Today we are going to delve deep into one of my favorite topics: Movie Marketing!
I DVR/TiVo everything but sometimes a commercial will slip through the cracks. This seems to be especially true for movies. Bad movies. I still debate whether I just notice the bad movie commercials more because they are so bad, but that is a different deep dive. For instance, I am so happy that John Carter came out in theaters so I won’t have to watch those horrible commercials anymore.
It seems there are always horrible movie commercials coming out though – Source Code, Immortals, Repo Men, and Red Tails to name just a few semi-recent ones. I was so happy on 11/12/11 because no longer would have to see Immortals ads. Then the Blu-Ray / DVD came out and I was subjected to more terribleness. Finally that dropped on 3/6 and I felt safe. Until the terrible Wrath of the Titans commercials started. It is like bad movie whack-a-mole.
In the pre and early internet days studios could drop 10-30 million on marketing and guarantee a good opening weekend for a bad movie. Now they can at best secure a mediocre weekend or slightly better if the film is in certain genres. Two things are at the top of killing the studio’s ability to trick people into watching bad movies. The first is Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. You don’t need to read reviews to see if a movie is bad or not, you just need to see the score. Studio’s also can’t buy reviews anymore to hide the truth. A lot critics were / are for sale. Some critics were even made up. Studio’s loved this as they could buy enough to fake people into thinking bad was good, or good enough. Then the sample space grew so large because so many reviews were pulled in from so many sources that it because impossible to hide the truth. Web 2.0 FTW!
The second thing that happened is texting / internet enabled phones / twitter. Within minutes of a movie starting to play the tweets fly out. People text their friends to never see a movie. This social power of the people kills all the carefully crafted marketing messages. It must be so frustrating to work in these marketing departments trying to trick people into seeing all this drivel.
I think a part of this is they market to lowest common denominator. They just assume everyone is stupid and will fall for the wiz bang effects or star. They don’t think ordinary people care / want to see good movies. Either that or studios / marketers are stupid and can’t tell what a good movie consists of. I am not talking The Artist “good movies” here, I am talking Forest Gump, LOTR, Captain America, Saving Private Ryan, Top Gun, The Social Network and last year’s Moneyball, good movies. These are well crafted stories with good effects, good characters, quality acting and they are well paced. Unlike some POS art artist crap. (The idiocy of the Academy is a whole other topic.)
This “stupid” factor, whatever side it lies on, is a key component into why studios only make sequels now or copies of other movies. They have exhausted their ability to market crap as people figure out it is crap way to quickly now. We did it to ourselves! Of course the solution to the problem is to figure out how to make better movies so they don’t have to attempt to sell crap to people, but I guess that idea hasn’t occurred to anyone, if it did, it fell on deaf ears. Either they can hire some smarter writers / producers or stop lying in their marketing, or keep kicking the can of crap down the road. (Guess which option they appear to be making.)
But let’s say you have a stinker on your hands, what do you do? Consider the case of the Three Musketeers. You remade a classic, so you had a known brand, threw in all the modern PC stuff so you hit all your demographics, made it take place in France / Europe so you would get your foreign markets to see it. You had your star power and you marketed her as the reason to see the movie. You showed ridiculous special effects that would get the “stupid” kids to come and watch. Then for some unknown reason no one watched! Your opening weekend earned $8M on 3000+ screens, coming in at 4th place. Yikes! Luckily you only spent $75 million to make this turd puppy. Overseas would allow you to recoup your loses but a picture like this will have a DVD / Blu Ray release. Obviously your original marketing plan failed. How can you re-sell this?
Consider the original commercial:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xkspbi_the-three-musketeers-new-tv-commercial-launched_shortfilms
Now take a look at the new DVD commercial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD5P9bFfnvk
Or how about the Movie poster versus the new DVD cover –
Theater:
DVD:
Notice something is missing? I guess Mila didn’t sample so well. Sacré bleu! Joan of Arc shunned? Say it isn’t so, but she is gone. So are the over the top moments in the commercial. It’s like they are trying say the movie isn’t about giant airships shooting fire. Of course that makes the rebranding commercial very short because the movie really is about fireball shooting giant airships. But at least they are trying to trick people picking this up, like it is a whole different movie. Marketing: If the truth doesn’t work for a movie, make sure to lie better next time.
Some of us don’t forget though. We remember the failure, and more importantly the 26% fresh rating on RottenTomatoes.