Movie Marketing Madness Special Edition – Hero

Ryan Anderson posted over on his site:

Is it me or is the plot for HERO (as described by the reviews) completely different than the one in the previews? Thilk, please look into this.

Never being one to shy away from special requests, here goes.

The trailers for Hero present the film as being very much in the tradition of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Jet Li is shown in high-wire kung-fu action, CGI arrows rain down destruction on villagers and mass armies await orders to march. Both of the trailers I viewed were strikingly similar – almost to point I began to question why there were two versions cut. They contain almost the exact same shots, with one running about 20 seconds longer than the other. Honestly, though I couldn’t tell you what was different about them even after repeated viewings.

Both play heavily on the point of Jet Li’s character, referred to in press accounts as “Nameless” (bringing to mind Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name), seeking revenge. He has been wronged, his people wiped out and no seeks to fight his way through a series of enemies before getting to Bill.. err… the leader who ordered the massacre. For a mainstream audience this is an easy sell.

The problem is, this plot has almost no relation to that presented in reviews and other media coverage of the film. Almost universally Hero is described with some variation on “Rashomon like” and attention is paid to how beautiful the visuals are. Specific mention is made in most coverage of how the telling and retelling of stories are designated with differing color schemes.

So why willfully mislead the public? To sell tickets, of course. Heady (sorry, that’s Hedley) examination on perceptions of truth and vague and unclear motivations are not seen as appealing characteristics for a film to have when it’s being marketed to googleplex goers. Marketers are going to ask two questions of a movie: 1) Does it have a romance?; and 2) Does it have any fighting? Those two points are seen as what will attract young woman and men, respectively. Play this up as something that requires thought and you risk only bringing in older people and they don’t have the disposable income the younger folks do.

The problem with this strategy is that marketing campaigns are, with the exception of the biggest tent-pole releases, designed for opening weekends. Ticket sales beyond that are based ever increasingly on word-of-mouth. When you falsely portray your movie you run the risk of alienating those opening weekend moviegoers. They, feeling betrayed by the campaign, will then not recommend the movie to their friends. Worse, they may actively discourage them from going to see it.

I can’t fault them for the campaign they put together. It makes the movie very attractive to what I call the “second-tier” moviegoer (more on these levels at a later time). I can bring my overall opinion of it down for the complete misrepresentation of the movie’s structure, theme and plot.

Movie Marketing Madness: Open Water

Let’s review the campaign for Open Water, the recent release from Lions Gate. The movie revolves around two scuba divers who become stranded in the ocean after being separated from their tour group. Opening on 47 screens – an extremely small number in comparison to the thousands that major studio releases such as Collateral or The Village are released to – “Open Water” grossed around $24 million in its first weekend.

The Posters

There are two posters that show different takes on the same theme. On one, the stranded swimmers are shot from a distance. The antagonists of this poster are the elements, with a huge wave behind them, ominous storm clouds on the horizon and endless stretches of water all around them.

The other has a tighter shot of the two almost completely eclipsed by the dorsal fin of a passing shark setting the stage for the other main “villain” of the movie. Assuming this poster was the primary one given to theaters, this poster works better, in my opinion, at attracting a mass audience. The “tidal wave” version brings to mind grand CGI fests like The Perfect Storm. The “shark fin” one-sheet shows a more demonstrable adversary for the divers and gives the audience something more concrete to sink their imaginations into.

The Trailer

Because the movie relies so heavily on suspense and actual terror it would have been very easy to cut a trailer that gives away the entire movie as most trailers do. Instead, it relies on a brief setup, some shots of sharks swimming past the stranded divers and lots of storm clouds gathering. This was probably great at freaking people out in theaters where group panic can set in. It’s lack of special effects presented it as an alternative to the other summer fare, an asset which probably helped it in its goal of attracting people who like movies where you have to use your mind.

The Website

Relatively sparse, the website contains a trailer, a story description and a screensaver available for download. Reviews from some major magazines are included as pitching tools for those easily swayed by the opinions of others. Most of the rest of the site is devoted to money making opportunities, including an online store where you can purchase T-shirts and the option to buy tickets online.

There are a couple other features, including a “Survival Guide”, where you can view health and safety tips in the off chance that while you are shipwrecked you still have an internet connection. There is also the ability to register on the site as well as a message board which had a grand total of two posts almost a week after the opening. That’s kind of sad.

Media Coverage

Most (seemingly all) of the media coverage for “Open Water” contained some sort of reference to Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws”. This is, in some respects, unavoidable. Anytime you put sharks on screen you are going to bring what many consider to be Spielberg’s masterpiece to mind. The fact is, though, that these are two completely different movies on shark-phobia. One is a monster movie, where the shark takes the same role as the virus in “Outbreak”. It is an irrational and larger-than-life killer that “HAS TO BE STOPPED!” by a set of heroes.

The other, the sharks of “Open Water”, are just sharks. This is what they do. This is where they live. In that environment, people are food the same way everything else in the water could be food. What the media has done is create a positive perception of the movie in people’s minds before they even see the movie. By linking it to an established classic this movie gains ten times as many recognition points as it otherwise would have had. This adds it to the “must see” list for many people.

Relating something unknown to something familiar is also an effective rhetorical trick for the journalist working on deadline and unable to come up with an original or inventive angle for a story. That’s at least two or three paragraphs per story that the writer didn’t really have to work too hard on since they basically contained allusions to “Jaws”. So by taking the easy way out in the story the writers did the film a favor.

This is not to say that’s what all the writers did. Nor am I saying that this relationship may not have been coaxed by the marketing department in charge of the movie. It’s highly likely that press materials for “Open Water” contained references to “Jaws” or other shark-themed movies in an effort to create the association in the writers’ mind and increase the likelihood this would carry over into any articles.

Overall

Obviously this was an effective campaign. As I stated above, stories presenting it as a “Jaws” for the next generation helped it immensely by presenting it as part of a cultural lineage and not just another pretentious art film. Kudos to all involved.

Movie Marketing Madness: Alien Vs. Predator

Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the end of creativity as we know it. Last year saw two icons of the horror genre go head to head in Freddy vs. Jason as New Line Cinema desperately tried to breathe new life in to two ailing franchises at once. There has also been the steady stream of rumors about a possible Batman vs. Superman movie.Those were only dispelled when photography started on the upcoming “Batman Begins”.

And now 20th Century Fox takes two sci-fi films and asks a screenwriter whom they may have found by literally throwing a rock out a window to put them together. The result? “Alien vs. Predator”. Admittedly, based on Internet news coverage of this it may be a highly anticipated film but it’s been a long time since either of these characters graced (?) the big screen: “Predator 2″ (featuring Danny Glover as he bided his time before “Lethal Weapon 3″) was in 1990 and “Alien 3″ was in 1992 (some people claim there was an “Alien 4″, but I’ve seen no proof of that).

The Poster

Here’s the transcript from the phone call made while designing the posters:

“Props Department, Bob speaking.”

“Hi Bob, it’s Sam in Marketing”

“Hey! How’s it going?”

“Good. Listen – We need to create posters for ‘Alien vs. Predator’. Do you have the heads to the costumes by you?”

“Yeah, they’ve been in storage for ten or 12 years, but they’re around here somewhere.”

“Great! Could you take pictures of them and send those pictures to me in an inter-office envelope?”

“Sure. They’ll be there day after tomorrow.”

“Fantastic. Thanks.”

The Trailer

The theatrical trailer for AvP is a fast-moving, poorly lit wet dream for sci-fi aficionados (interestingly the same description can be used for Halle Berry). Most of it is taken up by shots of the two leads jumping/leaping/slicing/dicing. It’s very well done in the sense that the alien costumes look to have been updated for the 21st century and there are just enough plot points dropped to tap into the mythology of both series. Aside from Lance Henriksen (who’s still gotta be pissed “Millennium” was cancelled) there aren’t really any known actors in this so the lack of screen time devoted to anything human isn’t all that surprising.

The Website

Like most recent Fox productions, the introduction page to the site lets you pick what part of the world you live in and what language you speak there. They seem to be getting more and more obscure with some of the choices as I noticed there was a location option for Atlantis and the ability to choose Sanskrit as a language. Can’t say the Marketing Department isn’t trying to appeal to everyone here.

The website as a whole strikes me as being not very fully populated. There are almost no interactive features aside from the ability to cast a vote in the “Whose Side Are You On?” poll which basically lets you choose who you are rooting for. Really, though, this is like choosing between whose career you’d rather have: Dave Couliers’ or Jim J. Bullocks’: Either way you’re going to lose.

Moving on, one of the first things you see is the ability to download an “Extreme Desktop”. The use of the word “Extreme” does nothing but prove that Fox executives are still working off a 1995 focus group memo. The wallpapers that are part of this are also accessible in the “Downloads” section along with some AIM icons. The Trailers & Video are available exclusively in QuickTime format which seems odd considering most other sites make it a point to offer video in a variety of styles and bandwidth-friendly sizes.

“About the Movie” contains a one paragraph plot synopsis which I think also may have doubled as the script. Cast & Crew profiles have absolutely no information there. Nothing. Talk about showing your opinion of where the filmmakers actually fit into the making of this one. The Production Notes are, on the other hand, rather extensive and does get into some of the filmographies of those involved.

The “Gallery” extends an idea that I’ve been enjoying on these big-budget sci-fi films’ websites: the inclusion of concept art as well as actual stills from the film. The target audience for these movies is people who frequent comic book shops, read Wizard and surf the ‘Net looking for the latest tidbits on the making of the movies, so why not give them the behind-the-scenes glimpse their all jonesing for?

Overall

I know that the meeting of these two legendary creatures has been anticipated since a brief shot of an Alien skull was seen on the Predator’s ship in “Predator 2.” It seems like they had a pretty good overall plan but didn’t execute it to its fullest potential. The website was a big missed opportunity with its lack of interactivity and I would have liked to have seen the trailers in more formats than just QuickTime.

One point where I do think they succeeded is in the tagline “Whoever Wins..We Lose”. This is used everywhere: posters, the trailer and website. It sounds kind of corny (alright, it sounds very corny) but seeing it so much has definitely gotten it burned into my brain which is the whole point: brand recognition. My opinion of the campaign goes up a full notch based on this alone.

Movies on the Brain: Hidalgo

WATCHED: 8/5/2004

00:00 – Nice forest. I think I see Richard Dreyfuss and Audrey Hepburn discussing how to get rid of Brad Johnson in the background.

00:01 – C. Thomas Howell! His career really did peak at Soul Man, didn’t it. “Mom! Dad! There’s something I have to tell you… I’m black. “

00:04 – Date stamp on the movie says it’s December 29th. Day after my birthday. Cool.

00:07 – The army is massacring a Native American tribe and, as unfortunate as this may be, I can’t help but think I’m only going to be happy if they also shoot Kevin Costner and Mary McDonnell. Sorry.

00:09 – Nice train. I think it’s the same one Doc Brown to push the DeLorean in Back to the Future III.

00:11 – Is that the accountant from Bowfinger? Yep.

00:13 – Hey I just realized the guy playing Buffalo Bill Cody is J.K. Simmons. As much as everyone (justifiably) loved him in the Spider-Man flicks I’ll always see him as the psychiatrist on Law & Order.

00:16 – “A man drink like that and he don’t eat, he is going to die.”

00:19 – Is this guy’s name Bertold? Isn’t that Eric Idles’ character in Adventures of Baron Munchausen?

00:20 – Nice shot here of the Statue of Liberty but I can’t help but wait for Charlie Chaplin to pop up on deck.

00:21 – I just watched The Company. I’m reminded of this because Malcolm McDowell just showed up on screen.

00:23 – Pretty sure Bob Hope and Bing Crosby are somewhere in this Arab bazaar scene. It’s too bad the Road Shows are split up between different studios. That means there won’t be a comprehensive box-set of DVDs of the whole series.

00:25 – What’s the list of all time best character introductory entrances? Indiana Jones turning around against mountain backdrop has to be on there. Ursala Andress in Dr. No absolutely. Anyone else?

00:28 – Viggo is looking at this stone pillar with a metal cutout that I think is actually just an old “You Are Here” sign.

00:30 – Cool. Here’s the comic relief Arab sidekick. I was wondering when he was going to show up.

00:33 – I keep expecting this scene inside the Sheikh’s tent to somehow include Charlton Heston being asked to pick a wife.

00:37 – Ahh… the married potential love interest finally shows up.

00:39 – The racers better be careful going across the desert; the Nazis have been digging all over the place and who knows where they forgot to clean up after themselves.

00:41 – Some guy is giving a final inspirational farewell speech and I just keep waiting for him to say, “Where’s your Messiah now, heh??”.

00:43 – Very John Williams-ish score to the movie. In fact the whole movie is playing like something Steven Spielberg would have done about 12 years ago.

00:44 – Who started the golf tradition of replacing divots? I have a hard time believing it was the golfers themselves seeing as how they’re too lazy to even play a real sport.

00:47 – The one racer with the eagle is making me think of Spirit from the old G.I. Joe toys and cartoon. The eagle was one of the better accessories to come with a figure.

00:49 – Aren’t these the same ruins Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston hid out in Treasure of the Sierra Madre? If not, does it matter?

00:51 – Unfortunately filmmakers can’t do a CGI sandstorm without bringing back violent flashbacks in viewers minds of the Mummy remake staring what’s his name George of the Jungle. There’s a career path that went wildly off-course.

00:53 – How much more would, say, soccer be in the U.S. if 40 percent of the participants didn’t live to see the end of the season. Talk about a ratings draw.

00:56 – Interesting that part of this race goes through Iraq. Wonder if Halliburton existed in 1890?

00:58 – Ahh, dick jokes. The hallmark of lazy writing.

00:59 – Do you think during the sandstorm Viggo got sand in his pee-pee? (See what I mean?)

1:04 – Russian interrogator: Every minute you don’t tell us why you are here I cut off a finger.
Emmett Fitz-Hume: Mine or yours?
Russian interrogator: Yours.
Emmett Fitz-Hume: Damn!

1:07 – Note my restraint in any Lord of the Rings cracks, observations or asides? This may cause a vein to pop in my head, but I feel it’s worth it.

1:09 – All the insults being lobbed at Viggo and yet no one has called him a son-of-a-motherless-goat.

1:13 – The balcony scene in Star Wars: Ep. 1 between Darths Sidious and Maul hinted at something so cool and yet that hasn’t even been touched on yet. Maybe in Ep. 3 but I’m not going to hold my breath, just to be on the safe side.

1:15 – I watched Gladiator and Best in Show on the same day a few years ago and came away thinking Best in Show was the better flick. Can’t say as I’ve changed my opinion of that any.

1:17 – Jules: Pigs are filthy animals. I don’t eat filthy animals.
Vincent: Bacon tastes gooood. Pork chops taste gooood.
Jules: Hey, sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I’d never know ’cause I wouldn’t eat the filthy motherfucker. Pigs sleep and root in shit. That’s a filthy animal. I ain’t eat nothin’ that ain’t got enough sense enough to disregard its own faeces.

1:18 – OK, hammering home the Indiana Jones theme, where does Sean Connery’s introduction in IJ & the Last Crusade rank on the list? I mean, he hits Harrison Ford over the head with a Ming vase (which turns out to be fake thank goodness).

1:22 – Of course the daughter of the Sheikh is going to be romantically interested in Viggo’s character; She’s on the DVD cover!

1:24 – Is the English chick’s presence serving the plot at all? If not could she, I don’t know, get dragged out into the middle of the desert and be left for dead? Great, now I’ve got that quote from Christmas Vacation in my head: “Can I refill your eggnog for you? Get you something to eat? Drive you out to the middle of nowhere and leave you for dead?”

1:27 – I’m watching this movie on the train ride home from work and in the parking lot of the station we’re stopped at there’s a car with the license plate “PACKRS 1″. In a Chicago suburb! There’s a Packers fan flaunting his allegiance! There’s never a cop when you need one.

1:32 – As long as Sebulba isn’t racing here everyone should be fine.

1:35 – Jazira told Viggo’s character not to fear the locusts but she offered no guidance on frogs falling from the sky or rivers of water being turned to blood.

1:41 – Uh oh. Sandpeople. Or worse.

1:42 – I bet the guys crawling around the rocks are just there to ambush Indy if he should try to reclaim the Ark of the Covenant.

1:43 – Viggo’s screwed. There are too many marauders. He’ll never get across the river with Frodo in time. Better call Liv Tyler. (I’m very sorry. The pain was becoming so great I was beginning to look like Verbal Kint.

1:50 – This is such a desert wasteland I think I see Clark Griswold in the background looking for a gas station.

1:57 – No way Viggo wins this if Toby Maquire were riding one of the horses.

2:05 – Anyone else catch Open Range with Kevin Costner. That was a good flick, especially Robert Duvall’s performance.

2:08 – So he’s won the race, come to terms with his past and let his horse run wild once again. Now Viggo can go back to plotting to kill Gwyneth Paltrow.

Movie Marketing Madness: Little Black Book

Orpheus descended into Hades to rescue Eurydice, Luke Skywalker braved the Death Star for his sister and now I have descended into romantic comedy territory to rescue my column from the perils of a computer that won’t install the latest Flash plug-in.

“Little Black Book”… look – I’m not really going to try to provide any meaningful commentary on this one. It stars Brittany Murphy Let me just say that again: It stars Brittany Murphy. I sat through “Uptown Girls” and have never quite been the same since. Whenever I turn on a movie since then I have a vague fear Murphy and Dakota Fanning are going to pop up. I know it’s irrational, but still I can’t shake it.

The Poster

Brittany Murphy is simply shown heaving her breasts into Ron Livingston, who at this point has got to be tired of waiting for Mike Judge to call with “Office Space 2: Electric Bugaloo”. Murphy is slyly lifting the once and future Peter Gibbons’ PDA from his jacket pocket.

While Murphy may not be the best actress in the world (I actually doubt she’s the best actress in her zip code), I think I speak for most heterosexual men when I say if she were to thrust her breasts in my general direction she could remove my right arm and I wouldn’t notice until she had made a safe getaway.

The Trailer

This may take the award for my least favorite trailer of the year based on two things: 1) The inclusion of Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” over the beginning of the trailer, and 2) The inclusion of Carly Simon’s “Let the River Run”. Sweet Fancy Moses! What are these people thinking? Has the script been hanging around Hollywood so long that these two songs were still popular when the idea was pitched? They couldn’t find anything more recent than, I don’t know, 1989? This was the theme song to “Working Girl” for crying out loud! That was back when Harrison Ford was still able to move around under his own power and Melanie Griffith was one of America’s sweethearts!

Anyway, madcap high jinks ensue as we see the entire plot of the movie over the course of less than three minutes. Murphy and Livingston meet. They fall in love. She begins to be jealous of his ex-girlfriends and uses her position on a TV talk show to “interview” his past flames. I gnaw off my own arm just to have something to beat myself over the head with.

Please keep in mind I had to watch this a few times since I kept lapsing into a coma at various points. I eventually had to have someone standing by to keep me conscious. I am both grateful to as well as never speaking to that person again. That’s too bad, but that’s the price they pay for making me sit through that.

The Website

Covered in a layer of molasses several dozen feet thick, the website shows far more originality than a movie like this deserves.

Profiles of the main cast (including Kathy Bates who I can only assume spent the entire time on the set completely whacked out on smack) as well as some supporting players can be found under the sections “The Couples” and “The Ex-Girlfriends”. These sections are laid out as pseudo-personal ads. The only difference between these people and those who actually advertise in personal ads is, well, these people are attractive and are less likely to cut out your kidneys and leave you in a bathtub full of ice cubes.

Moving on, you can also find entries for the ex-girlfriends on the Friendster website, which is increasingly allowing itself to be the bitch of the major Hollywood studios. You may remember last month there was a controversy when characters from the Will Ferrell comedy Anchorman showed up on Friendster, which prides itself on providing factual information about its listings.

The “Little Black Book” section is a fancy way of saying Downloads. This consists of a half-dozen wallpapers and some AIM Icons, all of which feature Brittany Murphy struggling mightily to convince people she wasn’t cast as the “ugly” one in “Clueless”. Rounding out the site is a nifty little “Polls” section which is cool simply because you get to manipulate a PDA stylus and a “Photo Gallery”.

Oh, one more thing (sorry – I sometimes digress into Peter Falk quotes when I’m sleep deprived). The site also has a “Find Your Ex” feature. You plug in various details about someone who broke your heart and left you an empty shell of a person who was almost unable to open a peanut butter jar without suffering an extreme emotional breakdown and see if you can get back in touch! Cool!!

Actually, this brings up some sort of randomized “story” about your ex by plugging the details you enter into some half-assed scenario. Couldn’t the programmers responsible for this have spent their time playing Solitaire instead of perfecting this piece of horse hockey? We all would have been better off.

Overall

There’s no way around the fact that this is going to appeal to the female crowd tired of a summer of Spider-Man 2 and other action/adventure films or comedies like Anchorman which tend to skew towards males. The campaign isn’t overly original but it doesn’t need to be. Put an empowered female and make her come apart and act like a socially retarded fruit fly and you’re sure to attract the date crowd. Men are advised to drink heavy amounts of wood alcohol in the hopes of incurring blindness.