Movie Marketing Madness: The Ides of March

We live in interesting political times. I’m sure that’s something that every generation has felt about the times they lived in as well as they’ve gone through their own trials and everything else but that doesn’t make it any less true. A feeling that we were on the dawn of something new led to the momentous 2008 Presidential election, an action that had an equal and opposite reaction in 2010, when a wave of those who were more interested in stagnation were swept into power. That’s lead to years of one battle after another between parties as they go back and forth trying to appeal to the lowest common denominators of their supporter base.

Coming in to this climate is the new film The Ides of March. George Clooney stars as Mike Morris, a Presidential candidate that has captivated the nation with his ideals and high standards. Leading his campaign is Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling), the campaign manager that has even more charm than the candidate he’s supporting. But one day the rival campaign comes calling and Myers is tempted to switch sides in order to be on the winning side, a feeling that’s heightened when Morris refuses to cross an ethical line that could ensure his victory. His betrayal scorches the earth behind him and causes all sorts of drama in both camps.

The Posters

The poster is kind of clever and certainly communicates the fact that this is a political drama. Gosling stares at the camera holding up a Time Magazine that has on its cover Clooney’s face along with the question “Is this man our next President?” So the idea of someone being two-faced is also introduced here in a way that still allows both leading men’s faces to be put on the one-sheet, something that’s obviously important for the marketing.

The Trailers

The first trailer starts off by showing us how Myers is a valued advisor for the campaign being waged by Norris for the Presidency, someone Norris refers to as his braintrust. Myers is happy working on the campaign not only because he believes Norris can actually change things for the better but also because he’s friends with Zara, the campaign manager. But he’s approached by a worker for the opposing candidate and asked to work for them. When he decides to switch sides after coming to believe Norris can’t win things get dramatic, as everything is thrown up on the air and his position as the golden boy of the political world is tarnished while those around him start to question whether or not he can be trusted.

It’s a tight and gripping trailer for a dramatic movie that looks like it has adults as its target audience.

Online

The movie’s official website opens with the poster key art, which you can click on to Enter the Site.

Once you do that you’re taken to a collage of images from the film as well as the main content navigation menu.

The first section in that menu is “About the Film” and has a very brief Synopsis as sell as Cast and Filmmakers sections that just have the name of the character each actor plays without any deeper information on them.

After that is “Trailer,” which at least is honestly labeled since that’s all that’s there. There are about 20 stills from the film in the “Gallery” and “Downloads” has a collection of Twitter Skins, Desktop Wallpapers and Buddy Icons for you to add to your collection.

The “News” section is probably the most interesting one here. There are links to some of the press stories that have been published about the movie but there’s also a stream of fake Twitter-like updates from some of the characters that, when clicked, opens up a selection of extended video clips to play. Then there’s a real Twitter update down in the other corner that has a link to a real story.

The movie’s Facebook page includes not just the usual updates on press activities and other marketing materials but also lots of education for the audience on where the term “Ides of March” comes from and what it means. That may help people understand the themes of the movie but you never really know.

Advertising and Cross-Promotion

The first TV spots that began running were kind of odd. Instead of selling the movie as a political drama they recut things we’ve seen in the trailer to make it look like Gosling’s character is the subject of some sort of personal attack, with people digging up skeletons from his past to blackmail and otherwise hurt him and the candidate he works for. That’s kind of strange since it’s not at all the same movie the trailer is selling and so I’m thinking one of them is misselling the film to the general audience.

Media and Publicity

The first major news from the film was when it was announced (Hollywood Reporter, 6/21/11) that it would open the 2011 Venice Film Festival, a very high-brow coming out party for the movie. Before that, though, it screened at the Telluride Film Festival, where it garnered mixed reviews – though with the occasional outlier that pegged it as an early Oscar favorite (Entertainment Weekly, 8/31) – but lots of press (Time, 8/31) for its combination of presidential politics and Clooney.

Of course the movie provided the press with plenty of opportunities to ask Clooney about politics and what he hoped to achieve with the film (Los Angeles Times, 9/25/11), though he consistently denied any political aspirations of his own.

Overall

If there’s a consistent theme to the marketing it’s that this movie is an intelligent drama that’s intended for a grown-up audience. I’m convinced that if the campaign misrepresents the film it’s selling at all it’s in that it makes it seem much more action-oriented than it really is. I’m guessing the slammed phones and terse conversations are much more evenly paced in the film itself than they’re presented here.

But that’s a minor quibble and, as I said, there’s still the clear message here that we’re dealing with a serious drama and not something that has any aspirations of filling seats full of teenagers. It will be interesting to see how it does in the early fall release window and how much of a draw Clooney winds up being for this release.

Movie Marketing Madness: Hanna

We seem to be in a weird era in terms of the depictions of female empowerment. Instead of simply showing strong, secure women who are comfortable in the choices they’ve made for their lives (be they in the business world or as part of a family) the predominant way this idea has been represented in popular culture of late is to show them kicking someone’s butt. This started, in some respect with “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” but even while that show was about doling out the violence it was also about a young woman coming to terms with the responsibilities thrust upon her by life more than her becoming the perfect killing machine.

And that’s exactly what the title character in the new movie Hanna seems to be. Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) has been raised in the Finland wilderness by her father Erik (Eric Bana) who’s on the run from his former life in the CIA. Though only in her early teens she’s been honed her entire life by him to become an even more lethal killing machine than he is. Then one day it’s time for her to complete the mission she’s been training for and so is purposely captured by the CIA. With her ultimate goal being reaching Marissa Winger (Cate Blanchett), another CIA agent who has secrets relating to Erik and therefore important to him and Hanna.

The Posters

The movie’s first poster is raw and more than a little enigmatic, featuring just an image of a young girl’s face that’s largely obscured by the protective clothing she’s wearing. I can’t quite tell whether she’s hiding behind something drawing a bow and arrow, but either way it’s clear this is one intense character. Just how rough and intense she is is emphasized by the “Adapt or die” copy that’s on the one-sheet and which is designed to give the audience an insight into not just the character’s personality but also her surroundings and upbringing.

The poster gives prominent placement not only to director Wright’s name but also to the fact that the soundtrack is coming from The Chemical Brothers so apparently that fact is going to be a big draw for potential audiences.

The second poster takes us out of the arctic setting a bit and instead shows Hanna, still in close-up, as more of a Nikita type of character, with a scratch on her cheek and a gun n her hands. The copy here is meant to play up the contrasts in the character’s appearance and her capabilities. The design comes off a little like a promotional image for a show on The WB but that might actually be what the creators are going for here.

The Trailers

The trailer opens with a father informing a young girl, who’s carving up a deer in the arctic, that she’s dead. We see this is part of the training she’s being put through to become a deadly survivalist. She flips a switch that alerts a government agency of their location and is captured on purpose to try and get to the agent in charge, eventually escaping with that agent and everyone else after her.

It’s a pretty cool trailer that has a lot of mystery to it, laying out something that’s on the one hand a simple chase movie and on the other hand something much weirder. It works because we immediately care about the main character and are therefore invested in all the little twists and turns that the plot seems to take.

Online

As is usual with releases from Focus, the emphasis on the official website is on content. At the top of the page is an invitation to watch the trailer but then things get more substantive.

“Story” has a long and detailed Synopsis of the film’s story that pretty clearly outlines what audiences can expect in the story without, it seems, giving away any potential third act spoilers that are going to make things interesting. “Cast & Crew” gives you more details on the backgrounds of the people involved in making the movie from either side of the camera.

You’ll find the Trailer, a whole bunch of TV spots, some extended Clips and even a couple of Featurettes and behind-the-scenes looks at the making of the movie. There are about 15 stills from the movie and a few from its making in the “Photos” section.

Where things get in-depth is in the “In Depth” area of course. There you can read a bunch of feature-length stories about the movie’s predecessors in the “hinder kicking girls” genre, interviews with the director and more. This level of content creation is really where this studio excels and it’s fun to see what they produce for each movie they put out.

There are also links on the site to download the movie’s soundtrack, get the Hanna iPad app or grab a ringtone that uses one of the soundtrack’s songs.

The movie’s Facebook page has updates on the cast and crew’s promotional activities as well as photos, videos and information on the soundtrack and more.

Advertising and Cross-Promotions

Plenty of TV advertising was done that emphasized the action aspects of the story since the actual plot is fairly complex and full of actual character motivations that are hard to cram into a 30 second spot. So the spots are full of fast cuts and lots of people being hit in the head very hard by a young girl, with just enough hints of the story to make it seem kind of interesting to those who like more than just violence. There were some that were more cerebral or which de-emphasized the hurting that was inflicted but mostly this is just about showing people being beat up by a little girl.

Media and Publicity

There was surprisingly little press for the movie outside of mentions of the marketing materials and such. A panel promoting the film was held at WonderCon (Hollywood Reporter, 3/31/11), the smaller-scale event that is put on by the same organization that holds Comic-Con, but that was just a week or so before the film’s release and not quite early enough to seriously change minds. The director even took the opportunity presented by his appearance at WonderCon to get in a dig at Sucker Punch, which opened just a couple weeks prior, as being overly objectifying, something that a lot of commentators misread as being feminist or empowering but which Wright just felt was sexist.

Wright was also the focus of this story (New York Times, 4/3/11) about how such an action/adventure type of story is well outside his usual thematic stomping grounds but how it afforded him the opportunity to tell an original story for a change and dabble in some different styles of filmmaking.

Overall

It’s not a bad campaign but, as Wright was more or less alluding to at WonderCon, it’s invariably going to be compared to other movies that also featured “female empowerment” themes that were focused around turning them into killing machines. That’s why I’m interested in how even in the pretty basic TV commercials, the focus seemed to be in positioning this movie as more of a thinking-man’s thriller that’s akin in some ways to the Bourne movies than the craptastic visual excesses of something like Sucker Punch.

Of course while I think the campaign is all the more interesting for at least trying to be interesting, it will probably suffer by not consistently playing to the lowest common denominator of the audience. But it works in what I think it’s trying to do and has actually, the more I’ve dug into the marketing, made me more interesting in seeing the flick. So that’s a win, right?

PICKING UP THE SPARE

• 04/22/11 – An artist has posted the poster design concepts he created for the movie but which, obviously, went unused.

What value, Comic-Con

The other day day Cinematical editor-in-chief Erik Davis tweeted the following:

“It amazes me that Comic-Con can sell out tickets in 40 seconds, but still can’t sell a movie.”

While it was actually seven hours, the comment struck me as interesting for a couple of reasons.

First, Comic-Con, like SXSW, always seems to be either preparing, in motion or wrapping up. SXSW began soliciting ideas for panels somewhere back in April 2010 for the 2011 conference, which happens in March – so just a month after the event itself. Likewise Comic-Con is in an endless cycle of talk about when tickets go on sale, what the hotel situation is going to be for next year and so on. They’re like the hockey season: There’s rarely a time when they’re *not* happening.

Second, Comic-Con has become an event better known for movies, it seems, than comics in recent years. Studios are there with everything from sci-fi heavy blockbusters, a seemingly natural fit for the geek-heavy audience that made the convention what it was orginally, to the latest family sitcom that’s debuting on network television.

The fact that there are so many panel discussions on such a broad swath of entertainment properties is what’s to blame for both aspects of Davis’ comment. Because there are so many different types of shows, movies and more (including even a few comics-related things) there are more areas of journalists – both professional and amateur – trying to get in. And because there are so many more journalists trying to get in the average comics/movie fan is squeezed out. Put that together and you have attendees made up of people who aren’t representative of the audience as a whole. So movies play like gangbusters at Comic-Con (or SXSW Film) because the people there are predisposed to like them since they come from the loyal fringe and not form the mainstream.

I’ve said it many times: A movie will never attract an audience bigger than the one it’s supposed to have. That might sound simplistic, but it means that movies like Scott Pilgrim, Snakes on a Plane and others that get all the commentators fired up and talking like there’s no tomorrow never really had a shot at breaking out beyond those crowds. Scott Pilgrim was a movie made for the people in Hall H and not for the parents looking for a relaxing way to spend their weekend evening.

Similarly, a great screening of 15 minutes of footage won’t save a clunker of a movie. I remember a couple years ago there was ton of Comic-Con buzz around the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still but the box-office was dead as the movie struggled to make back its production budget in domestic theaters. There are countless other examples.

On the other hand movies like Iron Man have seriously benefited from getting attendees at the convention excited. Green Lantern is likely hoping to also be on that side of the ledger, as is The Avengers, which had its formal coming out party at last year’s event.

Eventually there are two possibilities that will play out: Either studios will wise up and scale back their Comic-Con efforts for all but a small number of titles that are more inline with what the traditional audience has been or things will continue to ramp up as no one wants to be the one who *doesn’t* go and then has to justify that decision if the movie tanks. Either way there are now, at this point, enough case studies for marketers to look at and see if the return on the investment that’s being seen there is great enough to continue putting so much effort into Comic-Con panels and appearances.

Social Sundance

As if you weren’t already aware, the 2011 Sundance Film Festival kicks off today and continues on for the next week or so with plenty of screenings, panel discussions and schmoozing going on. If you, like me, aren’t there in person – or even if you are and can’t get to everything – Search Engine Land has a good rundown of some of the ways you can keep up with the goings-on through social media.

You can also check-out the YouTube Screening Room for select shorts from this and past year’s festivals and learn how some of the movies making their premiere at Sundance will be available through various VOD platforms so those at home can enjoy them. Same goes for those appearing at Slamdance, which is also kicking off in Park City.

Festival Genius lives on

While I’ve never had occasion to use it myself, I know that the film festival world was greatly impacted by the arrival of Festival Genius, the tool from the recently shut-down b-side that allowed people to manage more efficiently their festival screening schedules. While b-side would, as a whole, be missed, the average movie blogger or festival attendee was especially sad about Festival Genius.

Which is why it’s good news that Festival Genius has been bought by a company that will now license it to Independent Filmmaker Project, the parent company of Filmmaker Magazine. That means Festival Genius not only lives on but will be in the good hands of a company that can integrate it with their existing products and really take it to the next level in terms of functionality and utility. That’s huge and is a testament to the tool b-side built.

Put Sundance 2010 in the books

Sundance 2010 ended last weekend, with most of the media heading home in advance of the end of the festival once the majority of the anticipated press screenings and other debuts had taken place and the feeling that the fizz was lessening started to settle in. It was fun, on some level, to watch a bunch of movie blog writers who live in California get there and complain about walking half a mile in six inches of snow, to which my reaction was a resounding “Wimps.” ‘Cause I’m hardcore.

But now that we have the benefit of hindsightt it’s a good time to look at how the festival was perceived and what resulted. Yes, this is part of the obsession with sales figures that Patrick Goldstein questions in a great Q&A with LAT writer John Horn but, as Horn says, lacking any other yardstick sales is the only true measure we have.

By that measure this year’s festival was a moderate success, at least to my eye. While the buying started, according to Brook Barnes (New York Times, 1/29/10), gingerly it proceeded at a steady if moderate clip, which is a good thing. There were some traditional deals cut, some non-traditional deals made and generally it seems like everyone’s progressing in a non-hurried and non-panicked manner, which is probably a good thing.

But was the fest a success artistically? Kirk Honeycutt (Hollywood Reporter, 1/28/10) weighed in skeptical of how “recharged” or “renewed” the spirit of the films in competition actually were, saying they seemed to play it safe more often than not and didn’t push boundaries in the way one might expect festival entries to.

I wasn’t there and so didn’t see the movies themselves obviously. And the problem is few people outside of Sundance attendees will ever see them. Even those that did get theatrical distribution deals will be limited, in the main, to New York City and Los Angeles arthouses with possible expansion to Chicago and a couple other major metro markets.

Can you imagine if Sundance rearranged itself into a distribution network, with theaters across the country that played these films for people everywhere? Or as an on-demand and online channel where films were available to anyone at anytime? Or as a DVD distribution house that fed you a new movie every week at random and then provided an online community for people to come and discuss the movies with others who had seen the same one? Then run a small-scale festival as more of an industry convention where panels and discussion groups can happen.

The one take-away, as an observer, is that for all the momentum that has indeed occurred over the last year or so we’re still a long way from a large-scale shift in how the film industry is run and Sundance, which has always positioned itself as an artistic showcase and not a sales market, has some room in front of it that can be used to lead the charge.

Film festivals as the ignition point

This week Park City, UT will once again come alive with the pitter patter of thousands of people who are looking to alternatively show off their films, find films to distribute or cover the movies appearing there as the Sundance and Slamdance film festivals commence.

There will also be a ton of conversation in the ensuing days around distribution, in groups both large and small up and down Main St. While there appears to be some cautious optimism (Hollywood Reporter, 1/19/10) that the indie market looks better this year than it has in the past few we’re by no means returning any time soon to the glory days of the late 90s since there continue to be fewer players in the market and less money that’s going to willingly risked on something new.

All of that, though, overlooks the tremendous potential each and every filmmaker who’s attending either Sundance or Slamdance has to kick-start the word-of-mouth around his or her film, word-of-mouth that can have benefits lasting throughout whatever distribution cycle winds up being utilized.

By building a network of friends and followers on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere – a network that includes the press (however loosely we define that term) and others – filmmakers can send updates on how a distribution deal is coming along, where it might be available and more, as well as just engaging in a conversation with people that encourages interaction and keeps the updates alive in-between big news updates. Many of those updates wind up becoming the basis for long blog posts on movie sites about the filmmaker and the movie. The benefits are potentially even bigger if the filmmaker has their own blog.

The best part of all this is, of course, that it continues to be something that’s managed by the filmmaker themselves and, while certain compromises may have to be made, the effort is independent of studio or distributor control. Meaning, primarily, that even if the studio isn’t willing to put money toward an online word-of-mouth strategy the filmmaker can keep doing what he or she is doing. I’ve seen this happen at big levels – Jason Reitman, Kevin Smith, etc – and small – Hunter Weeks, Ted Hope and others – and each is just as successful in their own right.

Because Sundance and Slamdance aren’t primarily buyer’s markets it can be months – if not a year or more – before movies that debut there are available to the audience. Social media platforms can help bridge that gap and keep awareness of the films alive as the conversation progresses. And, as I’ve stated before, the big studios do a lousy job of acknowledging the buzz that emerges from these festivals when it comes time for a formal campaign despite the ignition of that buzz being the primary reason for a film to make an appearance there. The tools are very much in place for filmmakers large and small to step up and become what they need to be, which is the advocate-in-chief for their productions, by participating in the conversation.

Festival buzz

We’re now well past the two major events that kick off the film festival season, with both the Telluride Film Festival and Toronto Film Festival behind us. As expected by most, the news isn’t great at all, with many highly touted films that debuted at those festivals still lacking distribution deals. The failure of some – most – movies to come away with sales under their belts is just the latest nail to be driven into the coffin of the independent film market, one that’s fallen victim to a combination of over-saturation in theaters, too much production money being thrown around and an economic downturn that has bigger studios turning away from unknown properties in favor of comic adaptations, sequels and remakes.

Despite this gloomy picture the festivals are more highly covered by the entertainment press in the last three years then ever before, with almost every high profile movie blog sending one or more representatives and plenty of journalists there from what remains of the trade publications. In a funny way, coverage of the festivals has increased almost exactly as much as the actual sales market at those festivals has declined. More stories are filed but fewer deals are done.

One of my gripes in the last couple years has been that despite the saturation of movie industry writers buzzing about all those movies, very little of that buzz is carried over to when those movies are sold to a distributor are eventually released. If a filmmaker and his team sell their movie to one of the remaining buyers, that studio seems to discard whatever positive word-of-mouth and goodwill has been established through the festival appearance in favor of a marketing campaign that follows what for them is a more traditional model.

That’s why I’ve been thinking lately that studios have in their very own hands the key to turning the independent film market around and making their festival acquisitions a more profitable investment. And that key looks very much like a strategy involving embracing the word-of-mouth a movie already has in its favor.

The reality is that, with very few exceptions (the upcoming Up in the Air comes to mind) it’s really hard to market a festival film to a mainstream audience. Running a traditional marketing campaign for a movie like Moon, one of the most-buzzed about films from the most recent Sundance Film Festival felt very much like the studio was trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. More effective what director Duncan Jones’ interactions with fans and bloggers on Twitter, where he could talk to people and tell them about the movie’s theatrical expansion and other developments and thank people who had championed the movie for their efforts. Even Up in the Air, which features one of the biggest current movie stars is more…polished…than most arthouse fare is benefiting from director Jason Reitman’s Twitter presence, which has a similarly conversational and behind-the-scenes feel.

Both of these efforts have many things in common, but the biggest one is that they use social media tools to embrace, communicate and empower their fans. Which is kind of the point.

One of the problems with the studio model is that it’s one that’s only built to define success based on a single yardstick. More accurately there’s one set of tactics that a movie has to be promoted through because that’s how the infrastructure within studios has been established. If the movie is one that could benefit from something different, well that’s just too bad. It needs a mass-appeal poster, a mass-appeal trailer and then a distribution pattern that is meant to minimize financial risk but which has the side effect of minimizing audience exposure, thus dooming the movie. I’ve referred previously to this as kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy, where a studio buys a movie for the prestige value but then expresses doubts about its market viability and executes such a limited distribution program that they wind up proving their own skepticism.

So instead going down this road again and again, what if studios bought a movie and then

• made sure all the positive reviews that resulted from the festival screening were linked to from the film’s official website
• executed an ad campaign promoting screenings on those blogs that were among the film’s initial champions
• used those blog writers as hosts for some screenings, letting them further express their passion for the movie
• engaged in outreach to other online communities that were relevant to it (special interest groups, fans of the movie’s genre, etc)
• used social media to allow people to meet others in their geographic area that were interested in the movie and plan a real life meeting, with the studio popping for coffee, pizza or whatever

Basically find ways to harness some of the enthusiasm people have coming out of the festival and use it to expand the movie to more audiences. Don’t try to go wide at first and don’t even try a traditional platform release schedule. Let the movie work organically from point A to point B, with growth coming from the audience itself, with some sort of online ambassador – the director, a studio publicist or whomever is best and most passionate about it – making sure that the online buzz is extended and broadcast in the easiest and most engaging possible way.

These tactics aren’t going to work for every movie. Hell they may not even work for one. But the only people are going to turn around the film festival sales market are those with the money to spend, and that’s the studios. If they start innovating and experimenting with new ways to promote and publicize the movies that emerge from those festivals as favorites I firmly believe we’ll see a market currently suffering a massive downturn right itself and vibrancy return. Best of all, this sort of experimentation is going to prove out the legitimacy of other “true” independents that are already doing some of these things, possibly putting them on some people’s radars and bringing them more success.

The primary point, though, is that there’s all this positive word-of-mouth that results from film festival appearances, something that’s still sought after by filmmakers of all shapes and sizes. Letting that go and not building upon it is a missed opportunity to let fans of a movie contribute to the success everyone is striving for.

Cannes posters

JoBlo has a couple of posts collecting some of the best posters spotted in and around the Cannes Festival that just wrapped up. I can’t sum up all of the movies that get spotlit but suffice it to say there are some good and some bad and then there’s Rambo 4. Check out Part 1 and Part 2.

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movie marketing, cannes

SXSW trailer

This site has two torrents of the trailer for movies being screened at this year’s SXSW festival. Click here for the complete list of movies that will be there. It’s a neat way to promote the movies going there. Too bad it’s not something the festival itself is doing.

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movie marketing, sxsw