The Problem with Movie Marketing
In a sort of (but not really) follow up to my post on The Most Horribly Timed Entertainment Release Ever, I'd like to talk about an industry that I have 0 experience in, Marketing. Now this is not look at the craziest or most controversial marketing campaigns (although there are absolutely some bafflingly short-sighted marketing stories out there), instead this is a look at the more standard marketing that you see every day for pretty much everything and critiquing why they failed. Sensible and logical as they may seem, even the most standard advertisements can backfire when certain factors aren't considered.
And yes, some of these critiques are entirely with the benefit of hindsight, as I most likely would not have thought of these either at the time. BUT some of these were obviously bad ideas from the beginning.
First Impressions are Everything
Drive, Plane, Skyscraper, Spy, Grandma, Sisters, Brooklyn, Neighbors, Chef, 65, I'm not just listing random nouns, these are actual movie titles. It's not hard to understand why these are bad titles but I'm going to dive into it anyway.
No matter how good the marketing is, word-of-mouth is by far the best publicity you can possibly get. In that vein, a title should ideally follow certain criteria: it should be easy to remember but unique enough to be identifiable, but not so unique that it's hard to say in conversation. Afterall, if you want people talking about, they need to be able to easily say it. At the same time, unlike the titles I mentioned at the beginning, it shouldn't be overly generic to the point where others don't know what they're talking about. But on top of all of this, it also needs to be relevant to the movie itself, providing at least some context as to what it is. (Now explaining it like this might make naming a movie sound hard, but let's be real, we've all thought of awesome titles for our dream movie or that book idea we keep saying we're going to write someday.)
The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a 2023 vampire film adapted from a chapter of Dracula by Bram Stoker. But unless you already knew that, this film likely had very little appeal to you, as the word "Dracula" was inexplicably left out of the title. While it's still a pretty menacing title and it works for the tone of movie, right off the bat it alienates anybody that doesn’t know what the Demeter is, which is basically anyone didn't read the book. I myself had no idea it was a Dracula movie until learning it elsewhere. In some international markets the film was given the more fitting title of Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter, but for whatever reason, never capitalized on the popularity of Dracula to boost its popularity in the U.S. Which is too bad because the movie is actually quite good and offered up one of the most terrifying renditions of Dracula in recent years, but its unappealing title left it dead in the water (pun intended).
Ignoring the quality of the movie itself, the problems with Disney's John Carter can mostly be traced back to a Hollywood superstition that any film with the word "Mars" in the title is doomed to fail. Released in 2012, it didn't help the many previous films (Mission to Mars, Ghost of Mars, Mars Attacks, Mars Needs Moms) proved this to be true, with Mars Needs Moms in particular being a historically epic financial disaster for Disney just the year before. Misguidedly though, Disney attributed this with the "Mars" nomenclature, rather than it just being a bad movie. It's speculated that this effectively scared Disney into changing to the name from John Carter of Mars to just John Carter, which then snowballed into film being completely misunderstood from the outset, with some even having no idea that it was based on the book series. Uninteresting, uninspiring, and uninformative, the new title did next to nothing to grow the movie's appeal, and John Carter would go on to become one of the biggest flops in Hollywood history.
Misunderstood the Assignment
The all-time classic cardinal sin of movie marketing is a bad trailer. This can come in many forms, such as giving away too much of the overall story, revealing key plot points that were meant to be a surprise, betraying the intention of the movie, and/or advertising it as something it's not.
In 2005, The Island was a sci-fi thriller about a dystopian society where citizens are told the outside world is contaminated, with the only exception being a place known as The Island, where those lucky enough to win a lottery get to go, yet two of its inhabitances are attempting to flee. It's an intriguing premise but instead alluding to the greater mystery, the trailer features Steve Buscemi flat out explaining the entire plot and Ewan McGregor declaring "there is no island". So, they named the movie The Island, but the island doesn’t exist?! In the DVD commentary, Director Michael Bay weighs in and talks about how the domestic marking was misguided and that he kept asking the studio to follow the international marketing campaign, as it made the film much more appealing.
Kingsman: The Golden Circle got completely stabbed in the back when the trailer revealed that a key character, who was believed to have died in the first film, was still alive. Director Matthew Vaughn would go on to say, "Well, I’m not in charge of marketing. The thinking about that was stupidity, to be blunt. I begged the studio not to reveal it. Because it’s the whole driving force of the first act and if you didn’t know that scene it would’ve made the whole audience gasp. So you have to ask the lovely marketing guys because I think their job is to open the movie and don’t really care about the experience of the movie."
Similarly, if you don't know what The Cabin in the Woods is, that's a good thing. I encourage you to watch it. Don't Google it, don't look up the trailer on YouTube, just watch it. Because anyone who's seen it will agree that in order to get the best first watch experience, you need to go into it blind.
Disappointed with the direction that the horror genre was going in at the time, Producer Joss Whedon & Director Drew Goddard set out to write a script that turned horror tropes on their heads. The result was a film that relies heavily on surprises and subverting expectations, but the trailers completely ignored that and spoiled many of the twists it had in store. Prior to the theatrical release, during a screening at the South by Southwest Film Festival, a reporter even recommended that people not watch the trailers.
Now The Marvels had a myriad of problems but one of which is when a trailer makes a big deal out of nothing and focus' heavily on something that ultimately doesn't matter in the final product.
As a writer and storyteller, you may enjoy putting little nuances like this into your story, as they’re seen as quirky, interesting, and sometimes funny. However, it needs to have relevance, because the reality is that the audience doesn’t care about those things like you do. It needs to either add to the character development, the world building, or progress the story. If it has no bearing on any of those and is simply just a thing to be dealt with, the question then becomes, what was the point?
In the case of The Marvels, it was the place-swapping whenever the trio used their powers. Early trailers made it seem like the place-swapping gimmick was going to be a far more pivotal plot point than it actually was. In the final film, it quickly felt like nothing more than an afterthought that overstayed it welcome after the first act because the writers didn't know what to do with it after tacking it on. Now as I said, this can easily (and should) be blamed on bad writing, but it's also the fault of the marketing for leaning so heavily into it. As negative buzz about the movie grew louder by the time the final trailer came out, a sense of likely underperformance had clearly set in, as they began heavily referencing Avengers: Endgame. This only made it more evident to people that The Marvels was relying purely on its connection to, and popularity of, the MCU. Throw in an unintimidating villain dropping the cliche one-liner, "You took everything from me," and you have a collection of trailers that failed to convince audiences to leave their house to see it, especially knowing it wouldn't take long for the subpar film to hit Disney+. (All things considered though, with how final movie turned out, it's hard to blame to The Marvels' failure on the marketing. I mean, they were really just working with what they had.)
Mission: Impossible
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One is a fascinating trilogy of marketing errors. All of which could've been avoided, but again, I say this with the benefit of hindsight as I do think that some of these were actually a good idea at the time.
Over the years, two-part movies have become much more accepted. With successes like The Avengers, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, It, and Dune, audiences have shown that they’re willing to watch two movies if that is what’s needed in order to tell the whole story. So, with that in mind, why not advertise your next action epic as a multi-film story? Well, the difference with all the previously mentioned titles that have been successful two-parters is that they’re all adaptations. They’re all previously established brands with previously established stories. Mission Impossible may be an established brand, but it does not have an established story. No one knows what it’s going to be about, and there’s no source material to get people excited for what’s to come. In the absence of such material to keep people salivating for the next one, when you give your film the label of "Part One", you're effectively just telling people that it's an incomplete movie. In which case, many people will just wait for the second film and watch both at once in order to ensure they get a full experience. But to Paramount's credit, they took notice of this after the fact and dropped "Part One" from the title for the home release, and "Part Two" from the follow up. (While Mission: Impossible was able to avoid it, this approach could backfire even harder if the first movie flops, potentially resulting in the finale getting cancelled.)
Moving past the name, Mission: Impossible is a franchise known for its big stunts, and yet with Dead Reckoning they decided to give away their biggest stunt for free months ahead of the release, even worse, they also showed extensive behind the scenes footage of how the stunt was done. By the time the movie came out and people got to see Tom Cruise drive a motorcycle off a cliff, they had already seen it dozens of times. Adding to the deflated excitement of the stunt was the way the final version of the sequence was edited. As an audience, we've become very accustomed to the fact that the majority of what we see on screen is often computer generated. So, when it came to this stunt, even though you knew that it was real, it felt fake because it was presented in a very generic style, making it look like any other CGI stunt. In my opinion, they should've referenced real-life BASE jumping footage for the cinematography and portrayed the stunt in a similar fashion in order to make it more grounded and authentic, and hammer home that fact they did it for real.
And finally, to actually harken back to my Horribly Timed Releases post, its last mistake was coming out just a week before Barbenheimer took over the world. This could have, and should have, been avoided. Everyone and their mother knew that Barbie and Oppenheimer were going to be massive, even without combining superpowers. Having nowhere to go, with Barbie dominated ticket sales as girls dragged their boyfriends to the theater, and Oppenheimer dominating IMAX, Dead Reckoning faced an impossible mission.
