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John Marston

Times when you felt poor marketing hindered a film's business

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another one. Real Steel from 2011. The marketing made it look solely like a sci fi robot boxing action movie ignoring the whole father son underdog storyline aspect that could have attracted more family audiences (film pretty much skewed young male entirely) and gotten the film to 100m. 

Yeah the ads just had Hugh yelling, "Let's make some money!" and made the jokes that it was just a cash grab job for Jackman so easy. I heard pretty good things from everyone who actually saw it.

 

The ads/trailers for Ender's Game made it seem like it was all about Harrison Ford being gruff and some kid looking really intense, and it was in space, I guess. And it wasn't a game! Unless it's some weird esoteric awards bait thing, a studio should be able to sell the public on a basic story outline in 5-6 sentences max. The movie as a whole can be a lot more complex than that but you have to get people into theaters in the first place.

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YEEEEESSSSS.

 

It had a disadvantage with the stigma of Batman & Robin going in, but recent franchise reboots have proven that doesn't have to always be the excuse for a "modest" blockbuster performance. Stronger trailers (better music, better cutting), ads, emphasis on Bruce's journey, and a ban on the use of Nickelback songs or any other vocal pop music. That would have made for a possible $250-275 million grosser that summer, I feel.

 

Of course, strictly hypothetical and something that can't be proven.

 

 

Sad thing is BB has one of the best teaser trailers for any superhero movie. Unfortunately the rest of the marketing was a gigantic dud. The movie ended up with a pretty good "after life" if you will thanks to great WOM, home video, and the success of its sequels. Still wish WB hadn't completely dropped the ball after the teaser.

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This. WB and GdT spent far too much time and effort preaching to the geek choir instead of engaging the GA, which is the bulk of the audience. Footage and trailers were shown exclusively to conventioneers, when the studio should have been getting that material before the wider public. The silly viral marketing program centered mostly on posters of the robots and boring videos when it should have shown exciting clips from the film. The marketers basically acted as if they had a built-in fanbase instead of trying to generate real world buzz as opposed to Internet chatter. It was only when the studio realized about a month out that it had a bomb on its hand that they made a push, but it was too late by then. 

 

Actually it was Legendary Films that decided that if they got the Geeks excited enough, everything else would follow. Legendary was in charge of the marketing until about three weeks before the film opened, when Warners,concerned about how badly the film was tracking,took over the campaign and tried to appeal to a General Audience,but by that time the damage was done.

And even the last trailers was mainly "Big Robots and Monsters Fighting! Cool!" instead of trying to introduce the "Human Element" that is vital to getting the GA in to see a film.

Still amazed that the marketing totally ignored the powerful female audience by not showing that PR had a very strong female major charecter.IMHO very stupid.

I think the film had a tough sale from the start (too easy to write off as just another Transformers wannabe) but Legnedary's and Warners marketing  pretty much doomed it.

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another one to add to the list. Jack Ryan; Shadow Recruit.  Sure the film isn't anything great but there is no reason it shouldn't have made 100m domestic  and allowed this franchise to certainly continue. Paramount dumped the film and released only one bland trailer and some horribly photoshopped looking posters. I don't get why they would treat one of their few franchises is such a careless way

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Mr Peabody and ShermanI'm currently in the UK and I was genuinley shocked to hear that this was coming out in a week.I think they put out the first trailer only 2 weeks ago.

I've noticed the same. That said I've been bombarded with ads on youtube these last few days.

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I've noticed the same. That said I've been bombarded with ads on youtube these last few days.

1) get AdBlock. You will thank me2) It looks GREAT but Dreamworks suck at Marketing at the moment, look at Turbo. All my kids want to see is The Lego Movie, hell, all my friends want to see is The Lego Movie. They have fun ads everywhere, and our local toy shops have gone Lego Crazy, these bricks everywhere. It comes out a week after Peabody too and frankly WB have already won the battle.
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1) get AdBlock. You will thank me2) It looks GREAT but Dreamworks suck at Marketing at the moment, look at Turbo. All my kids want to see is The Lego Movie, hell, all my friends want to see is The Lego Movie. They have fun ads everywhere, and our local toy shops have gone Lego Crazy, these bricks everywhere. It comes out a week after Peabody too and frankly WB have already won the battle.

 

Is it DreamWorks marketing Peabody & Sherman or Fox? DreamWorks films tend to get the shaft in terms of marketing because they rely on their distributors.

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Pacific Rim was probably the most poorly marketed film of 2013, IMO. It's pretty ironic, seeing as how I think Man of Steel had probably the best marketing campaign of the year. So WB effectively has the best marketed and worst marketed. You can add Gravity in there for another great marketing campaign by WB as well.

 

I really don't understand what went wrong there. Why did WB do such a horrible job with PR's advertising while MoS, which opened just a month earlier, had an amazing one? A lot of theories as to why have been brought up here, but I guess we'll never know. Was it the fact that MoS was taking up so much of their resources that PR just sort of got the shaft? I don't know, but with a campaign that focused more on the actual plot here and there (come on, it wasn't so deep that a few commercials couldn't have summed up the story) and show off better mech fights as the money shots (as several have mentioned the ones they used were not the best), and also actually putting the film out there for the GA there- I'm pretty sure it could have done close to $200 million, maybe even more had the GA really clicked with it.

 

Hopefully they push Godzilla and Interstellar more in line with MoS and Gravity than PR.

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Interstellar is Paramount in America so no big deal.

 

They will fuck Godzilla just like they did to Pacific Rim. It is another Legendary partnership, in which Legendary owns the rights to the franchise. Which means that a Godzilla 2 would be Universal. 300 got lucky because WB has the rights.

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Interstellar is Paramount in America so no big deal.They will fuck Godzilla just like they did to Pacific Rim. It is another Legendary partnership, in which Legendary owns the rights to the franchise. Which means that a Godzilla 2 would be Universal. 300 got lucky because WB has the rights.

Godzilla already has a pretty intriguing trailer
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