TV shows & movie failures cause by bad marketing

I have been watching Braindead the horrible looking show from last summer with alien bugs making heads explode. It looked dreadful but it's actually really fun! The ads really failed it badly. I know wish it could have continued for the other 3 planned years. More so because of the fact Zoo and Under the Dome got at least three seasons.

I still have yet to watched it, but I understand that 'Live. Die; Repeat. / Edge of Tomorrow' was the same way, good movie, horrible ads. More so when you change the name of the movie after the fact.

 

Braindead was really great, I don't think I ever saw any ads for it.
The Edge of Tomorrow trailers made it seem terrible to me too, so I never bothered with it.
I thinkt the the tiny marketing campaign ST Beyond got is responsible for its underwhelming box office.
And while I'm excited for it the marketing for Ghost in the Shell seems to leave most people cold. We'll see...

 

The classic modern example would be John Carter. A half-billion dollar movie with barely any marketing, and what there was, wasn't very good. The decision not to use "...of Mars" in the title, so they could use it for a possible sequel, kept those who didn't know of the books from realizing that it was even a sci-fi/fantasy film.
The movie turned out to be delightful, but nobody went to see it.

 

I was going to say John Carter, I did not see it till it became available on netflix or Amazon.

 

The tv show Hunter with Fred Dryer and Stepfanie Kramer was started up again in 2003 after it ended in 1991. The problem was that they didn't advertise its return. NBC only aired 3 of the 5 filmed episodes before they cancelled it again. I didn't even know that the new show existed until a few years later.

 

I'd love to get that on DVD, just to be a completist.

 

Braindead I saw a ton of ads for and every one of them made it look stupid and not funny. It's actually smart, stupid (at times when needed) and really funny. A joy. But the ads made it look like a CBS sitcom.

I have Edge of Tomorrow on Blu-ray and never opened it. But there is still talk of a sequel.

Star Trek Beyond ads made it look like 'Fast and Furious in Space!', it wasn't terrible, the character interactions were great, but they needed to work on the plot again because it just wasn't a good movie. Almost, and better than Into Darkness (but that says nothing) but just not quiet as fun as it should have been.

John Carter is a great example. I still haven't seen it.

 

Maybe the timing of Braindead was bad with so many people sick of politics.

 

I think the timing was perfect, at least from a European perspective, most of us were sitting here thinking what is this madness that is the US political climate at the moment? Oh yeah, brain bugs, that makes sense,,,

 

Not that this was even a good movie, but Collateral Beauty's trailers were extremely misleading. It made it look like either supernatural beings or actors hired to play supernatural beings were coming to help a grieving man. And it left out the huge part about his own friends being evil dicks.

 

Judge Dredd, the new one, not the Stallone one, wasn't marketed right at all. It was a really good movie with a potential for many sequels but they just threw it out there and left to die.

Pacific Rim very neary suffered the same fate only it managed by the skin of its teeth to get a sequel.

 

Idiocracy would be an obvious choice.

Although in that case it wasn't a "failure" as such, rather an intentional conspiracy by its studio to MAKE it tank. Guess the movie just hit too close to home for some people.

 

I always thought TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES was mis-sold. Season after season, all the marketing hyped the "Summer Glau as sexy fembot" angle, but that's not really what the show was about. And the cyborg chick wasn't even the main character. (Oddly, Sarah Connor was largely invisible in the print ads for "The Sarah Connor Chronicles.")

I suspect this hurt the show in two ways: People tuning for a show about a sexy fembot we're bound to be disappointed, while people who might have liked what the show really was might not have been turned off by the ads.

In general, it's never a good idea to try to market a movie or a TV show (or a book) as something other than what is. You see this in movie trailers occasionally and it usually means that the studio has lost faith in the product and thinks the only way to make their money back is by "tricking" people into seeing the movie. But this seldom if ever works.

Don't sell a moody character drama as an action movie or feel-good comedy. Don't try to hide the fact that it's a musical, or a western, or whatever. Don't hype it as a star vehicle when the Big Name Star only has a small supporting role. Etc.

 

And don't put a scene in the preview where a main character is confronted by a TIE Fighter on a catwalk when no such scene ever existed in the actual film.

Far as I'm concerned, previews should be banned from including ANY scenes that are not in the film...

 

That's impossible to enforce since the trailers are made BEFORE the movie is finished.

I suppose you could require that any scene shown in a trailer HAS to be included in the final cut of the movie, but that would effectively put the marketing guys above the director when it came to editing the movie. Never going to happen.

Nor should it.

(It's very possible that you could have some footage that looked great in the trailers, but that ultimately doesn't work in the finished movie, for reasons of pacing, or plotting, or script changes, or whatever. So we should hurt the movie just to be consistent with the trailer?)

 

Oh, definitely yes. Somewhat related to this, moreso because the movie was actually a success, but that's what I encountered with Pan's Labyrinth. A friend who wanted to see it dragged me to go see it with him, and all I knew from seeing the trailer was that it was supposed to be this dark fantasy, when in reality, it was as much a violent and graphic movie about war, with the fantasy part in the sidelines. In the end, I felt blindsided and actually sick to my stomach as I wasn't prepared for what I would be watching. Never have I felt more mislead with a movie trailer. In fact, if I had known what it was going to be like, I wouldn't have agreed to go with him.

 

Ah, like how the first trailers for The Phantom Menace made it look like it might be good!

 

I never liked the fact that You're Next was marketed as a super serious horror film, but it ended up being a black comedy. I may have been more inclined to enjoy the film if I knew the comedy was intentional.