TV shows & movie failures cause by bad marketing

[The Old Mixer]

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?)

That reminds me of something in the DVD commentary for Octopussy. The pre-credits sequence was running long so they'd edited out the part at the end where Bond rolls the Acrostar into the gas station and says "Fill 'er up, please"...but it made it into the trailer. Somebody working on the film saw a movie that showed the trailer and they put it back in based on the audience reaction.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Original Family Guy run.

They ran six episodes at a time, months apart, with no advertising, at random timeslots.

There was a movie in the 90s Long Kiss Goodnight. It was an action movie but the title makes it sound like some kind of romance drama.

 

[bigdaddy]

^Family Guy was screwed with because of what they were writing into the show pissed idiots off who didn't know how to change the channel, so Fox burned it off at times. But it wasn't really from ads.

I just finished Braindead, best show I have seen in years. I loved how the ending closed up the story, yet still hinted at what a second season would bring. Season 2 was going to be Wall Street, season 3 Hollywood and I can't remember season 4 they had planned.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

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.

The ads for BrainDead didn't sell it well at all. I remember thinking, "So what is this supposed to be?" (since it was getting ads during the final few weeks of The Good Wife before its debut), and I watched the first episode pretty much out of boredom (or other options) and enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. I'm a sucker for politics and, frankly, DC architecture.

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.

John Carter had several things going against it. First, it was an orphaned project within Disney; the people who had greenlit it were gone, and the execs who inherited the project had no skin in the game if it failed. Second, it fell afoul of office politics and, essentially, a Disney/Pixar proxy fight; there were people in Disney who wanted to see Andrew Stanton (and, by extension, Pixar) taken down a peg or two, and sinking John Carter served the purpose. And third, the Hollywood press was actively rooting for the film to fail, arising somewhat from points one and two. It was a film killed by politics.

I just finished Braindead, best show I have seen in years. I loved how the ending closed up the story, yet still hinted at what a second season would bring. Season 2 was going to be Wall Street, season 3 Hollywood and I can't remember season 4 they had planned.

Almost right. Season 2 would've been Wall Street. Season 3, Silicon Valley. Season 4, Hollywood. They had it all mapped out.

Damn, I miss Laurel and Gareth. I'd watch them, and Luke, in pretty much anything. Just a perfect cast.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Interesting, I've never heard of Fox caring if their programming offended people. And it is way more intentionally offensive post-cancellation than it was when it started.

 

[bigdaddy]

Damn, I miss Laurel and Gareth. I'd watch them, and Luke, in pretty much anything. Just a perfect cast.

I love Gareth, so sexy... I mean so much fun. I love the line he gave when they were pulled over by cops and he's like "I'm a black guy, why do you think I don't have a car?"

I could watch 10 years of just them all in DC and Laurel and Gareth just teaming up and fighting DC stupidity. The show was SOOOOOO good and the ads were such a failure.

 

[The Old Mixer]

Before 1990 or so, didn't they actually wait until the stinking film was finished?

Nope...see my Octopussy anecdote. For that matter, the trailer for The Empire Strikes Back had a thing or two that didn't make it into the final film.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Or rather, Fox has historically preferred that their shows *do* offend people. Way back when it was kind of their thing, "We're so much more RAUNCHY than the big three!"

 

[Greg Cox]

. Before 1990 or so, didn't they actually wait until the stinking film was finished?

Nope, they didn't. In fact, back in the day, it was not uncommon to come up with a catchy title and movie poster first, and then make the movie if you got a good response to the poster. (See, for example, pretty much every horror movie produced by RKO back in the 1940s, including such classics as CAT PEOPLE and I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE.)

And the practical reality is that you usually have to start marketing your movie before the film is finished, so the people producing the trailers (who are NOT the same people making the movie) have to make do with whatever footage is available at the time. But there's no way to tell what shots are going to make it into the final cut of the movie until much, much later. (I was just reading today about an entire sequence that was shot for BRIDESMAIDS that ended up being cut, despite being very funny, because the movie was running long.)

You can't wait until the movie is finished. If anything, the audience is even more impatient to see trailers these days than they used to be. Can you imagine all the grumbling and fretting there would be on the internet if the studios didn't release any trailers until the movie was absolutely, positively finished, which would be right before the movie opened.

"SPACE VIXENS opens in only six months--and we still haven't seen any trailers yet!"

"Well, they're still doing editing and post-production, you know. And there's that new rule that says they can't release a trailer until the movie's final cut is locked down . . . . "

It's not like most movies are finished a year or so before they open, and are just sitting around on a shelf somewhere while the sales and marketing campaign gets underway.

(For what it's worth, this happens in publishing too. I've written jacket copy and commissioned cover art for books that were still being written. Usually it doesn't make a difference, or you can fix any discrepancies before you go to to press, but sometimes the cover doesn't exactly match the book--because the cover was finished before the text was. Unless you can persuade the author to change their book to match the cover! )

 

[The Old Mixer]

I don't think a trailer was ever released under the name, but in 1965, the original release of the Beatles single "Ticket to Ride" had a line on the label saying that it was from their upcoming film Eight Arms to Hold You...then John wrote the song "Help!" and they changed the title of the movie.

 

[Greg Cox]

Remember when "Return of the Jedi" was going to be "Revenge of the Jedi."?

 

[Owain Taggart]

Yeah, didn't they actually make a poster before they decided to change the name?

 

[Greg Cox]

Yeah, didn't they actually make a poster before they decided to change the name?

I believe so.

Funny story: my first semi-professional sale (for which I was paid a whopping $55) had a character going to see Revenge of the Jedi in a theater because the story was published before they changed the title!

 

[Forbin]

Yup:
https://images.search.yahoo.com/sea...of+the+jedi+poster&fr2=piv-web&fr=tightropetb

 

[cultcross]

Yeah, didn't they actually make a poster before they decided to change the name?

They certainly did some marketing work for the Bond movie Licence to Kill with the original title Licence Revoked, including this teaser poster

 

[Owain Taggart]

Interesting. I hadn't even known there was an alternate title for that one. I imagine it was changed due to test groups. Licenced to Kill certainly has a better ring to it than Licensed Revoked, which doesn't quite have the same punch to it.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

The trailer for The Lookout didn't even mention the main character had brain damage from a car accident.

Trailers often like to make unique premises look like generic genre pieces. This is dumb because it repels the audience that will like it and attracts the audience who just want the generic genre piece. The trailer for Cyrus looked like a generic Jonah Hill being Jonah Hill setup.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Interesting. I hadn't even known there was an alternate title for that one. I imagine it was changed due to test groups. Licenced to Kill certainly has a better ring to it than Licensed Revoked, which doesn't quite have the same punch to it.

I thought Licence to Kill was a fusion of both Revoked and Renewed?

That said, I worked in a theater when LTK came out, and got tired real quick of having to change the marquee because they spelled it wrong.

 

[Greg Cox]

They certainly did some marketing work for the Bond movie Licence to Kill with the original title Licence Revoked, including this teaser poster

I remember hearing somewhere that they were concerned that some moviegoers wouldn't know what "revoked" meant.

Not sure if that's true.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ It better not be.