I understood it was because they felt people would associate the phrase 'licence revoked' with driving licences rather than the killing variety, and therefore somewhat diminish the film's jeopardy.
^ That is, admittedly, slightly less insane. Although it still speaks to the alarming tendency for studio (and network) bean-counters to assume that the human population are morons who need to be coddled.
Will bet all of the money in the world that most Americans don't know what 'revoked' means. The ones that do will think driving license.
That sound plausible. The "problem" with License Revoked is that it requires the potential moviegoer to fill in the dots between Bond's license to kill and the revoked business . . . I suppose.
Dredd, John Carter, Star Trek Beyond, Edge of Tomorrow... these most commonly cited victims of poor marketing, in my opinion, are all mediocre to bad movies with little to appeal to those outside the audiences they did get. Dredd: it's The Raid with guns. Only a small audience is going to enjoy that kind of movie, and the intensity of their fandom, while impressive, does not imply that more/better marketing would have broadened that appeal. John Carter: a dreary, bloated bore of a movie with a shrug of a lead performance. Yes, the marketing sucked, but the movie had nothing new to offer contemporary audiences after the source material's successors had reached the big screen years or decades before, and it's not as though they had any footage of Kitsch being charming to work with, because he never was. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time had a similar problem: yes, the ads which focused on the movie's release date were pathetic, but they did highlight the one impressive aspect of the movie, being Gyllenhaal's bulked-up arms. Star Trek Beyond: an awful, screeching remix of Nemesis, '09, and Into Darkness; a 50th Anniversary movie primarily aimed at audiences who don't care about Star Trek, especially now that Star Wars is back and they can get their more colorful, brainless space action jollies there. Bonus: a third-act plot twist that will mean absolutely nothing to those who didn't watch Enterprise, and is largely meaningless even for those who did. Edge of Tomorrow: not a terrible movie, granted, but it is a dreary, desaturated one in which Cruise's charm and swagger barely appear. Anyone who says that All You Need is Kill or Live. Die. Repeat would have sold significantly more tickets is kidding themselves; indeed, the former would very probably have sold many fewer. And now we have Ghost in the Shell: the trailers, which are admittedly total blah, neither explain the title (which, even apart from the franchise history, probably resonates more with Japanese culture, and definitely feels foreign to American ears), nor give any sense of the plot - but if they did, that would just make all the more obvious how passé and old-hat these tropes are in 2017. Even the promise of a kinda-naked ScarJo is several years too late. Bottom line: unless they willfully and significantly misrepresent the material they're working with, most marketing gives a fairly accurate sense of a movie's appeal, or lack thereof, to mass audiences. And while fans may find consolation in the notion that the oddities they love would have found far greater success and acclaim with more and different promotion, that's quite likely rarely if ever the case. Oh, please. It was a film killed by Andrew Stanton being an egomaniac live-action rookie with complete directorial and editing freedom who felt entitled to multiple and costly reshoots because that's how Pixar works in a completely different medium, and who demanded to personally edit the early previews, coupled with a fanatical and preposterous belief that general audiences both knew who John Carter was and were dying to finally see him onscreen. He had no idea what the hell he was doing, and blaming the execs for failing to nurture the corpse of a project is absurd.