TV shows & movie failures cause by bad marketing

[cultcross]

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.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ 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.

 

[Kor]

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 here I thought that the Summer Glau robot was Sarah Connor somehow.

Kor

 

[bigdaddy]

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

Not sure if that's true.

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.

 

[Snaploud]

And here I thought that the Summer Glau robot was Sarah Connor somehow.

Kor

That would be a rather disturbing plot twist. I like it.

 

[Greg Cox]

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 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.

 

[Gaith]

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.

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.

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.