At the Kansas City Star, Robert W. Butler brings up an issue that I’ve been thinking about a lot: with music minimized in the massive TV campaign behind Sweeney Todd (see a totally music-free spot above), aren’t they worried that that millions of Jack Sparrow fans will swarm the theaters, only march out angrily when the star breaks into song? According to Butler, we’d be naive to expect anything else:

Today’s kids are crazy about Johnny Depp and horror, and the Warner marketing folk have played to those strengths, emphasizing that in the R-rated Sweeney Todd Depp plays a bleakly amusing killer, a nut job with a straight razor. At the same time the ads de-emphasize the film’s musical origins…Lest I come off as terribly cynical about this, let me state right now that I approve of the Warner ad campaign. That’s because I think Sweeney Todd is a brilliant accomplishment that deserves to be seen by as many people as possible. And if you’ve got to con the kiddies into buying a ticket, that’s fine with me.

“Con the kiddies,” huh? Without even broaching the topic of a studio blatantly trying to sell an R-rated film to the under 17s (not to mention Butler’s presumption of knowledge about “today’s kids”), the real dishonesty here goes beyond the fact that the distributors are not being totally forthcoming about the fact that 90 percent of this story is told in song. The real lie: Sweeney Todd is not just a musical. It’s very literally your parents’ musical.

I criticized Tim Burton in my review of the film for casting his two muses in the leads, thereby considerably diluting the idea that this is a story about decay. While I maintain that sexing up the source is a mistake, at least Burton’s being true to his own aesthetic, which is basically built around vampire theory–eternal youth obtained through death fetish, etc etc. Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter may not be the best vehicles for them, but the film still traffics in extremely adult themes, and not just “adult” in the ratings board sense of the term. Sweeney is not just a mad man on a killing spree–he’s a mad man on a killing spree who is seeking vengeance against the man who robbed him of his youth. Are Pirates trilogy obsessives really looking for that kind of weight?

Though the con might work to get the “kiddies” into the theater, it seems unlikely that such a shock will result in positive word of mouth, and thereby sustained success. Warners and friends probably think they can do a huge opening weekend on star power alone, and then make up for the inevitable second week-end drop off with a slow trickle of grown ups through the awards season. But for the kids unwittingly conned into the theater, that’s almost worse than a bait and switch–it’s basically a fuck and run.

[Via Chris Thilk]