This week is proving to be a monumental moment for failed movie marketing campaigns. Over at Deadline Hollywood Daily, Nikki Finke shares an insider’s look at the blunder of Summit’s Bandslam campaign, which is being blamed for the movie’s dreadfully disappointing bow. Meanwhile there’s the apparent mistake of Fox’s Avatar promotion, in which “overwhelming response” caused the film’s site to crash while people attempted to get free “Avatar Day” tickets for this Friday (we think it was all a ploy to attract more interest from markets where there’s actually little response and awareness, such as Denver). Throw in some spoiler spewing from The Time Traveler’s Wife’s Rachel McAdams, and it’s clear we’re seeing some terrible mishandling of film promotion lately.

The fact that District 9 did so well with its advertising and buzz only makes the blunders of this week seem that much worse. Plenty of reports around the web this week highlighted the contrast between the campaigns and performance of D9 and Bandslam (some people have also been contrasting the latter with The Ugly Truth’s marketing). But will the mistakes cause Hollywood to do better? Looking back at some past marketing errors, we can only assume not. Check out some of the worst movie marketing blunders (including one for a film yet to come out) after the jump.

The Iron Giant (1999)

Opening weekend gross: $5.7 mill. (9th place)

Legendary for its failure, Pixar-director-to-be Brad Bird’s debut feature was basically too good for the studio releasing it. At the time, Warner Brothers’ animation dept. had a terrible reputation, having put out flop after flop after flop. Warner Bros. Animation’s The Quest for Camelot was apparently such a huge bomb that they pretty much stopped promoting their titles, so despite the quality of The Iron Giant there was very little push for it. The man in charge of marketing the film, Brad Ball, claimed the biggest mistake was not having a fast food tie-in (Ball had, after all, come from McDonalds, where he made a famous 10-year-deal with Disney). Unfortunately, its stellar critical response didn’t help the film enough theatrically, but the studio did eventually get wise and managed a much better campaign for the home video release.

Dick (1999)

Opening weekend gross: $2.2 mill. (12th place)

Opening on the same weekend as The Iron Giant, Andrew Fleming’s Dick performed even worse at the box office. Like Bandslam, it was wrongly targeted at an audience younger than appropriate. Posters for the movie focused on stars Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams in a way that sold the historical satire as a teen movie. But few kids could appreciate the jokes about Watergate, Nixon and, most certainly, Woodward and Bernstein (hilariously lampooned by Will Ferrell and Bruce McCulloch). Sure, it’s not the smartest political comedy ever made (it’s no Wag the Dog, which also featured Dunst), but a lot of people over the age of 15 would have enjoyed the film if they hadn’t dismissed it as a movie for children. We still can’t get friends to believe it’s worth seeing.

The Straight Story (1999)

Widest release weekend gross: $0.6 mill. (22nd place)

This surprisingly simple film from David Lynch was brought up in a comment on Finke’s report, so we must include it despite our doubts that it truly suffered “a worse marketing disaster.” It is true that its G rating may have confused prospective audiences, but we don’t recall Disney selling the thing to kids, even with the company’s logo topping the posters. Were young viewers mistakenly taken to see it? Probably. Were older moviegoers turned off by the kid-friendly rating? Perhaps. But the film did have legs in limited release, even before Richard Farnsworth’s Oscar nod.

Birth (2004)

Opening weekend gross: $1.7 mill. (12th place)

We might be in the minority with this one, but New Line really should have sold Jonathan Glazer’s Birth as what it truly is, a brilliant satire on the fallacy of love. Call us cynical towards romance, but that’s how we saw it, a perfect compliment to 2004’s other great deconstructions of the love story, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Shaun of the Dead. Had it been marketed as a dry comedy, reviews of the film might not have so heavily criticized Birth for being so ridiculous and corny. The bathtub scene controversy might still have hurt the film, though.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005)

Opening weekend gross: $21.1 mill. (1st place)

There was a lot wrong with Disney’s handling of this Douglas Adams adaptation, starting with the fact that Disney shouldn’t have been the one to make The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the first place. This should have been obvious to Adams (who co-wrote the screenplay but didn’t live to see the final product) and the visionary filmmaking team “Hammer & Tongs” (director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith), that the studio would gear the smart, funny, exposition-heavy sci-fi comedy towards kids. Marketing aside, the movie itself doesn’t seem to know who its audience is. This is an interesting example, though, because had the film been designed more for an older audience and/or marketed as such, it probably wouldn’t have made as much money as it did. And it still wouldn’t have made a profit and we still wouldn’t have gotten adaptations of the rest of the HHGTTG books. Still, we probably would have enjoyed the movie a whole lot more and recommended it to more friends had there not been so many bored and crying kids in the audience.

Zathura: A Space Adventure (2005)

Opening weekend gross: $13.4 mill. (2nd place)

While compiling this list, we read complaints all over the web claiming that Zathura was one of the worst marketed films of all time. We’d corroborate with this if only we thought the movie deserved better. Unfortunately, we didn’t see it, having believed the film’s ad campaign that it was like Jumanji. Of course, that was the main reason people stayed away, because it was (rather legitimately) sold as Jumanji in space, which nobody really needed to see. Honestly, we figured the movie did poorly more because it opened a week prior to the release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Obviously no kids movie or even older-skewing sci-fi adventure could have done well at the time.

Zodiac (2007)

Opening weekend gross: $13.4 mill. (2nd place)

Never mind that the running time kept many moviegoers away, David Fincher’s Zodiac, considered by many to be one of the greatest films of the 2000s, let alone of 2007, was mis-marketed as a suspenseful thriller about a serial killer. Well, yeah, that’s kind of what it was, but it was also much more, and despite what the trailer made it seem like, there wasn’t a lot of focus on the killings nor was there a climactic cat-and-mouse denouement, which fans of the genre are used to. In a Sight & Sound interview that may have actually been conducted before the film opened, Fincher told Amy Taubin, “Everyone has a different idea about marketing, but my philosophy is that if you market a movie to 16-year-old boys and don’t deliver Saw or Se7en, they’re going to be the most vociferous ones coming out of the screening saying ‘This movie sucks.’ And you’re saying goodbye to the audience who would get it because they’re going to look at the ads and say, ‘I don’t want to see some slasher movie.’” The one problem with this thinking, though, is that adults who would get this movie are so glaringly missing from cinemas in general these days. Paramount’s main marketing blunder was not capitalizing on the positive reviews soon enough, but otherwise it’s unclear if Zodiac would have done any better had it been marketed differently.

American Teen (2008)

Widest release weekend gross: $0.1 mill. (46th place)

Young people are not averse to non-fiction. They watch plenty of reality shows, particularly those about other young people. So why don’t they go to see documentaries, even those about teenagers? Maybe there’s a stigma. But there’s just no use in trying to get kids to see non-fiction films in the theater (unless they’re about penguins or by Michael Moore, anyway). Paramount Vantage apparently wanted to prove they could do the impossible when they attempted to sell Nanette Burstein’s Sundance hit American Teen to teens by making it look like a fictional teen movie, specifically one along the lines of The Breakfast Club. And in doing this, the distributor turned off a number of older documentary fans who might have feared something more akin to an MTV reality program. The other problem with the Breakfast Club connection is that, as entertaining as John Hughes’ film is, it’s probably the least realistic teen movie of all time, so in comparing their documentary to it, Paramount Vantage made their film seem even more contrived than it already is.

Seven Pounds (2008)

Opening weekend gross: $14.9 mill. (2nd place)

Secret twists will often work in a film’s favor, but only if audiences have something to go on. The inability to say anything about the plot of Seven Pounds ended up being a major fault to the film’s marketing. And still there were the curious moviegoers who went in enticed by the mystery and trusting of the Will Smith brand. They were disappointed to find that the story wasn’t actually worth all the secrecy, anyway. Most of the success for films with secret twists comes from word of mouth, so the film and the twist have to be interesting for secrecy campaigns to work. Sony might have made a lot more money by selling the premise completely, even if it ruined some plot points for the audience.

The Road (2009)

Opening weekend gross: TBD

Though it hasn’t opened yet, The Road is sure to be a disappointment at the box office due to its misleading trailers, which sell the Cormac McCarthy adaptation as an apocalyptic thriller akin to something from Roland Emmerich. Apparently the actual film is quite lacking in destructo-porn, so fans of disaster films are in for a total letdown. Fortunately for them, Emmerich’s 2012 will appease them a month later, but speaking of that movie, the equivalent of selling The Road as a mere disaster movie is like selling 2012 by only showing dramatic scenes between John Cusack and his kids while hiding all the action and special effects.