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10 Movie Marketing Blunders

By Christopher Campbell posted 3 months ago

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.
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Zombieland Trailer is Unnecessary Yet Awesome. Today in Film Bloggery 06/19/09

By Christopher Campbell posted 5 months ago

Do we really need more zombie movies? Just as one is opening — the Nazi zombie flick Dead Snow — another gets a trailer: the zom-com Zombieland, starring Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone and Oscar nominee Abigail Breslin. Also, according to the IMDb page, Bill Murray has a cameo as a zombie. After the brilliant Shaun of the Dead, there’s not much need for more zombie movies, especially humorous zombie movies, but I can’t help but be excited about this thing. Hopefully that tongue-in-cheek narration is heard throughout the movie and not just in the trailer, in which it’s employed hilariously.

Anyway, as entertaining as Zombieland looks, it’s certainly contributing to the potential over-saturation of the genre. Somehow, though, zombie movies aren’t as threatened, no matter how many examples are made, as some other types of movies. Vampire plots, for instance, are too common these days. And apocalyptic scenarios in general (which does include zombie stories) are excessively prevalent (today’s other most popular trailer is for Roland Emmerich’s destructoporn flick 2012, which also features Harrelson). Yet we always think most films would be better if they had zombies. The real question may be, then, do we really need more non-zombie movies?

Lets see what the film blogs have to say about this trailer after the jump:
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