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 Avatarpromotion, 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. …Read more
The Bloom poster took me three months to complete. Some days I worked six hours, some days I worked fourteen hours, and some days I watched a lot of reality TV, drank a lot of whiskey, and checked my Facebook a lot of times. This is what it looked like around week eight.
Zachary Johnson takes us inside the creative process behind the poster he designed for his cousin Rian Johnson’s second film, The Brothers Bloom. As I am having one of those high-Facebook days, but haven’t yet dipped into the reality TV or the whiskey, I figured blogging this might offer incentive for me to stay strong.
The 9th Annual Golden Trailer Awards were held in Los Angeles last night with what seems like a thousand winners announced in all sorts of categories representing movie marketing. There were awards for trailers, TV spots and posters divided up by genre (comedy, drama, horror, independent, etc.) and technical achievement (sound editing, motion graphics, etc.). While having too many categories can lead to questions of consistency — how does The Dark Knightbeat out Iron Manfor Best Action trailer but the latter film wins the Summer 2008 Blockbuster award? — it’s interesting to know which film’s ad employs the best music (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) and which has the best voice-over (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford).
Regarding Jesse James‘ win, though, I have to wonder how a film’s marketing can be so great if it doesn’t actually bring in an audience. In addition to its trailer being honored, its poster also won in the Best Drama category. Plus (and this is me just being picky), isn’t awarding the trailer’s voice-over a bit unfair considering it just utilizes part of Hugh Ross’ narration from the actual film? To me, this category should probably be honoring those “In a world … ” trailer voice-over guys. Nonetheless, I do love the trailer and the film and so I’ve included it for repeat viewing above.
Of course I understand that the Golden Trailers are more an honoring of craft than of successfulness. Still, if the trailer for In Brugesand the stencil poster for Ramboare the most original works in film marketing in the past year, we need some new designers right away.
Check out the list of winners and nominees after the jump
Ain’t It Cool has pictures from the Morocco set of The Green Zone, a Paul Greengrass film about the war in Iraq starring Matt Damon. AICN’s tipster says the U.S. military has refused to provide props for the film because of the script’s critical stance towards the war. I don’t know that it’s exactly standard practice for the military to lend equipment to Hollywood productions anyway, but LIBERTAS says this is just one more sign that filmmakers who question the war are “enablers of evil willing to squander tens-of-millions in the hope of watching untold numbers of abandoned Iraqis fed into the meat grinder of death squads and terrorists.”
Eugene at indieWIRE notices the similarities between the new poster for Baghead, and the poster for 60s sex farce Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (starring young Elliott Gould….drool). I think the Baghead poster is kind of awesome––I love it that it downplays the totally (and I’m sure somewhat intentionally) unconvincing horror aspect of the film.
Vulture counts down budding filmmaker Madonna’s five worst in front of the camera contributions to the music video canon. The big loser is the partially-animated “Dear Jessie”, which is truly awful, but also enough of an oddity that it’s a shame it’s already been removed from YouTube.
To close the day on the most prurient note possible: the tabloids say Lindsay Lohan’s drinking again, but Radar says she’s just an avid Facebook updater who takes both her sobriety and alleged lesbian lover Samantha Ronson very seriously.
The winner of our Julian Schnabel Poster Contest is Ed Howard. Ed’s contest entry is posted after the jump; you can also check out his extended thoughts on The Diving Bell and the Butterflyat his blog. Congratulations, Ed––and please contact us with your mailing address at karina AT spout DOT com so we can get the poster out to you.
See that graphic above? According to Armin Vit at the graphic design community blog Speak Up, it’s empirical evidence that in order for a G-rated film to succeed, its poster needs to be predominantly white and blue.
In what he describes as “an exercise in color trends,” Vit analyzed the predominant color breakdowns of the theatrical posters representing the five highest grossing films from each MPAA rating. The top grossing NC-17 films (none of which grossed more than about $20 million, due to the restricted release that rating brings) were all advertised via posters predominantly made up of black and red tones. Successful films with more lenient ratings are marketed with lighter colors; blue begins to replace black as the dominant background color, and imagery moves from stark and high-conrast to soft and airy.
In terms of color psychology, it all makes sense. While Showgirls (rated NC-17) and Finding Nemo (rated G) are each the highest grossing films in their rating’s rubric, in terms of design elements, their posters could not be more diametrically opposed. I haven’t seen Finding Nemo, but from what I remember of Showgirls, I imagine the films are equally discrepant in terms of content. Unless Nemo is a manipulative, glorified prostitute with a taste for Ver-sayss.
Vit’s full, illustrated analysis can be found here, via BoingBoing.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Ain’t It Cool has pictures
The winner of our Julian Schnabel Poster Contest is Ed Howard. Ed’s contest entry is posted after the jump; you can also check out his extended thoughts on The Diving Bell and the Butterfly 
