Marketing Mishaps: movie trailers

(This is a repost of an article I wrote in august 2009)

Selling a film is a craft not to be taken lightly. Each year Hollywood spends hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising, in an attempt to convince those fickle moviegoers to spend their hard earned cash at the box office. In some cases, the cost of marketing can equal – or even exceed – a film’s production budget. Crazy, huh? Well, this industry isn’t called showBUSINESS for nothing. If you want to sell tickets, you’ve got to get out there and let the people know your film has the biggest bang, the brightest star, the scariest monster or the most adorable puppies.

Make no mistake, marketing can make or brake any film. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT would be nothing more than an obscure little student-film on Youtube had it not been for the brilliant marketing campaign that made it seem like a good idea to spend 8 dollars to watch shaky video-footage of three kids running around in a forest for 90 minutes. At the other end of the spectrum you’ll find films like the recent OUTLANDER – deserving of a far better marketing-treatment than what the distributor felt was adequate at the time. Too bad, because more often than not these films actually have the potential to become box office-hits, instead of just hapless straight-to-dvd dumps.

Which brings me to the centerpiece of any movie marketing-campaign: the trailer. That carefully crafted montage of shots from a particular film, set to enticing music and usually accompanied by a deep resounding voice-over. Most people in the industry don’t like to refer to it as a commercial, but of course, it’s exactly that. And like any commercial for any product, it can either succeed in its goal to move the target audience, or it can fail.

Harrison McCann once famously said that advertising is ‘truth well told’. A great adage if ever there was one – and one that I think particularly applies to film-marketing. After all, we’re in the business of storytelling. And telling stories is all about telling the truth. Right? Well unfortunately, most movie trailers aren’t cut by the people responsible for the final film (ie the director). Marketing is handled by the studio / distributor, so unless your name is Steven Spielberg or Ridley Scott, they get the final say over your film’s trailers.

The result of this practice? Trailers that give you the completely wrong idea about a film’s concept or story. Case in point: the first trailer for Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of Alice Sebold’s novel THE LOVELY BONES. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love the imagery presented to me in this trailer, but after a promising start, we suddenly turn the corner and the story’s about ‘a dead girl’s attempts to hunt her killer from beyond the grave’. Which, as anyone who has read the novel can tell you, is definitely NOT what THE LOVELY BONES is about.

This is an understated story about family dynamics in the wake of a tragedy. More akin to Redford’s ORDINARY PEOPLE or Todd Field’s IN THE BEDROOM than it is to, say, Jerry Zucker’s GHOST. And for the life of me, I don’t understand why you would try to sell this film as a supernatural thriller with fantasy-elements thrown in (been there, done that), when you should be selling it on PJ’s pedigree, the stellar Academy Award-winning cast and the fact that it’s based on a novel read by millions of people around the world. Truth people, truth. Ultimately, that will sell best.