John Carter of….somewhere?: How Marketing Can Murder a Movie

Recently I watched the 2009 Judd Apatow film” Funny People again. I remember seeing it in the cinema and, whilst enjoying it, finding it ultimately disappointing. The trailers sold it to me as another knock around romp in the style of Apatow’s previous efforts albeit, with a slightly more serious edge. What I got instead was, what I felt at the time, a reasonably funny comedy with some marginally interesting bits of drama that was overall about 40 mins too long.

However, on revisiting the film again 3 years later, now knowing exactly what to expect, I enjoyed the film a heck of a lot more. I loved the fact that the drama took centre stage. I loved the fact that this wasn’t a film featuring a group of funny people, more it was about a group of funny people. And I loved the fact that it was about how they control their lives when they aren’t attempting to be, well, funny.

This got me thinking about why I hadn’t enjoyed the film as much the first time around. I settled on one major factor; the film’s marketing.

As I said, I expected (due to the trailers and poster quotes) to see a laugh a minute comedy which Funny People really really isn’t. Had it been sold as exactly what it was I get the feeling that it would have received a much more favourable reaction from critics and the public alike. Instead it wound up with a lot of very middling reviews and a sub-par box office for comedy behemoth Judd Apatow ($71m worldwide, lower than almost every other of his films – including Forgetting Sarah Marshall…)

It isn’t as rare as you might think that a film’s marketing kills its box office or critical reception chances before it hits theatres. 2012 featured a perfect example in the honestly-not-as-bad-as-everyone-says John Cater. Hailed as one of the biggest flops of all time, John Carter is a beautiful example of a marketing department getting it staggeringly wrong. Famously the film dropped the Of Mars from the end of its title as Disney were afraid that this sci-fi twist would alienate large sections of the public, forgetting that leaving the title just as John Carter makes the film sound like a Terrance Malick piece about a tax collector.

For the perfect example, compare these 2 posters. Which of these do you most want to see? Then guess which one was posted around the world.

That’s right, the first was the main release poster seen nationwide, the second was the poster handed out exclusively to IMAX midnight screenings and was thus seen by a very limited group… who already had tickets. Moreover, Disney advertised the film during the Superbowl in 2012, in one of the most expensive advertising slots on TV. You want to know what they broadcast?

For comparison, here is what Disney broadcast to advertise The Avengers (which took $1.5bn worldwide and is the third most successful film in history)

One of those trailers builds tension, excitement, action and character. The other is a mess of images and a name I neither know nor, apparently, have any reason to care about.

The marketing of a film is a big deal. To the everyday audience member the only interaction they have with a film is through the marketing campaign; be it trailers, posters on buses or adverts in newspapers. As such a film truly has to make itself stand out as an event worth going to and raise expectations to the correct level. If Funny People had been marketed as the drama it effectively is, I strongly believe it would have appealed to Apatow’s wide fan base as well as a different, new audience and would have been more successful for it. Likewise John Carter‘s marketing campaign was an utter calamity from start to finish. Nobody knew what this film was and so everybody believed that the film itself was equally a mess. Whilst it isn’t great, it certainly didn’t deserve the box office kicking it eventually got, not even slightly.

If a studio truly understands what it has then these mistakes can be avoided. There are so many other examples of where marketing has killed a movie but ultimately, the result is always the same. It’s a shame to see a good film kicked to the curb because somebody messed up the message to the audience as it’s the people that made it that get the blame. The failure of John Carter doesn’t lie with Andrew Stanton, it lies with Disney*. If it had been pushed differently the film could have likely taken a much bigger box office and the sequel would now be greenlite.

And yes, whilst a great film will always find a way through no matter how poor the marketing (think The Shawshank Redemption and its cinematic failure compared to the mega hit it has become in later life) there are some films for which damage is irrevocably caused.  John Carter and Funny People may not be Citizen Kane, but I’ll tell you something, they sure aren’t the Plan 9 From Outer Space’s we were led to believe.

*Amendment: It has been pointed out to me that in fact Andrew Stanton did have some marketing control over John Carter making one of the above points slightly moot. Perhaps he wasn’t the best example in that instance. The point I was trying to make there was more that in the majority of cases a director won’t have control over some marketing aspects and even a great film can fail. A better example would likely have been Monsters which was an amazing indie drama, advertised as a mega monster movie. This ultimately meant that a lot of people were disappointed and whilst everyone praised the film and it did very well for an ultra low budget thing, word of mouth could likely have helped the film if the audience would have known what they were paying to see- 500 Days of Monsters, not Godzilla in Mexico. In this case director Garth Edwards did everything right and for the most part so did the studio, but perhaps by not showing that there was something else just as wonderful as the titular monsters in the film audience members weren’t as quick to recommend it to a friend.