When Bad Marketing Ideas Become Reality
0Were you aware that there’s a Matt Damon movie opening today? It’s okay if the answer is no. It would be hard to blame you.
You might have noticed something regarding a strange movie about the Great Wall of China and some monsters or something, and that it takes place in the 15th or 16th century, or maybe the 17th, that there’s a Caucasian actor with a ponytail in it, as well as that Latino guy from Narcos and Game of Thrones, and that all the dialogue in the trailer sounds like a badly dubbed Bruce Lee movie, but specifics may have eluded you.
Thus, it should come as no surprise that the film is tracking to open poorly, and will be blown away by such returning fare as The LEGO Batman Movie and, perhaps, Fifty Shades Darker and John Wick: Chapter 2, while also fighting for those new release dollars with the comedy Fist Fight.
Not surprising for a random movie coming from China, at least. When it’s directed by one of the world’s most revered directors (Zhang Yimou) and features one of its last, true movie stars (Damon), it probably is a bit of one.
Now, before I go any further, I think it’s sort of important to point out that The Great Wall was always about foreign dollars and has already done over $224 million worldwide before it opened here, and more than $170 million of that came from Chinese audiences. Again, not a bad start, but with a budget of $150 million, that means it needs to gross closer to $350 million worldwide to break even, and the financiers had to think that a good chunk of that might come from domestic ticket sales to balance the money coming from the Middle Kingdom.
Except for the fact that the movie was marketed so poorly here that people don’t even know what the heck kind of movie it is, much less whether or not they actually want to see it.
Seriously, I see more films than most people and have seen the trailer at least a dozen times, and I still have no idea what in blazes is going on in that thing. Are they suggesting that the Great Wall of China was built to keep out monsters? And if so, doesn’t it sort of defeat the purpose if some of those monsters can fly? And what is Damon doing there? Why is Pedro Pascal with him? What, exactly, is going on in this movie and what are the stakes? And for the love of Pete, why on God’s green earth is Damon wearing that ridiculous ponytail?
None of these questions, by the way, are answered in the trailer. I don’t want a trailer to give the whole movie away, but I would like it to give me at least half a clue as to what it is the thing is trying to get me to see, is all I’m saying.
Look, the movie could end up being great, but you wouldn’t know it from any of the marketing they’ve given us so far. For point of reference, look at the other new release this weekend: Fist Fight. That movie might be totally awful, but the ads have made me laugh, and I know exactly what kind of flick it is, so I’m much more likely to see that one, even though I like Damon, Yimou, and Pascal, and tend to go for those big, ridiculous fantasy adventure numbers.
Incidentally, neither movie has been all that well reviewed, which makes it even easier. Of course, there are plenty of bad movies that do well at the box office — see Fifty Shades Darker — and what they have in common is that they were well marketed to the right audiences, who then showed up to see what they were promised, whether the movies delivered on that promise or not.
Deadpool is not remotely a bad movie — I am firmly on the record about that — but it serves as an excellent example of marketing done right. The folks at Fox saw what they had, and were very bold with their choices, letting star Ryan Reynolds address audiences as the character, pushing the R-rating, and making it very clear that this was not your standard superhero movie. The job was done brilliantly, and Deadpool had a record-breaking opening on route to almost $800 million worldwide.
It’s almost hard to believe that the same studio resorted to fake news to push another movie coming out this week, A Cure for Wellness. Stories about the president secretly meeting with Vladimir Putin, or banning vaccinations, or that a Utah senator was pushing a bill to jail and publicly shame women who receive abortions, each with oblique references to the movie in question?
There is good bold, and there is bad bold. In my two preceding paragraphs, you will find an example of each. Thus, it should not come as a shock that Wellness — a horror movie directed by Gore Verbinksi, aimed at the same audience that made Split a smash hit just a few weeks ago — is tracking to open horribly. While Split made $40 million its opening weekend on a budget of $9 million (another example of brilliant marketing), Wellness is targeted to make between $6 million and $8 million, on a budget of $40 million.
In other words, disaster.
These are not isolated incidents, of course. It happens all the time, in fact. Several movies each year fail because the people in the marketing departments didn’t know how to sell them. Free State of Jones, for one example, couldn’t decide whether it wanted to sell the historical nature of the film — about a Confederate Army deserter who returns to Mississippi and leads a militia of other deserters, runaway slaves and women in an uprising against the corrupt local Confederate government — or the relevance to current events, while also displaying posters that had star Matthew McConaughey giving us a thousand-yard stare. Nothing terribly engaging about that, and audiences didn’t show up for it.
I’m not saying that every movie that flops does so because of the marketing. That would be totally unfair. I mean, Zoolander 2 probably suffered at the box office because it came so long after the first one and people had stopped caring about the character, not because the folks at Paramount didn’t know how to sell it, but there are certainly more than a few that do bad box office because of marketing failures. Not to pick on McConaughey, but the failure of Gold last month had as much to do with that as with the film’s quality, since the normally reliable Weinstein Company publicity machine clearly had no idea what to do with the movie. Buddy adventure story? The historically accurate aspect? Parable to current events?
Actually, a lot of the same issues that plagued Jones, if you think about it.
Ultimately, no one can have a perfect record, and I’m not saying anyone needs to, but sometimes, common sense sort of has to prevail. If you’re sitting around the meeting table and having trouble figuring out how to push the movie, someone probably should say, “Wait, why don’t we just tell people what the hell it’s really about?”
That may not always work, but, more often than not, it seems to.