Film, Box Office, and Stuff

Don’t you just hate when you view a 3-minute trailer and end up feeling like you’ve seen the majority of the money shots, side-splitting one liners, and sometimes even major plot twists? Especially nowadays, it is not uncommon for a film to have many trailers released, all of which show different scenes and clips, and all of which are 2-3 minutes long. It’s not only trailers, Hollywood marketers also think it’s a good idea to release clips and featurettes, too. In what world does showing a potential customer too much make something more sought after? If a football fan was shown the goals being scored, would that encourage him/her to pay to see the rest of the game? (Even if the game was free to watch, after seeing the goals, is there much point in watching the rest of the game?). This want-it-right-now culture of showing too much is one of the reasons why cinema attendance is struggling (at least in the USA); experiencing a film is no longer exclusive to paying attendees. In the...

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 , made by Sony, features many shots of Sony products. This is the usual product placement strategy, and it is expected. It’s not blatant. It’s subliminal, to a degree. But what’s happening now is that global brands are hi-jacking films and turning them into feature-length advertisements. There is no artistic or creative input behind the films Sex Tape and The Internship . They are not pushing boundaries. They are safely aligning with the principles and culture of their respective brands. These mainstream, four-quadrant summer comedies are about as dull as choosing beige as your bathroom colour scheme. If the product is jeopardised as a result of over-marketing your brand or because of negligence of creativity, the strategy will fail – audiences will reject the product and the goal of embedding the brand in the psyche of modern culture will have been wasted. Is it Apple’s dream to be attached to the bad taste in people’s mouths as they exit the cinema af...