Even good movies can’t overcome bad buzz

Posted by Chris

September 26, 2006

The New York Times has an interesting post-mortem on All The King’s Men, the political drama starring Sean Penn, Jude Law and Kate Winslet. The entire piece is worth a read but the gist is that audiences today are extraordinarily savvy in the ways of media companies. They can speculate, rightly or wrongly, that the postponing of a movie by a year means there are major problems with the movie that the studio is trying to fix through editing, reshoots or other means. These opinions and assumptions are then extremely difficult to overcome when the movie is actually released.

The thing is I thought this had a good campaign. The trailer and poster were both extremely well edited and designed and represented the movie well. But this negative perception that built up about the movie was simply too large to bowl over. As the article states, if the movie had come out on time last year it wouldn’t have had a year to allow these negative perceptions to fester but they did and that’s the reality.

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movie marketing, sony pictures