2007 July : Movie Marketing Madness

Quick Takes 7/31/07

Seems that the success of The Simpsons Movie is proving to be good for 20th Century Fox as a whole. That’s good news since Fox pulled out all the corporate stops to promote the flick.
Blockbuster is looking at revising their bricks-and-mortar store strategy. The chain is playing with the idea of smaller stores that just [...]

Not screening films now, it seems, standard practice

Once upon a time studios would regularly screen their films for critics well ahead of their theatrical release. Doing so allowed the critics to see the movies, formulate their thoughts and opinions and then write them down for later publication.
But then a scattered few movies began to be released without these screenings. The first ones [...]

Zannel creates 11th Hour mobile content

From a very good, well-targeted email pitch comes this news about mobile content for Leonardo DiCaprio’s global warming documentary:
Now movie fans can get one step closer to Leonardo DiCaprio and his latest project The 11th Hour simply by picking up their mobile phones.  Zannel (http://www.zannel.com), the mobile social network that provides the easiest way to [...]

It hasn’t gotten better

Two weeks after going off on a rant about the horrible email pitches I got from people who obviously just plugged my email address into a blast email program, I wanted to update that and let you all know it has not gotten any better. This confirms my suspicion that the people pitching MMM aren’t [...]

Veggie Tales movie gets promotional partners

The next Veggie Tales movie, subtitled The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything, will receive a good amount of promotional help, most of revolving naturally around Christian retailers and churches, reports BrandWeek.
Promotions and advertisements for the animated movie from Big Idea will appear at religious-themed events, Christian bookstores and more. There will also be a new [...]

Hellboy 2 and Whiteout Comic-Con teaser posters

I really like this teaser poster for the comics adaptation Whiteout. It very much looks like the cover to one of the comics themselves. The only question I have is where they grabbed the picture of Kate Beckinsale’s face that they Photoshopped into the parka from.

Then there’s this teaser poster for Hellboy 2, which is [...]

Warner updates WhySoSerious.com

Warner Bros. has made some changes to the WhySoSerious.com domain it’s using to promote The Dark Knight. Instead of a more or less straightforward promotion for the movie it now looks, at least at the top, like a cheesy entertainment rental site and actually redirects to Rent-A-Clown.com. At the bottom of the page are pictures [...]

Post sues Boll over websites

Director Uwe Boll has been sued by the New York Post over a couple of websites Boll launched to promote his new movie Postal, reports The New York Sun.
The sites, the suit alleges, infringes on the paper’s trademark by creating more or less direct reproductions of the Post’s website. The paper has asked a federal [...]

Expanding the community

Over the course of the last two years my view of Movie Marketing Madness has evolved quite a bit. As I wrote a couple weeks ago, MMM exists at the intersection of the movie and marketing worlds in terms of online communities. But most of the links to the site, I’ve noticed, come from marketing [...]

Quick Takes 7/30/07

The producers of The Simpsons Movie say the excellent viral and experiential marketing efforts for the movie helped to make it a success. Meanwhile The New York Times finally gets around to writing about the 7-Eleven marketing partnership.
Both Chattaway and Wells (as well as the guys they link to) continue the discussion of why exactly [...]

Quick Takes Trailer Round-Up 7/30/07

A number of new trailers hit the net while I was out-of-touch. I promise this will be the last of the huge round-ups for a while. Everything is just about caught up.
The new international trailer for Beowulf, director Robert Zemeckis’ latest meshing of live-action acting and CG animation, is heavy on showing off the epic [...]

Allowing buzz to happen

Just for the record, I agree with just about everything Heather Green writes here at BusinessWeek regarding fanmade trailer mash-ups:
…if I were the movie studios, I would be ecstatic. Companies try so hard to create buzz and following for their products. They throw video out there for people to use, but all too often only [...]

Sweeney Todd poster

I mentioned this briefly in an earlier recap but this poster for Sweeney Todd really deserves to be shown off. It’s so wonderfully designed that it immediately captures the interest of passers-by. The color scheme and overall look and fee of the one-sheet also instantly brand it as a Tim Burton film to anyone paying [...]

30 Days of Night red-band trailer and official website

The newly launched official website for the vampire flick 30 Days of Night is hosting a new red-band, age-restricted trailer for the movie.
The trailer itself is a bit better than the previously released version, primarily because it’s allowed to show more of the gore of people getting their necks ripped out by the vamps. It’s [...]

Quick Takes 7/29/07

BoingBoing links to a gallery of very cool Polish movie posters, a good number of which were made for American films.
The NYT covers the Film Forum’s NYC Noir series and the themes explored in these darker, grittier films.
Regarding the Chicago Film Critics/20th Century Fox flap, it appears the CFCA has come out and said that [...]

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