Movie Marketing Madness: Jennifer’s Body

Everyone’s all about the supernatural these days. You can’t swing an undead cat around the entertainment world without hitting a movie, TV show or novel about vampires and other demons these days. More often than not these shows/movies/whatever use the supernatural as the basis of a story but then fill it with romance of the Harlequin variety, with lots of blushing faces and nervous hands but little in the way of actual sexual activity. Some go further between the sheets than others but a lot of them are heavy on the innuendo and light on the full getting of the busy.

Oh, and most all of them owe their lives to “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.” But that’s all I’m going to say about that.

Jennifer’s Body is a rare exception to the tried and true Buffy (I lied, deal with it) formula of young virginal girl and centuries-old vampire boy and their forbidden love. In the movie Megan Fox plays a young woman who winds up as the ritual sacrifice for a group of out-of-town boys. But instead of staying dead she comes back with a demon in control of her body, a demon with an agenda consists of killing boys since they’re all a bunch of hormone-controlled devils who hurt girls. But her best friend, at first thrilled to have Jennifer back, eventually figures out she’s the one killing all the boys in their town and so decides she’s going to be the one to stop her.

The movie features the combination of three things that are all pretty hot at the moment: The aforementioned supernatural story, the writing of Diablo Cody – this is her follow-up to 2007′s smash Juno – and Megan Fox, who can’t act worth a lick but is hot and has gained a following based on pretty much that alone. Let’s see how it’s being sold.

The Posters

The teaser poster did a good job of giving the audience an idea of what the movie would be dealing with, though it’s not perfect. It features the mouth of Megan Fox, with her tongue licking a drip of blood from her red, luscious lips. That makes it pretty clear that the movie features her as some sort of blood-sucking demon, though the obvious connection to make would be that she’s a vampire, which isn’t what she is according to the rest of the campaign. That assumption was only strengthened by the fact that the poster is really, really similar to a promotional image created by HBO for their vampire series “True Blood.” At the bottom of the poster it’s made clear that this is from “The Creators of Juno” and, thanks to type font that’s used for the title treatment, that it takes place in high school.

The second poster debuted the same day as the green-band, official studio version of the trailer. It shows Fox dressed in what can only be described as a slutty school-girl outfit and perched on an old-fashioned desk, a desk that has a hand sticking out of it. I’m not going to comment on the “Hell Yes” text that’s written on the chalkboard behind her since it’s pretty awful. But what’s funny is the inclusion of the “She’s evil…and not just high school evil” copy at the bottom that’s also spoken by one of the characters in the trailers. That’s a nice touch that creates a bit of consistency between the components.

The Trailers

The first trailer released was, of course, a red-band version and unlike some recent restricted trailers it actually lives up to that designation.

It starts off with a very naked Fox swimming in a lake before we start getting teaser text that there’s something different about Jennifer, specifically that she has a demon inside her. That’s put on full display as she unzips her sweater, revealing nothing underneath, and then lunges at the football player naked and with fangs bared. It’s then shown that there’s a rash of murders in the small town high school and we get later on that it’s Jennifer that’s been killing them because, well, they’re boys.

The other girl (Amanda Seyfried), alternately shown as Jennifer’s friend or her nemesis, tries to warn people that Jennifer’s evil but eventually gets targeted by her as well, with Jennifer explaining that she “goes both ways.”

In-between there are plenty of shots of Fox looking hot, quite a bit of violence – including a shot of her tearing someone to shreds while writhing on top of him – and even more of Fox looking hot, most of which come with the implied threat of violence.

This trailer was reportedly put together by Cody, Jason Reitman and director Karyn Kusama before the “official” studio version could be released. They explained the decision to do so by saying that said official version was more horror-oriented and didn’t truly represent the finished film so they wanted to get this one out as a real vision of the movie.

The studio version hit the Internet just a couple days later and, to some extent, confirmed the statement issued by the filmmakers. While it uses much of the same footage as the first one it’s also quite a bit shorter and arranges the clips to make it much more of a horror flick with a couple of funny lines instead of a funny movie that’s built around a horror-centric idea. It starts off largely the same way but plays up more the friendship between the two girls, which actually works a bit better in that their eventual showdown is built up to more steadily instead of being something that weaves in and out of the spot.

Online

The Jennifer’s Body official website opens with the all-ages trailer, which you can share via Twitter, Facebook or MySpace or grab the embed code. There’s a prompt at the bottom of the player to view the red-band version as well and clicking it actually brings it up as a Hulu video. It’s inclusion here means that at least some of the sound and noise about it not being studio-approved was over-stated. It was at least liked enough for it to be embraced after the fact and included here.

Toward the bottom of the screen there’s a big focus given to the soundtrack, with prompts to order it either by itself or with a movie t-shirt.

There are actually more features on the film’s Facebook page, including a 1:31 featurette and photos from promotions for the movie that were executed in conjunction with the Warped Tour, promotions that included a life-size cutout of Fox that people could have their pictures taken with.

There was also an iPhone app that got a fair bit of buzz around its release since it featured not only Megan Fox but also what was billed as the first user-generated contest on the platform. The contest encouraged people to use existing assets to create their own mobile theme, with the winner being decided based on community votes.

Advertising and Cross-Promotions

Something I would not have expected – but probably should have – from a movie like this is a comic book tie-in. The graphic novel, published by Boom Studios, is not an adaptation of the film but instead collects side stories featuring characters that appear in the movie that relate to the film’s events but aren’t told there.

The studio also created a PSA starring Fox that had her encouraging kids in and entering high school to throw off peer pressure and be themselves, even if that meant giving in to their inner desire to slowly kill and eat the others at school.

There were also a couple of TV spots, some of which provided a more clear explanation to the audience of how Jennifer got the way she is and what she intends to do with her new found powers, a plan that from beginning to end includes her killing boys for being…well…boys.

Media and Publicity

While there was plenty of material from Fox for some salacious press (she dropped comments about how kissing another girl felt safer than kissing the guys during filming) but most of the coverage came from the release of various bits of marketing materials. That included an appearance by Cody, Fox and others at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, a recap of which you can read at Shock Till You Drop.

There were also a couple of behind-the-scenes featurettes that were played on “Entertainment Tonight” and elsewhere that featured interviews with the cast and crew interspersed with footage from the movie, mainly talking about how amazing and original the story and characters were and are.

Finally, it worked to get a little more positive press by appearing just a week before release at the Toronto Film Festival. That appearance, which generated decidedly mixed buzz, was followed up by the release of a couple of clips from the movie, one of which of course featured the lead-up to that girl-on-girl kiss that’s been one of the focal points of the campaign.

Overall

It’s not that hard to sell a movie featuring Megan Fox as a writhing, uber-sexual demon who appears throughout the film in various states of being scantily clad. The campaign doesn’t screw that up to any great extent, and components – particularly the creator-created red-ban trailer – compliment that visual component with scenes that emphasize Cody’s writing.

But I have to wonder about how light the campaign is. While all the required elements are there, there’s not much to them. That’s especially true of the website, which for all intents and purposes doesn’t need to exist. All it does is play the trailer (already done on Apple’s page) and point to the Facebook page. That’s a major loss – there’s no character information, no listing of showtimes, no nothing there. I kind of can’t look past that, even if the rest of the campaign is…fine. Nothing is going to set the world on fire here, though, and I kind of wish there had been a bit more meat on the bones of this campaign.

PICKING UP THE SPARE

9/19/09: The press coverage of the movie – specifically of Megan Fox – amounted to a media tsunami of sorts as everyone rushed to get the same two or three quotes from the actress about her lady bits.
10/7/09: IO9 has an interesting piece about how the movie’s marketing hit exactly the wrong note, selling the movie in a way that seemed aimed at guys but which downplayed a story that had more appeal for women.