Polone: The Three Ways a Studio Can Screw Up Your Movie Release — Vulture

Producer Gavin Polone contributed a great article to Vulture about how marketing decisions make or break a movie’s success.  Not exactly news, per se, but he has a great handle on the oft-cited truth that you can make a great movie and have it still be a bomb.

We’d like to take this one step further.  He argues that people loved DROP DEAD GORGEOUS but poor marketing led to the movie’s weak box office.   We agree that the film is great, but one look at metacritic.com says the critics didn’t agree; the film has a 28 out of 100.  There could be many reasons why the score is so low, but we wonder if it might also have something to do with marketing.  After all, critics see (almost) the same marketing as the rest of us, and that marketing can color their interest in the movie.  A critic pre-disposed to disliking a movie – “the studio has no faith,” “it’s in seriously limited release and not an indie, so it must be bad,” “the posters are hella boring” – will probably go in looking for something to dislike.  We’re watching that happen right now with WE BOUGHT A ZOO.  Posters with the wrong message, a crowded release weekend – you’d think a Cameron Crowe/Matt Damon/ScarJo movie with the great story would have a better shot.  Critics were blasting the film way before they’d seen it – and likely because the marketing was shameful, and without the script in hand, and with the prospect of sexier choices like GHOTOCOL or DRAGON TATTOO, the only way to go was negative.

Not that poor marketing is the only thing that leads to poor critical reviews, but it could be factor. And the only things that can save a film from poor marketing are critical reviews and word of mouth from the brave.  So, we enter a loop, and good movies sometimes get the short end of the stick.

You can read a snippet from Polone’s article below, and click through the link for the full read.

“Studio executives are people just doing their jobs. They have to make decisions based on their experience and best guesses, as well as finite marketing budgets and a limited number of distribution slots. Yet I’m fortunate if I get to make one movie every eighteen months, whereas they make and market twelve to sixteen a year, allowing them to punt one or four and maintain a pretty good record. It can be really difficult to cede so much power over your success or failure to someone who can just call “next” to whomever is standing in front of the deli counter right after he has fucked up your sandwich.”

via Polone: The Three Ways a Studio Can Screw Up Your Movie Release — Vulture.