How important is marketing to a film's success or failure at the box office? WIP

How important is marketing to a film's success or failure at the box office?
Niamh Gallagher

In this essay I will be writing about how marketing can effect whether a film is a failure or success at the box office. The two films I will be analysing closely are 2010's Avatar and 2012's John Carter.

Avatar had a marketing budget of $223,000,000 compared to John Carter's $100,000,000. Avatar's heightened budget greatly helped its success at the box office. This is because the money was invested wisely in seven marketing campaign. They used social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, had websites and apps dedicated to the film and a viral assault of trailers and pop ups. This attracted new fans and expanded on the ones they already had by reaching out across multiple platforms. Avatar even had a day dedicated to itself, 21st August 2009 was known as 'Avatar Day'. On this day moviegoers in more than a 100 IMAX 3D screens worldwide watched 16 minutes of footage from the movie. The same day Ubisoft debuted a trailer for a videogame based on the film. Mattel unveiled action figures inspired by the film's characters and technology. All this only rose the level of interest in James Cameron's Avatar, to the point the official website crashed from that amount of visits it received.