How important is marketing to a films success or failure at the box office?

A good marketing campaign is vital for a films success at the box office as by presenting the movie in an appealing matter to its target audience it attempts to make a perception of the film in the publics’ consciousness. If the technique is effective positive expectations are created and used to appeal to a particular audience group. It also increases the awareness of the product and keeps it in the publics consciousness so its always on their mind.

Marketing can be performed in a multitude of ways such as a good trailer, selling products, releasing video games to promote the movie and enhance ticket sales. By doing this correctly it identifies the customers’ needs and satisfies them – as without customers Hollywood would essentially not function. Marketing is basically the most important factor of defining a films failure or its success.

Avatar is the best example for successful marketing as it is the most successful movie ever made. The budget of the movie was estimated at about $237 million and its marketing costs were just as expensive. The marketing team presented a trailer which appealed to a wide audience as it very clearly described the plot, characters and creates an obvious perception of what is happening in the film. It also promotes the unique CGI and 3D aspects, presenting a new cinematic experience to capture the audiences’ attention. The trailer also highlights its star director, James Cameron by stating his previous films with the intention of promising that this film will be just as successful and quality-filled as his others. This is the opposite with Disney’s John Carter as they tried to release something that has already been done before and so does not provide anything new and exciting for the audience. Its trailer failed at providing a clear explanation of what was going on and overall was confusing and overly complex, this contributed to its major fail at the box office along with its bad word of mouth and poor promotion of the film overall.

The posters released for Avatar were recognisable with the logo being the same and placed in the exact place on each one so it could reinforce the same meanings and reinforce the expectations with the clear presentation of the genre and characters. The posters for John Carter however were unclear and each one was very different, seemingly presenting a different type of genre for each one. Because of these differences, audiences were unable to recognise the film as they lacked consistency and repetition.

By highlighting stars in a movie, it is more likely to appeal to more audiences and in Avatar’s case it promoted the fact that this is James Cameron’s return movie and it’s going to be epic and amazing, whereas John Carter had no recognisable stars or qualities and had a less-known director meaning it appealed to less of the public due to it having no one recognisable.

Another contribution to John Carter’s failure is the fact that Disney failed to capitalise the horizontally integrated business they operated meaning they did not promote their own film in their stores or on any other mediums, this meant a lack of publicity to challenge the already negative word of mouth it was getting. It also didn’t help that Disney itself admitted the film was bad before it even came out which resulted in people not going to see it because the expectations were already incredibly low.  Oppositely, Avatar had a very positive word of mouth which, contributed to its major success.