How Important is Marketing to a films success?

As soon as a film is on track for release, the producers are issued a marketing budget in order to get the film as big an audience as they can by using tactics such as TV advertisements, Social Media, posters etc.

Using Avatar and John carter as examples, I will explore how successful marketing can make a film into a massive success even despite the quality of the film itself. Avatar had one of the biggest production budgets in film history with an extensive amount of $425,000,000, a majority of this going towards marketing, whereas John Carters production budget was $275,000,000 and not much was spent on marketing.

When looking at the properties of Avatars marketing campaign, one of the first thing people will take into account is the poster of the movie as it will be seen most places and will be the first thing that companies aim to stick in peoples minds. Avatar did well with creating a recognisable poster that followed a certain consistency throughout all different versions of it and immediately registers with audiences due to the features such as the giant blue face of one of the avatars always taking up half or more of the poster and the title and director in giant font in the same places. This of course differs with John Carters advertisement posters with severely lack consistency throughout each of them. Using four different posters as evidence, its easy to see that they all present a different message to the audience which can be confusing due to the audience then not knowing what the specific genre of the movie is. With the four posters we were shown, the different presumed genres were Horror, Adventure, Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Period. This is obviously a problem as audiences don’t know whether or not this film is aimed at them or not.

Another form of marketing that Avatar used to their advantage was the trailer they put out on YouTube. To this day, the trailer acquired 24 million views whereas John Carters trailer only has 4 million. Both trailers aren’t very different in the structure they use, but they are very different in the terms of the perception they give out about the movie. The avatar trailer is a good trailer and marketing technique as it gives enough information about the movie to get audiences attention. It gives the name of the major location in the movie and the beginning of the plot away so we then develop expectations for the film. The trailer is also good due to the different paces they use and all the different genres they show in 3 minutes. This is good as it then reaches out to a wider audience. The John Carter trailer is the opposite as the entire 3 minute trailer manages to leave the audience with no clear knowledge of what’s going on, and when this happens, its unlikely that the audience will want to see it.

In conclusion, avatar managed to use the marketing budget to their advantage by hitting every mark with precision and making sure that it appeared as though it appealed to everyone where as John carter gives no clear recognition into what type of film it is and whether its any good.