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

Marketing for any film is important, to gain viewers in the cinemas film companies must build hype and awareness for their film. There are many different ways to do this with films such as, posters, billboards, word of mouth but also there is digital marketing which is all online through social media, online adverts and most importantly trailers.

An example of where marketing of a film has succeeded is the movie Avatar. With such things as competitions on their website, which led to crashing due to so many visitors, and interacting with the audience members through social media sites like Twitter. Avatar had over 1.5 million twitter followers so it then meant that with every retweet, favourite and reply the word of mouth was spreading and this was doubled when Avatar gave away the soundtrack of the film to anyone who tweeted them, so that anyone who tweeted them, all of their followers then saw on their news feed and then did it themselves, making these twitter followers active participants in the film's promotion.
However when looking at what was most important and built up the most hype and excitement for Avatar it was definitely the film's trailer. It had ever aspect a trailer needs to be successful promotion. When watching the trailer the audience was given a certain perception of this film being action packed, ground breaking, dramatic and just epic. It was promoted through the trailer as the cultural event of the year, a must see with it's new cinematic experiences, this could be seen through the visual effects, the fantasy conventions, eg. new creatures and alien substances. Throughout the trailer James Cameron's name is shown and no cast members are, this then makes James Cameron's presence within making this film a big deal, it then lists his best films giving Avatar the same expectations to be just as good.
Also the trailer gives just the right amount of information and taste of the storyline while leaving the end open on a cliff hanger to encourage audiences to go see it. The audience knows the basics and then wants to see how the story develops and ends.

In complete contrast the film John Carter by Disney was made in hopes of it being a big hit and to become one of the most known franchises. However due to poor marketing that was not how it turned out. Before the film even hit cinemas Disney completely wrote it off and let it be known that they though this film was a failure, which meant they did nothing to deter the negative press surrounding it. Reviews in The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw perpetuated this negativity and wrote a scathing review on just how boring the film was. Different things could of been done by Disney like Avatar did, they could of used the horizontally integrated business and sold John Carter toys, clothes, video games in their actual Disney stores and advertise it through those stores. This already gave the audience very low expectations.