Marketing - Avatar and John Carter Essay

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

Marketing is absolutely key to a film’s success or failure; this is proven by the world’s biggest box office success and the world’s worst. Marketing and Publicity have two different meanings. Publicity is the attempt to manage the public’s perception of a film, whereas marketing is the process of selling and promoting movies via advertising. An example of publicity would be reviews and studios such as Disney hold press junkets, like interviews with some of the movies cast or the director. An example of marketing would be advertising which includes things such as trailers, posters, merchandise and video games all of which produce a bigger profit for the studio.

Publicity can have a big impact on the success of a film. In 1997 the new batman and Robin movie was released, the film starred two big movie stars at the time George Clooney and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The movie was meant to be a big success but due to a BAD review by a man called Harry Knowles the movie went from earing $42,872,605 in its opening weekend to a 63% decline in its second week. The movie went from being the third highest movie of 1997 to only making 238.2 million. This was an overall profit but was a failure at the same time as the movie was predicted to make more than this. Harry Knowles wrote in his review that most of the characters acting were the worst they had ever produced and that who would recommend that people don’t watch the film.

In 2009 Avatar became the biggest box office hit of all time even beating the previous success of Titanic. Fox had spent overall $460,000,000; $237,000,000 of this was spent on the negative cost and the rest on marketing. As shown in the figures Fox spent a lot of their overall cost on advertising, this is one of the biggest reasons that Avatar had the success it did. Foxes advertising techniques were the best a movie has had, from my own experience I knew exactly when the movie was going to be released, I knew exactly what the movies storyline was and I knew about the new 3D that the movie had all before the movie was released. I knew all of these details due to the posters that were scattered around, the interactive trailers that were available over the internet and the toys and games that were in windows of shops. The posters for the movie were designed very well, with ease the consumer could tell that all the posters were connected to the movie, what genre the movie was and all the distinctive characters. The trailer was very similar to this, the consumer knew where the movie was set, what period, what the story was about and who was ‘good’ and who was ‘bad’. The trailer also offered the chance to buy tickets using three different methods, this was an ingenious idea as after watching a trailer the consumer is usually hyped up for the movie and if they are offered to buy the tickets easily, most of them will, Fox also offered an interactive trailer for the fans. The director of Avatar was James Cameron, who also directed the second biggest box office movie of all time, Titanic. This was another big reason to why the movie was so successful; many people knew how brilliant his previous work was that they knew that it would have a good chance of also being brilliant. The biggest reason the film was so successful was the interactivity and the chance at a new experience. The film was the first to offer a new 3D experience and also the first to release an interactive trailer, both of which people couldn’t help but have a go at. The film also had their own website that told the fans character bios and showed off never before seen photos this was another way that the fans could interact with the film. The video game was also released before the film; the game was a prequel to the film which gave the fans a chance to understand the avatar world and all the characters that inhabited it. Social media had a key role as the ‘word of mouth’ can be very effective when it comes to a film’s success, friends would tell friends who would then tell their friends over sites such as Facebook. All of these had a part in giving Avatar the success it got.

Two years after the success of Avatar, Disney released their new Fantasy movie called John Carter. John Carter of mars, which was its original title, was a completely different story, it became the biggest flop of all time and unlike Avatar this was due to their Marketing techniques, which were the worst I have ever seen. Only $100,000,000 was spent on marketing for john Carter and the negative cost came to $250,000,000. After spending this much money on making John Carter, Disney only received Box office revenue of $257,219,949, this gave them a massive loss. Unlike Avatar I knew nothing about John Carter, I had no idea where it was set, I had absolutely no idea who the characters were and who was ‘good’ and who was ‘evil’ and worst of all I was left wondering what the movie was actually about. The posters and the trailer were the most confusing as it was hard to tell that they were all connected to one movie, the Name/logo changed in most of them and there was no clear genre as some looked like a horror movie and others looked like a kid’s movie. The trailer never told the audiences were the movie was set, who the distinct characters were and what the storyline to the movie was. This in turn meant that people were left puzzled as to what to expect if they were to go and see the movie so they simply never, I know this from my own experience. To make things worse Disney never tried to repair the negative word of mouth they just ended up leaving it and accepted that the movie was the biggest failure, this shows that even the studio gave up faith on their own movie. All of these reasons contributed in the failure of John Carter.

Overall I think that Marketing and publicity have a massive contribution to a film’s success and failure. If the audience don’t know what to expect they won’t go and see the movie which is exactly what happened with John Carter.