Marketing (Avatar/John Carter)

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

Studios use a variety of different ways to appeal to audiences and to control their perception of the film and ultimately try and get them to pay and see the film. They will use things such as posters, trailers and digital technologies (websites, social media etc.) in order to attract the audience and keep them thinking about the film.

Marketing is an integral part of the Hollywood machine and helps build strong relationships between customers. Marketing will be initially aimed at a target audience and then they make products and influential adverts to tend to this audience. Studios see it to be an important factor for a films success, so much that some studios spend as much on marketing as they do on the actual production of the film. An example of this would be James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’. This films negative cost was around $237,000,000 and the marketing cost was around $223,000,000. These figures show how important marketing is for a film as big as this. There was no surprise to me that avatar would succeed at the box office regardless of how predictable and simple the story was because avatar was everywhere. Billboards, adverts, toys, clothes, posters even on popular Internet sites. They took advantage of horizontal integration and made the choice to have Avatar everywhere to get people talking about the film and to subconsciously stay in their minds. This marketing strategy proved to be extremely successful as its box office revenue was an amazing $2,782,275,172.

Another example that shows just how important marketing is is John Carter. This films negative cost was around $250,000,000 and they spend considerably less money on marketing, as ‘Avatar’ and it was around $100,000,000. For me as part of the audience I did not see this film anywhere, not even a trailer until the film had actually came out. John Carter also had 4 posters that were to be put lightly contradicting. By just looking at each of them and having no information about the film before hand it is hard to determine what genre this film depicts. The posters had to be simple and have some sort of insight to what the film is about, like Avatar, which had several posters that contained the same font heading, focused around the colour blue and didn’t fail to mention its star director in every one.

 They didn’t control the audience’s perception of the film because they lacked consistency and people didn’t know what to expect. I think this is a really big problem for a studio because the audience will not want to risk their money to go and see a film when they don’t know what its about. Disney of all companies would have been the last studio I would have thought of that didn’t take advantage of the horizontally integrated business that it owned. Not even toys that could be sold in their Disney shop that are everywhere for people to see. In my opinion the main reason for John Carters failure was because of the poor/lazy marketing strategy.

With both budgets being around the same I think it is valid to say that its success came down to the marketing of the film which Avatar outweighed John Carters by a long way. So in conclusion I think for a films success marketing is one of if not the most important factor for making money at the box office whether the film is a high budget sci-fi or a low budget comedy.