This! Is! Marketing! Five movies powered (for better or worse) by the Internet
This! Is! Marketing!
Five movies powered (for better or worse) by the Internet.
She is a fickle mistress, this Internet, no? Sometimes she smiles upon the makers of the films with her pearly whites, and other times... well, she uses another part of her body to do things to movies that do not smell so good, eh? In recent years, filmmakers big and small have been trying to take advantage of the inscrutable powers of the Internet to promote their movies. What they have mostly found is that the Net does no favors, and hype will only get you so far. In other words big buzz does not necessarily get you big dollars.
Even so, here are our favorite five that owe most of their success (such as it is) to Internet Buzz. For your pleasure, we’ve ranked them by overall quality (as determined by a panel of experts) and given them a letter grade for the quality of their hype.
Quality rankings are self-explanatory, and the Flixster Hype Grade scale™ is below.
The Flixster Hype Grade scale™:
- F
- Your studio buys so-called "real" advertising not requiring a high-speed connection. Stars do the talk show rounds, make quips about the Nixon administration. We have no need for these dinosaurs.
- D
- Enough hype that traditional media (like the, watchacallit?, the "newspapers") feel the need to write stories about how much attention your movie is getting from users of the Interwebs. Everything feels a little forced.
- C
- Fanboy blogs are all over you. Your movie is roughly as popular as cheese.
- B
- Stories about the stories about your movie are getting blogged, and/or mentioned on the nightly news. Nobody seems to care about the actual content of your film.
- A
- Your grandmother, who died in the eighties, has heard about your film.
Grindhouse
If you needed ironclad proof that Internet buzz is
not a reliable indicator of quality, this is it. Focused on generating
a huge online buzz, Grindhouse's
makers somehow forgot about the movie and managed to make a homicidal-maniac-on-wheels/zombie
double feature into what might be the most tedious film since The
English Patient. Tarantino
and Rodriquez
bet heavily on the buzz—and lost.
- Quality: You put your name on that? You’re braver than you look.
- Hype Grade: D
Serenity
When Joss
Whedon's SciFi series Firefly was cut short after less than one
season, the fan outcry was huge. It wasn't enough to get the series
back on the air, but after plans for a movie based on the series were
announced, Serenity
was at the top of Yahoo’s buzzlog for five months straight (prompting
discussion of an online series tentatively titled "Geeks Gone Wild"—which
was immediately deep-sixed when pasty Whedon fanboys started posting
topless photos of themselves). Fans and critics agreed, however, that
Serenity was smart, tightly written, and well acted, which probably
explains why it didn’t do so well at the box office.
- Quality: Whedelicious!
- Hype Grade: C
300
In a marketplace that has long been dominated by television
advertising, 300
is notable in that 68 percent of viewers polled on opening night said
they came to the movie because they had heard about it on the Internet.
Take that, oh, Television Advertising Overlords! One of our more successful
hype stories, 300 opened at a respectable $70 million and went
on to a very tidy $210 million domestic gross. A large portion of 300’s
success was also ascribed to the popularity of Brokeback
Mountain, which paved the way for films with predominantly
gay characters portrayed in a positive light.
- Quality: This! Is! Historically inaccurate but hugely entertaining!
- Hype Grade: B+
The Blair Witch Project
Judging by box office alone, this is easily the most
successfully hyped movie of all time. (Estimated cost: $60k; domestic
box office: $140 million. You do the math. Seriously, 'cause we're terrible
with numbers.) The only reason it doesn’t grade higher is because its
success was only partially due to online buzz. Before the days of the
blog, the producers of Blair
Witch used a deadpan documentary approach on their extensive
website to
inspire a word-of-mouth (and email) campaign unlike anything seen before.
Solely responsible for the comeback of Maryland's indigenous Stick People,
long thought to be extinct, Blair Witch is still one of the
best examples of a horror movies that rely on the power of imagination.
- Quality: Nearly lived up to its own hype.
- Hype Grade: A
Snakes on a Plane
The genius behind the Internet buzz surrounding SOAP
is the fact that once the online community began to ridicule the title/premise/plot
of this movie, New Line Cinema did absolutely nothing to discourage
it. And what might have been just a depraved, cheeseball crapfest of
a movie that no one ever heard of became a depraved, cheeseball crapfest
of a movie that everyone wanted to be part of. Despite the huge buzz,
and predictions of a $30-$40 million opening, SOAP only did
a modest $13 million on its first weekend. One reviewer said that this
was simultaneously the best and worst movie he’d ever seen.
- Quality: Mother@#*$ing Awful/ Mother@#*$ing Awesome (depending on how you look at it).
- Hype Grade: A+
