With multiple blockbusters failing to meet box-office projections, could the problem not be the films themselves, but the movie marketing machine behind them?
In April 2022, the marketing campaign for Robert Eggers’ The Northman went a bit viral. For most studios, this kind of attention would be great news. For Focus Features, frankly, it wasn’t. The film’s posters had just gone up on the New York Subway, complete with the film’s tagline, names of its stars and a big picture of Alexander Skarsgård’s muscled chest. The only thing missing was the film’s title. There’s always the chance, of course, that the faux pas was actually a deliberate (and very cunning) marketing ploy. If it was, it didn’t work. Though Focus insist The Northman actually made its money back and then some when on-demand rentals were taken into account, at the box office the Viking saga fell just shy of its $70-90 million budget.
But no movie displays the failure of the movie marketing machine like Warner Bros’ The Flash.
“They are spending huge,” a rival executive told The Hollywood Reporter in the weeks before The Flash’s premiere. Between the superhero epic and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, Warner Bros. were said to have spent up to $14 million on marketing for the NBA playoffs alone.
There’s a reason Warners were spending big. In Ezra Miller, the film they’d been banking on for years to save a messy and increasingly unprofitable cinematic universe found itself with a controversial star it was entirely impossible to shift. As a result, Miller remained a no-show in the film’s marketing push, despite – in The Flash’s multiversal, timey-wimey way – playing both the film’s leads.
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Thankfully, the Hollywood writers’ strike meant there weren’t any late-night shows for Miller to be conspicuously absent from. The bulk of press junket interviews fell on director and producer duo Andy and Barbara Muschietti, and co-star Michael Keaton. Meanwhile, Warner Bros were pulling favours from every big-wig in the industry, sending screeners to grab pull-quotes from everyone from Stephen King to Tom Cruise. At least the studio were selling a product they believed in. Troubled Warners CEO David Zaslav and newly crowned co-head of DC Studios James Gunn both told the press they felt The Flash ranked among the greatest superhero movies ever made. But others at Warners had their concerns. “It can’t be the studio telling you it’s good; your friends have to tell you it’s good,” one insider told The Hollywood Reporter. Unfortunately for the Warner Bros. accounts department, most peoples’ friends kept their lips sealed. Debuting to middling reviews and a below-expectations opening weekend, the film’s second week hold fell off a cliff. A quote attributed to a Twitter user singing the film’s praises in hyperbolic fashion now glared from every The Flash poster like a sick joke.
The Flash’s marketing campaign was an unmitigated disaster. But when conventional marketing now costs so much, including money for all platforms of social media, online trailers, cinema trailers, posters, billboards and online ads, a failure to turn a profit just becomes out of the question.
Of course, no small part of Dial of Destiny and The Flash’s failures might come down to the quality of the films themselves. Neither has been embraced enthusiastically by either critics or audiences. But when conventional wisdom says film marketing costs match up to 50% of a picture’s budget, it’s clear something here is going badly wrong.
Conversely, the most successful marketing campaigns since the pandemic have been for films erring on the cheaper, and more horrific, side. 2022’s Smile paid actors to grin rictusly at kiss cams in sports stadiums. M3GAN went viral almost exclusively from one clip of its robot-star dancing in a corridor. Cocaine Bear, in fairness, did a lot of heavy-lifting with its title. But all three made their budgets back multiple times over. And, crucially, they didn’t have to spend millions of dollars to do it.
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So why do studios continue to throw buckets of cash at methods which don’t seem to be working? If critical reaction sunk potential crowd-pleasers like Indiana Jones and The Flash, why have critical darlings like The Fabelmans, Babylon or The Northman also been allowed to sink without much promotional investment? As social media platforms continue to charge prettier and prettier pennies for advertising and the public’s purse-strings tighten, conventional marketing costs only look like they’re going to increase. But if they’re just not working anymore, perhaps it’s time for something in the industry to change.
In April 2022, the marketing campaign for Robert Eggers’ The Northman went a bit viral. For most studios, this kind of attention would be great news. For Focus Features, frankly, it wasn’t. The film’s posters had just gone up on the New York Subway, complete with the film’s tagline, names of its stars and a big picture of Alexander Skarsgård’s muscled chest. The only thing missing was the film’s title. There’s always the chance, of course, that the faux pas was actually a deliberate (and very cunning) marketing ploy. If it was, it didn’t work. Though Focus insist The Northman actually made its money back and then some when on-demand rentals were taken into account, at the box office the Viking saga fell just shy of its $70-90 million budget.
In fairness to the marketing team, the cogs on this particular push had gotten a little rusty. Where even a new trailer for a movie in 2019 meant assembling the A-list cast for a fan event, endless press junkets and slapping posters on every flat surface a studio could find, the pandemic saw the behemoths of movie marketing grind to a halt. TV and online marketing continued at a more cautious pace, but with no-one seeing regular trailers at the cinema and only a handful of people taking their daily exercise past a poster frame or billboard, physical marketing all but completely dried up. That did lead to a few surreal moments; buses were still begging audiences to catch Onward in the cinema a full year after release, like faded pre-apocalyptic relics. “There’s not the chance to wear out your welcome,” Universal’s chief marketing officer optimistically told Variety. As Covid-19 continues to fade out of public consciousness, though, the marketing status quo is enthusiastically re-establishing itself. London’s Leicester Square was recently turned into a rough approximation of Tangier for the Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny premiere. A new exhibition promises an immersive look at Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City. Journalists the world over keep getting sent cake. Like The Northman, though, it looks like most of these splashy publicity campaigns aren’t working. Dial of Destiny opened to a “catastrophic” $130 million globally despite unparalleled brand recognition and a bankable leading man in Harrison Ford. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has the unenviable title of the only MCU movie to lose money on its theatrical run.“So you got that poster ready for The Northman?” “Yeah, chief! We already printed it and put it in subways all over New York!” “You made sure the title was on it, right?” “Uhhhhhhhh….” pic.twitter.com/stFRzeR2Sw
— Isaac Butler (he/him) (@parabasis) April 4, 2022
Credit: Walt Pictures Studios Motion Pictures
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Thankfully, the Hollywood writers’ strike meant there weren’t any late-night shows for Miller to be conspicuously absent from. The bulk of press junket interviews fell on director and producer duo Andy and Barbara Muschietti, and co-star Michael Keaton. Meanwhile, Warner Bros were pulling favours from every big-wig in the industry, sending screeners to grab pull-quotes from everyone from Stephen King to Tom Cruise. At least the studio were selling a product they believed in. Troubled Warners CEO David Zaslav and newly crowned co-head of DC Studios James Gunn both told the press they felt The Flash ranked among the greatest superhero movies ever made. But others at Warners had their concerns. “It can’t be the studio telling you it’s good; your friends have to tell you it’s good,” one insider told The Hollywood Reporter. Unfortunately for the Warner Bros. accounts department, most peoples’ friends kept their lips sealed. Debuting to middling reviews and a below-expectations opening weekend, the film’s second week hold fell off a cliff. A quote attributed to a Twitter user singing the film’s praises in hyperbolic fashion now glared from every The Flash poster like a sick joke.
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – JUNE 12: Ezra Miller attends the Los Angeles premiere of Warner Bros. “The Flash” at Ovation Hollywood on June 12, 2023 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images)
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So why do studios continue to throw buckets of cash at methods which don’t seem to be working? If critical reaction sunk potential crowd-pleasers like Indiana Jones and The Flash, why have critical darlings like The Fabelmans, Babylon or The Northman also been allowed to sink without much promotional investment? As social media platforms continue to charge prettier and prettier pennies for advertising and the public’s purse-strings tighten, conventional marketing costs only look like they’re going to increase. But if they’re just not working anymore, perhaps it’s time for something in the industry to change.
