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Not sure if this has been covered yet, I looked on the forum but didn't a thread on it so...


Having recently seen a few comments on movie marketing, particularly for John Carter having poor marketing, I thought about what is best for film trailers.

Is it really best to have adverts that show absolutely every decent part of the movie within a 30 second slot, or, have an advert like John Carter has, that shows a few bits and pieces, a couple of laughs, a look at the scenery and a quick action shot?

I think it's funny when some films go for shorter, cheaper marketing (for instance John Carter) and get hammered by critics and fans for not showing the entire film in one advert.
Personally, I prefer the mystery of having the shorter trailer (aka: Teaser Trailers). It makes the audience want to see the film.

What are thou thoughts??



The criticism of John Carter seems to be less about not showing much (after all, Nolan's trailers usually leave all the big wow moments unshown), or that it was cheap (they had a Super Bowl spot, after all), and more about not giving people a decent taste of the action. By most insider-y accounts, Andrew Stanton (the director, who had some control over the ad campaign) made the mistake of thinking John Carter was an established, well-known property. This kind of makes sense, since to people who like sci-fi he's a big deal. Most other people don't know how influential his story was on others, though, so seeing it now makes it look derivative.

I think this explanation fits pretty well, too, because some of the earlier marketing materials sort of have that feel. We see it a lot with established characters; when we first saw a trailer for Indy 4, it was opaque for a bit, before cutting to a show of his shadow putting on the iconic hat. There was more, but that kind of move wouldn't have made sense if they were introducing someone. You can do the same thing when you reboot a superhero franchise: people know the kind of thing they're going to get.

I think shorter, less revealing marketing works all the time. This film was just a really poor candidate for it.



Movie Forums Insomniac
Films like Chronicle for instance, had barely no marketing at all whatsoever. Except for the usual posters and internet viral activity, there was not much seen which was a plus. That to me is what makes a film more of a surprise. Especially when Chronicle turned out to be such a marvel.



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Haven't seen John Carter, nor plan to - not my kind of film. As for the marketing, in my opinion, a teaser trailer is the best way to go.



28 days...6 hours...42 minutes...12 seconds
It's all about knowing what product you have and who to market to. John Carter was handled poorly because they didn't really know how to market the film. Disney was scared about the whole Mars aspect because Mars Needs Moms tanked, so they changed the title, changed their marketing too. John Carter had no hook. If you want to go for a a mysterious ad campaign you need a hook, Cloverfield did this with the head of the Statue of Liberty flying down the streets and no title.

If someone were to watch the ad for John Carter, they'd be confused as to what it's about, see that it's a big action flick that is based on something they've never heard of and think that since they don't know the source material, not bother. It didn't help that it got so-so reviews.

Just my take.
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I don't think we should worry about Disney as they are about to release the Avengers in just a month and later in the summer Pixar's Brave so I think they will make up for their loses. But still with a 100 mill budget for marketing you gotta make some money on top of that.
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