Two Hollywood stories this week prompted a mediation on the two things movies need to succeed—and yes, it’s only two.
Two things in the movie biz happened last week: one fantastic and one fatuous.
Let’s start with the dumb one. On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal ($) ran an article titled, “Here’s a Hollywood Twist: Streaming Success Runs Through Theaters” with the subtitle, “Just a few years ago, media executives thought theatrical releases didn’t benefit their streaming services. Now, many of them think the opposite.”
Please forgive my language, but when I read that my eyebrows skyrocketed, and I said—out loud in front of the dogs and everybody—”no fucking duh!” This is an insight along the lines of getting wet when you stand in the rain and the absence of clouds at noon yielding (gasp!) blue skies. The idea that studio execs somehow didn’t know this suggests disingenuousness at best and stupidity at worst.
Barbie wasn’t just a good movie (and it was); it also had a $150 Million marketing budget. That’s a lot of cabbage devoted to making people aware of a movie for its theatrical release, and the theatrical release is the biggest single marketing line item for every subsequent place where folks can see the movie later.
There used to be a clear sequence: Theatrical, Home video (DVD/Blu-ray), Pay-per-view and Video on Demand (VOD), Pay TV (premium cable), and then Broadcast/Cable TV. Streaming and COVID unraveled and re-raveled that sequence (who buys Blu-rays anymore?), but those things didn’t change the most basic facts about what makes people watch movies.
What are those facts?
Awareness and meta-awareness: the knowledge that other people are also aware of the movie. That’s it. This second kind of awareness is what Michael Suk-Young Chwe calls “common knowledge” in his intriguing book Rational Ritual:
Knowledge of the message is not enough; what is also required is knowledge of others’ knowledge, knowledge of others’ knowledge of others’ knowledge, and so on — that is, “common knowledge.”
Common knowledge lowers the social stakes of being the person to suggest going to see a particular movie. I haven’t seen Wicked yet, but I want to—in part because I loved the Broadway musical, in part because (after an omnipresent marketing campaign) I’d like to see if it merits all the fuss, and in part because if it stinks my family won’t blame me.
A movie doesn’t even have to be particularly good to get an audience: sometimes it helps, but sometimes there’s not enough daylight between “good” and “boring” for the average moviegoer versus the snobby cinephile. Bad movies can be great fun: I’m looking at you, Hot Tub Time Machine, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Animal House, and countless others—all gloriously bad movies.
Years ago, at one of my conferences, Peter Sealey (former CMO for both Coca-Cola and Columbia Pictures) hypothesized of the then breathlessly-awaited Peter Jackson King Kong (2005), that in the long run Universal Studios would make more money if the studio gave away its share of theatrical tickets for free. That inescapable awareness and meta-awareness would have driven up DVD and Blu-ray purchase, Pay Per Views, and given the studio more negotiating leverage with premium cable.
It was a fascinating idea, but I don’t think anything like that will ever happen because studios are risk averse around new business ideas while simultaneously embracing huge risks around what movies to make.
Movie marketing gets interesting around established intellectual properties, whether it be a beloved childhood toy (Barbie), a popular book (Oppenheimer, Dune), a sequel (all those Marvel movies), as well as remakes, TV upgrades (Fall Guy), and more. Anything with an existing fan base is more cognitively complex than something new, which can be delicious, but the downside is that if the new version of the old thing seems like a big homework assignment, then people won’t show up. (How many folks started with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1?)
One key difference between movie fans and sports fans is that with movie fans there is only an “us” and not a “them.” Sports fans have rivals, somebody to jeer as well as somebody to cheer. It’s a lower-stakes version of political polarization. Moviegoers who aren’t fans of an existing product just don’t go.
Given all that digital ink I just dedicated to the stupid movie marketing story, you might be wondering what the fantastic one is.
It’s Superman.
My son William was born (and possibly bred) to be my superhero buddy. His first theatrical experience of a big Hollywood movie was The Avengers. He was four, and it’s still one of our favorites. He’s now 19, way taller than me and with a voice an octave deeper than mine. On Thursday he came bounding into my home office and boomingly demanded, with justice, that I drop everything to watch the just-released trailer for the new Superman movie coming next summer. “This is where we’re going to be on July 11th!” he said, vibrating with excitement.
I watched the trailer and agreed. It’s magnificent. No spoilers from me: just watch it. The next day, I watched a more than 30 minute breakdown of all the references and Easter eggs in the trailer. The trailer is that good.
Director James Gunn, who now leads movies and TV for DC, has been teaching a master class in movie marketing… teasing his 1.7 million followers on Twitter (I still don’t like calling it X) for months with stills, images, videos, and hints. Don’t get me wrong, there has been an immense effort from a hard-working PR team too, but Gunn has taken shrewd advantage of his direct relationship with fans.
Superman is iconic. Most people know the Moses-like origin story, the small town childhood, the secret identity, the girlfriend/wife, the best pal, and the bald arch nemesis. Gunn has not only leveraged all that existing awareness lying around, but he has also reframed what a Superman movie will look like starting with the first image—just go watch the darn trailer already!
Now, we wait.
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* Image Prompt: I tried Adobe Firefly, but it can’t spell, so I switched to ChatGPT. My simple prompt was “an image of a crowded movie theater from the back of the darkened theater… on the screen are the words, “Next Stop, Streaming!” ChatGPT then revised the prompt to “A wide-angle view from the back of a darkened, packed movie theater. The silhouettes of the seated audience fill the foreground. Up on the brightly lit theater screen, in bold letters, are the words ‘Next Stop, Streaming!’ The overall atmosphere is cinematic, with dim overhead lights and the soft glow of the screen illuminating the crowd. High resolution, photorealistic style, detailed lighting, dynamic composition.”
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