Marketing Cloverfield - Story Beyond the Screen
Cloverfield seems to have done quite well at the box office over the weekend, doing $46 million in the US, which is comparable to Peter Jackson's King Kong opening, reports the LA Times. I find it interesting in these sort of articles how the explanations for the success of films like this, are pretty meagre. Cloverfield only cost $25 million to make, so its already broken even in that respect, although apparently the marketing campaign cost more then production. The reasoning given by the Times for its success... it was pet project of the a studio exec, and the good 'buzz' generated on the Internet was reinforced by good reviews. Two important questions are not really answered. What made it a good movie? What made people think it would be a good movie before they saw it? Apparently its a good movie because people went to see it, and people went to see it because its a good move. And people say Hollywood isn't insightful!
The other reasons given for it's success seem to be 'oh, it had a big monster', which often make money and 'its like The Blair Witch', which made lots of money. That must be it. Oh, and all that money spent on marketing. You'd think given the amount of money spent on movies in Hollywood, the depth of analysis would extend beyond, oh you know, the amount of money spent.
I thought it was a pretty safe bet that Cloverfield would do well. That's not to say I thought it would be a good film, it was disappointingly flawed as I said in my review, but I suspected it would do well. I know why I thought that, and it has to do with its similarity to The Blair Witch, but not simply because it generated some magical 'Internet buzz'. I remember when The Blair Witch came out no one seemed to really get why it was successful. "It's because it has ghosts, no witches!" "No, its because the camera was really, really shaky" "Na-uh, it's because it had no-name actors in it." "Derr, it was because it had Internet buzz!" After a few lame attempts to recreate the success based on lame theories, people seemed to give up trying to explain it. It became an anomaly. None of the reasons come up with looked deep enough. What made The Blair Witch good, and I thought it was really good, was that it didn't limit the telling of its story to the hour and bit spent in the cinema.
The problem with my generation is that our attention span is too short, apparently. That may be true, but that doesn't mean we want to see an epic squashed into an ad break. That's why the Snickers ad was funny. We still like a good story, and story is all the more enjoyable if told over a long time. The Lord of the Rings weren't just long cinematically, that's not what made them hits, their success came because they continued a story that people have been experiencing for 50 years. Both The Blair Witch and Cloverfield start telling the story before you watch the film. They don't just recap info from the film beforehand, in fact they cut out all the tedious exposition and explanation from the films all together because they've already given it to you on the net. That is incidently why they are both quite short films, and why that doesn't particularly matter.
Franchises are popular not simply because they offer the audience something familiar, but because they end up telling a story over a long period time. They build up back-story, in between story and incidental information, much of which is never explicitly covered in the films. Maybe implied at best. This is true for the Star Wars films, the Harry Potter films, the Matrix films, the Bond films, etc all of which have a plethora of books, video games, toys, animations, tv shows even fan fiction, that contribute to the larger story, or in geek terms, to the fictional 'universes'.
Hollywood certainly sees the value in these things, both for marketing, and for their own profitability, but the over-riding idea is that they are peripheral to the film. They are the rear-spoilers, nice if you can sell them too, but you still have to sell the car first. (Oh god, I'm using automotive analogies, someone shoot me) One day, hopefully, Hollywood will realise that its about telling a story, and it doesn't matter what medium you do it in. Instead of thinking of marketing as a means to trick, cajole and bombast audiences into watching their films, they should think of all the marketing as an integrated part of the story telling. They will stop wasting money trying to clamp down on people stealing their stories, and start giving away original parts of their stories for free, as tv, or on the net, or in games. Then people would be falling over themselves paying to be let into the cinema, or buying the disc to see what happens next.
It's getting late, and this post has got a bit rambly... there are too many ideas in here that I want to expand on, to write more about, but I'll wait until another day...
The other reasons given for it's success seem to be 'oh, it had a big monster', which often make money and 'its like The Blair Witch', which made lots of money. That must be it. Oh, and all that money spent on marketing. You'd think given the amount of money spent on movies in Hollywood, the depth of analysis would extend beyond, oh you know, the amount of money spent.
I thought it was a pretty safe bet that Cloverfield would do well. That's not to say I thought it would be a good film, it was disappointingly flawed as I said in my review, but I suspected it would do well. I know why I thought that, and it has to do with its similarity to The Blair Witch, but not simply because it generated some magical 'Internet buzz'. I remember when The Blair Witch came out no one seemed to really get why it was successful. "It's because it has ghosts, no witches!" "No, its because the camera was really, really shaky" "Na-uh, it's because it had no-name actors in it." "Derr, it was because it had Internet buzz!" After a few lame attempts to recreate the success based on lame theories, people seemed to give up trying to explain it. It became an anomaly. None of the reasons come up with looked deep enough. What made The Blair Witch good, and I thought it was really good, was that it didn't limit the telling of its story to the hour and bit spent in the cinema.
The problem with my generation is that our attention span is too short, apparently. That may be true, but that doesn't mean we want to see an epic squashed into an ad break. That's why the Snickers ad was funny. We still like a good story, and story is all the more enjoyable if told over a long time. The Lord of the Rings weren't just long cinematically, that's not what made them hits, their success came because they continued a story that people have been experiencing for 50 years. Both The Blair Witch and Cloverfield start telling the story before you watch the film. They don't just recap info from the film beforehand, in fact they cut out all the tedious exposition and explanation from the films all together because they've already given it to you on the net. That is incidently why they are both quite short films, and why that doesn't particularly matter.
Franchises are popular not simply because they offer the audience something familiar, but because they end up telling a story over a long period time. They build up back-story, in between story and incidental information, much of which is never explicitly covered in the films. Maybe implied at best. This is true for the Star Wars films, the Harry Potter films, the Matrix films, the Bond films, etc all of which have a plethora of books, video games, toys, animations, tv shows even fan fiction, that contribute to the larger story, or in geek terms, to the fictional 'universes'.
Hollywood certainly sees the value in these things, both for marketing, and for their own profitability, but the over-riding idea is that they are peripheral to the film. They are the rear-spoilers, nice if you can sell them too, but you still have to sell the car first. (Oh god, I'm using automotive analogies, someone shoot me) One day, hopefully, Hollywood will realise that its about telling a story, and it doesn't matter what medium you do it in. Instead of thinking of marketing as a means to trick, cajole and bombast audiences into watching their films, they should think of all the marketing as an integrated part of the story telling. They will stop wasting money trying to clamp down on people stealing their stories, and start giving away original parts of their stories for free, as tv, or on the net, or in games. Then people would be falling over themselves paying to be let into the cinema, or buying the disc to see what happens next.
It's getting late, and this post has got a bit rambly... there are too many ideas in here that I want to expand on, to write more about, but I'll wait until another day...
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