Movie Marketing News: Jonas Brothers 3D Movie+
The Jonas Brothers 3D movie the on-the-nose titled Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience is going to be released this weekend. All pre-release observations are pointing to the fact that the film will smash the box office. This will be a first for a concert film from the past 20 years or so. But that’s to be expected: Jonas Brothers + 3D! A winning combination, indeed. [Pop and Hiss]
And wait! There’s more! (more…)
Movie Marketing Trends: Trip Contests
Canada-based Mongrel Media, the movie company behind the upcoming Michael McGowan movie starring Joshua Jackson One Week is adopting a similar strategy as the marketers for the Woody Allen Oscar winning movie Vicky Christina Barcelona: they’re sending contestants on a vacation.
Visitors who hop on the movie’s website have a chance to win a two tickets for a trip to the rockies, as well as chance to be one of 10 winners to win customized leather bags from leather goods and active wear company Roots and books and DVDs prize packs.
In orchrestrating the contest, Mongrel is partnering with AirCanada and luxury hotel chain Fairmont.
And they’re not stopping there. Mongrel Media is actually offering free screenings on a first-come-first-served basis to the movie website’s visitors. Movie fans will get a chance to sign themselves and a friend up for the free screening in major Canadian cities like Halifax, Caligary, Ottawa, Vancouver and Edmonton. And they get automatically opted in for other screenings and the company’s movie alerts newsletter.
The Rockies trip contest certainly correlates with the movie’s actual plot which centers on an about-to-be wed twenty-something whose impending marriage propels him to do some soul searching via a border-crossing road trip.
Expect to see more movie contests in this vein as more and more studios join forces with companies in cross-branding efforts such as this one.
Sony Screen Gems Faces Chris Brown Dilemma
When Sony Screen Gems announced the casting of singer and teen idol Chris Brown as part of the cast for the urban action/thriller movie Bone Deep, it was no doubt seen as a casting coup. Brown was known as a clean-cut teen idol, with a burgeoning and promising career as a singer-actor-songwriter.
Fast forward to the present: Brown admittedly has beat up his fellow teen idol girlfriend pop star Rihanna.
And now with the planned release date of Bone Deep looming, Sony is faced with somewhat of an issue, probably wondering if it should follow National Milk Mustache/got Milk? organization and Wrigley and give the now-controversial singer the boot in its ads and publicity campaign for the film.
Other options include ignoring the situation, and hope that by the January 2010 date, (an eternity away it may seem, but court cases are known to drag on for years) the scandal will have died down, or that another celebrity scandal will have eclipsed it. As sang froid as this sounds, this is Hollywood after all.
But what about pre-release marketing and PR plans, which of course begin ahead of the movie’s actual release? It’s been said that all publicity is good publicity, but the singer is clearly in a PR quagmire and while he wasn’t exactly carrying the movie, his presence in the movie was no doubt being counted on to help bring flocks of teen fans to theatres. But with Paul Walker, T.I., and Hayden Christensen, not being no-names in the least, Sony marketing and PR execs could easily conclude that they can do without Brown, and edit his scenes out of the movie. But more undesired publicity could ensue from this action.
A third option would be to conclude that the singer’s personal life has no bearings on his career. But such nonchalance would only bring about a backlash.
Another option would be to push back the release of the movie. But Screen Gems, Sony’s specialty label only has a handful of projects each year, and that would certainly affect its annual output.
According to the site Wooha, the advertising fate of the movie has already been decided and Sony Screen Gems has opted for Choice 2:
“Unofficial word has it that Chris will be “erased” from marketing material such as the movie poster, trailer and TV ads to avoid any controversy. The movie has already finished filming in Los Angeles so Chris will still be in the movie but just don’t expect to see much of him in the advertising.”
Could this leak of “unofficial word” be just Sony’s way of testing the airwaves for public reaction towards ejecting Brown out of the movie?
There hasn’t been much of a precedent for a movie marketing and PR situation such as this one—at least to that degree—and it’ll be interesting to see how Sony officially handles it.
Still Credit: Photo Agency
Movie Marketing and PR Watch: Fired Up
Fired Up placed in this weekend’s Box office Top 10, in spite of critical review headlines like “Fired Up! Cheerleading farce falls flat” from the Boston Globe and ‘Fired Up’: Not much to cheer | 1 ½ stars” from the Kansas City Star, and the more pathetic-sounding “‘Fired Up’: Give It an ‘F’” from the Washington Post.
Positioning
The movie, which apparently was inspired by the early 2000s hit Bring it On, depended heavily on its marketers’ ability to reach the teen and college crowd. 
Star Press/Interviews
Screen Gems, like a lot of studios in these recession-plagued times are putting a lot of emphasis on star interviews.
Prior to opening weekend, Eric Christian Olsen, who plays one of the popular jocks in the movie, obligingly gave an interview with the Los Angeles Times which appeared in the publication’s print section.
One of the most largely unleveraged aspects of movie publicity is (more…)
Movie Marketing Links
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Hulu’s content is being derived from TV.com and Boxee. Is that a collaboration made in aggregation heaven?
Deconstructing the Oscars.
Get a headstart on the Oscars 2010 by getting your movie in front of influential people…now.
Has any of these 10 questions about this year’s Oscars crossed your mind?
Slumdog Millionaire Tries to Overturn PR Obstacles
While Slumdog Millionaire is under the influence of a feel-good publicity frenzy States-wise, it’s been an entirely different story in India, the actual setting of the Bollywood movie.
Slammed as “poverty porn” by some, and a “cinematic terror” by others, Slumdog Millionaire is definitely being avoided by some moviegoers in India, a catastrophic turn of events when one absorbs the fact that India has a population of 1,147,995,904, all potential moviegoers.
Word of mouth in Indian circles about the movie has hit a crescendo with an actual high court hearing taking place Indian courts and brought about by offended Indians complaints over the perceived national insult implied by the movie’s title. Coincidentally the charity in the movie also has a namesake in India, another PR snafu. An all-around PR nightmare, indeed—but one that could have been simply evaded by re-issuing another title for its Indian release. But with virtually every critic predicting that the film will nab the Best Picture Oscar (and goodness knows what other honor), let’s see how long the film is a pariah in its own hometown!
Disney Feeds High School Musical 3 Mania
So of course less than six months after the Nitendo DS version has dropped, and the XBox 360 version of the High School Musical 3 interactive game, the PS2 inevitably makes its debut into stores and hopefully into the PS2 owners across the globe.
Like its predecessors, the PS2 version is under $50.
Movie Merchandising News: Disney Begins Merchandising Blitz for The Princess and The Frog
If there’s one thing that characterizes Disney, it’s advance movie publicity chutzpah.
Its latest animated movie The Princess and The Frog won’t actually be released for another 6 months, but Disney has already set up a website.
Late last year, the movie’s marketers sparked a buzz about the coming of the movie that didn’t actually bear all-positive fruitage, especially in the blogosphere where first pics of the movie and its plot got mixed reviews.
Now, the movie studio is hurriedly going into another aspect of marketing the movie: merchandising. (more…)
Filipino Moviegoers Get an Offer from Vicky Christina Barcelona Backers They Can’t Refuse
The Spanish Tourism Board knew that traveling and tourism has fallen due to the world-wide recession. Earlier this month, USA Today reported:
Six U.S. carriers — American, Delta, JetBlue, Northwest, United and US Airways — have received permission from the U.S. Department of Transportation to postpone the launch of new international routes.
It certainly did not look good for international traveling or more importantly for Spain, one of the world’s biggest tourist destinations in Europe or elsewhere.
The Spanish Tourist Board was also aware of the fact that movie sales tickets are taking a dive for the worst.
So what’s a tourism board to do, especially when it has 1 million worth of investing dollars in a Woody Allen movie known as Vicky Christina Barcelona, and its financing partner Catalan Autonomous Government provided pitched in a whopping half a million euros? Use its brain to concoct a publicity frenzy for tickets by offering a trip to the city where the Woody Allen movie Vicky Christina Barcelona is set…that’s what!
So part of the PR strategy for the movie’s release in the Phillipines is to lure the audience in with the possibility of winning a Barcelona vacation. Now, who will say no to the very idea of going to Barcelona on a vacation and live vicariously through Penélope Cruz and her off-screen boyfriend Javier Bardem?
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The Hollywood Reporter Ad That Got a Movie Marketing Company in Trouble
The Daniel Cobb-helmed Axiom Entertainment, a Michigan-based movie production and marketing company thought it would be novel to tout the state’s filmmaking incentive virtues in a creative manner.
So, they placed the ad above in a recent issue of The Hollywood Reporter displaying a Walk of Fame Star with the state of Michigan as the star in question.
The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce wasn’t amused, however, and slapped the prodco with a cease and desist letter. The Detroit Free Press reports:
Cobb, though, says the real motive was jealousy over Michigan’s lucrative film incentives, which are worth up to 42% of a film’s eligible production costs to filmmakers who shoot their films in the state.
Cobb has since turned to another Hollywood landmark, the Hollywood sign, and is planning on putting a new ad out based on the legendary sign, only it spells Michigan.
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