Movie Marketing and PR News
McDonald’s and Fox are movie promoting buddies, having signed a deal that would allow the fast food chain to market characters from its upcoming animated (in addition to the recent Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian) film Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. [Commercial Exploitation]
Get the lowdown on what it was like to attend VoceNation. [Movie Marketing Madness]
Warner Bros has high hopes for The Hangover. [Risky Business Blog]
Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson spotted getting rather comfortable with one another, while we’re getting closer and closer to the much-looked-forward to Twilight sequel. Plus planted stories and unsourced press releases such as this one. A publicity stunt, or a Tom Cruise-Kathy Holmes-like coupling? [LA Examiner]
Is movie piracy wrong? Well is it? Two high school-attending members of the latter rungs of Generation Y debate on the matter. [Silver Chips]
Why the General Motors bankruptcy is bad news, very very bad news for the television industry. [Deadline Hollywood]
The Smithsonian Museum may house artifacts, but its marketing team is definitely with the times.
The renowned museum planned some promotions around the movie A Night at the Museum 2 to draw in visitors it probably wouldn’t have gotten had it not been a school field trip: the widely-targeted but mostly elusive younguns. [Kansas City Star]
If your mail is taking longer than usual to get there, Netflix and Blockbuster just might be the ones to blame. They may possibly be getting some favoritism mailing speed from the postal office. [Hacking Netflix]
Terminator: Salvation Goes All out for Marketing and PR Campaign
So that Christian Bale rant a few months ago, gave Terminator: Salvation some early buzz.
Now the real marketing machine is igniting, and it’s eminating a lot of smoke.
Contests
First there’s the advance screening contest (the courier-journal.com / Terminator Salvation Movie Contest) that’s being administered by some newspapers across the nation, mainly the Louisville, KY Courier Journal, which is giving out two passes to a fortunate reader to see the movie prior to its May 21st official release.
Star Inteviews
Sam Worthington, the new hunk in town gave an interview to ComingSoon.net prior to the movie’s release, and does a little promotion for the James Cameron movie Avatar as well. Nothing like killing two birds with one stone.
Movie Web marketing
No word on how long the movie’s custom made website has been active, but its flash-laden welcome screen features a battle scene from the movie, with Christian Bale’s character machine-gunning the T-600 Terminator.
The movie’s website color of choice is red and black, and after pressing OPEN MENU, it seems like it takes forever in Internet loading time for the actual menu to emerge.
The said menu includes 15 submenus, including video and gallery, a link to Skynet Research (huh?), and one for tickets and showtimes (that leads to a screen with a Activate Screen).
Movie Marketing Partnerships
Warner Brothers has apparently teamed up with a total of eight partners for the movie’s promotion, including Slim Jim, Visa, Pizza Hut, MyVu, XBox 360, and Oakley. Up to May 31st, those who visit 7-Eleven can get a collectible cup and straw featuring the machines from Terminator Salvation and can even try new Slurpee flavor from the convenience chain, Apocalyptic Ice. So after one has sampled it, will the Earth fall over?
Contests
With its partnership with Jeep, Warner Brothers is giving movie fans an opportunity to participate in its Jeep Summer Thrill in which the Grand Prize winner can win Grand 2009 Jeep® Wrangler Rubicon as well as a Family 4-Pack of tickets to aU.S. Six Flags® park. About fifty people have a chance of receiving a Family 4-Pack of tickets to any U.S. Six Flags park.
Up to 10 days after its initial release into theaters, Terminator: Salvation fans can also vye for a chance to instantly win an actual T-600 life-size Terminator, branded Xbox consoles and assorted prizes.
A lot of the cross-promotions seem to be male-slanted. Doesn’t the Terminator franchise have some female fans too?
Movie Marketing Watch: Obsessed
Movie Tagline
The movie’s tag line All’s Fair When Love is War effectively plays on the oft-quoted Shakespearan maxim for the purpose of the movie, which is a thriller about a deranged woman obsessed with a married lawyer at a firm starring singer Beyoncé, Ali Larter, and Idris Elba.
Movie’s Web Marketing
Wanting to capitalize on the fact that many of Beyonce’s fans are twenty-somethings and teens, Sony set up a MySpace page for the movie that features a forum where movie fans can start discussion threads about the movie, Beyonce herself.
MySpace Features
There’s also a standard MySpace comments section. The forum doesn’t have too much activity, and most of the posts were actually initiated by Sony International not fans (oh, the trouble with forums). Days before the movie’s release, the page had already garnered 3736 friends.
The Facebook page, where presumably, there’s less phantom identities, the friend count was a little higher with 4,326 fans. The movie’s Facebook wall is put to good use, with periodic annnouncements placed, beginning in late March about the movie, and about the pop star’s musical activities.
Marketing Partnerships
Sony Pictures, the studio behind the movie, chose to team up with Yahoo’s OMG, and create a Celebrity Obsession page, linked in from the Obsessed movie Facebook page, featuring a slideshow of celebrities and their obsessions.
Glam.com, one of the most highly women-perused web portals on the Internet, also has a banner on the Facebook page, which leads to a 15-question quiz for a fan to determine whether she (or he) is obsessed with Beyoncé.
Viral Video
Another site set up by Sony called Get Obsessed with Ali (http://www.getobsessedwithali.com/) gives fans the chance to become the subject of Lisa Sheridan’s (her character in the movie) displaced affections. From there movie fans can send their own viral Ali Larter video to a friend.
Will the Million-Dollar Marketing and PR Campaign for Watchmen Pay off this Weekend?
If the intensity of the marketing campaign for Warner Brothers’ Watchmen is any indication, then the studio is surely pouring all its publicity might into the superhero action film.
The question remains though: will it pay off? Reuters reporting that the studio has high hopes for the film, and expects it to yield a respectable $60 million over the weekend.
In terms of critical reviews, the movie has already gotten opening weekend blessings from the BBC, which labels the movie as untypical of superhero movies and lauds it as “very grown up”.
Joshua Rich of Entertainment Weekly predicts that the movie will inevitably sit at the number one spot, partly thanks to its status as one of the most long-awaited and formerly extremely elusive transition to the big screen, while pointing out that its 180 minute or so running time might actually do it a disservice. But if Steven Soderbergh’s Che biopic Guerilla conquered the world at four hours, surely Watchmen can too. It is about superheroes, after all.
MTV the ultimate hoarder of males 18-34 wrote a glittered review of the action film, written by the most serious journalist on its pop culture pundit roster, Mr. Kurt Loder. Weeks before the movie was featured on the network’s “Spoilers” episode, which of course was another marketing coup.
But by far, most agree that the biggest boost that the movie will get will no doubt from the zillion IMAX screens on which the movie will be shown.
Developing…
Movie Industry Stimulus Bill Tax Break Gets Thumbs Down
After starting the year off with a big bang, the Hollywood community is coming down from its early January highs. The admendment to the Stimilus Bill that would provide tax breaks for the movie industry received was rejected. CNBC reports
“Tuesday the House dropped a provision from the stimulus bill that would allow film projects in 2009 to qualify for 50 percent write-offs, worth some $250 million in tax breaks.”
The approval of the admendment would have meant big things for the major studios, many of which have posted big losses in the last couple of quarters, but alas.