Movie Marketing and PR: Movie Premiere Pictures—Star Trek in New Zealand
From left to right, Karl Urban, Zachary Quinto, Chris Pine and John Cho pose for a group photo at the New Zealand premiere of the Star Trek movie.
Photo: Sandra Mu/Getty Images AsiaPac
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!
Bollywood Not Hollywood Enough With Movie Merchandising
Bollywood is the most fertile and most prolific movie industry in the world. So why isn’t its merchandising sales up to par with that of Tinseltown’s whopping 16 million movie merchandising sales receipts? This lament from Bollywood movie giant Reliance BIG Pictures is typical,
“The Indian market is yet to catch up with movie merchandising. But there is great potential for the movie merchandise business to grow,” Saurabh Varma, chief marketing officer of Reliance BIG Pictures, said.
Ironically, the Bollywood film merchandising industry is marred by bootlegging! Another reason noted by The Indian Times is overall skepticism about the blockbuster potential of movies being released By some accounts, some Indian movie executives adopt wait-and-see attitude, by which time moviegoers have already moved on, in an industry inundated by releases.
Meanwhile, Bollywood movie marketing executives are doing what they can to fully leverage movie success into merchandise sales success with cross-promotions with clothing companies and retail chains.
But some can’t help but compare Hollywood’s widely-praised merchandising infrastructure to its slowly progressing Bollywood kin:
”If you look at a Hollywood movie, the revenues are split evenly between theatre (ticket) sales, home entertainment and merchandise. In India, cinema merchandise at the moment generates nothing. That is going to change with malls and multiplexes and a middle class of hundreds of millions,” said Andrew Heffernan of Eros International, the producers of “Drona”.
Gradually, but surely, they’ll get there.
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