"Hollywood and the Marketeers"

At the Sundance film festival, Kevin Smith made a speech following the screening of his new film Red State. He was not in any way discussing the film itself in any matter. What, in fact, was his topic of discussion was his disgust at the Hollywood marketing machine. Whilst announcing that this would be his penultimate movie (and after this would be focusing on the careers of young filmmakers), he went on to criticise the large budgets spent on promoting films. He stated that his new movie cost $4m to produce and that the distributors would buy it for around the same cost, but then spend a further $20m to promote it. This, Smith states, sickens him.

I totally agree with him. The average Hollywood movie these days cost around $70.8m to produce, and then a further $35.9m are spent on marketing. This is a trend that really began in the 1970s, on films such as Jaws, where they had both saturation marketing (using print media, television advertising etc), then saturation booking, where the film is shown on as many screens in as many cinemas across the country for the first weekend. The saturation of this, is Hollywood marketeers idea that if the film isn't very good, they may well at least be able to break even in the first weekend before word of mouth kicks in and the movie dies the second weekend.

At this moment in time, Hollywood is using 3D to promote many of their movies, a gimmick used in other decades to try and get audiences back in the cinema. In the 1950s this was used as a defence against television. In the 1980s it was video. Today it is because of illegal torrent sites. So Hollywood are using 3D in marketing a film on this basis alone. In fact this year, there are at least 30 films to be released that are in 3D.

The trend of researching what the audiences 'want' to see began in the 1980s really when companies like Coca-Cola took over studios marketing departments. Tests were devised to find out how to target the demographic that is the films target, so that whomever the companies idea of who may like this movie, the marketing will be placed in the media most associated with that target demographic. However, now with budgets so high on production of the major blockbuster releases, of lets say the summer months, that marketing is targeted at anyone and is placed in all media, which is essentially wasting money in dead areas. An example of incredibly high cost of advertising was for the release of The Simpsons Movie, where in the US, 7-Eleven convenience stores were transformed into Springfield's Kwick-E Mart's nationwide.

It is sickening that movies promotion costs are so high. So high in fact that they could possibly feed the third worlds population 5 times over. But that's a side of politics I'm not sure I want to get into.

Marc Ivamy