If you build it, they will come... Sometimes

"This is SPARTA!"

Well no. This is Singer's Superman Sucks. That image up there is Sparta, or more specifically, "300," the latest film from Warner Bros. that proved marketing works - as long as you listen to what your audience wants.

Grossing 70.9 million dollars, this tasty little masterpiece just became the highest grossing film ever to open in the month of March and is third behind The Matrix Reloaded and The Passion of the Christ for R-rated films. 300's opening included an estimated $3.4 million from 62 IMAX screens, surpassing Singerman as the biggest IMAX debut ever.

As Brandon Gray from Box Office Mojo pointed out...

Warner Bros. waged a striking marketing campaign for 300, based on the picture's hyper-stylized, digitally-enhanced look, the mythology of Ancient Greece and the high stakes premise of 300 Spartans fighting a vast army in the Battle of Thermopylae, replete with passing references to freedom to recall past audience favorites like Braveheart and Gladiator.

Steve Daly of Entertainment Weekly broke it down...

A tight 60-day live-action shoot began in fall 2005, and Warner got busy positioning 300 to the obvious fanboy-heavy, Sin City-loving audience. The studio organized a Q&A panel with director Zack Snyder and writer Frank Miller last July at San Diego's Comic-Con International, where they showed preview footage so gory and spiked with nudity it couldn't be posted on the Internet, thanks to MPAA rules about trailer content.

According to Snyder, Warner had given up on trying to appeal to a female audience. Then a pair of test screenings changed all that. "We got, like, a 100 percent recommend from women under 25," says the director. "They don't even get that kind of score on a romantic comedy." Why did women respond? In Miller's original graphic novel, Leonidas' wife, Queen Gorgo, appears only in passing. In the movie, Queen Gorgo (Brit Lena Headey) is a front-and-center partner to Leonidas, calming his nerves in bed (while both are very, very naked) and getting her own new subplot about political corruption as Leonidas marches off to war.

"At first I very much disagreed with it," Miller says. "My main comment was 'This is a boys' movie. Let it be that."' But the Snyders felt strongly that Leonidas needed something specific to fight for, and that female ticket buyers needed someone to identify with. The preview scores vindicated them. "Those numbers came back, and Warner said, Wow, we need to rethink this a bit," says Snyder. Instead of spending big on one 30-second Super Bowl TV spot, Warner sprinkled previews into more female-friendly TV shows, including Grey's Anatomy, Heroes, Lost, and American Idol.

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If you missed it, the key was test screening and audience Q&A, something that is routinely done for big budget motion pictures but was reportedly undervalued by Singer during the production of Singerman. Warner Bros. pulled out all the stops but they seemingly ignored the one thing that would drive the film to boffo business: word of mouth.

It was by far, the most anticipated film opening in June. "More than any other studio, Warner Bros. has embraced the summer tentpole strategy. Spending huge sums to produce and market big titles, the studio regularly produces $200 million gambles that would make Vegas high-rollers blush." (Link) "On top of the $50 million or so it spent on its own marketing, Warner lined up promotions with Duracell, Samsung, Pepsi's Tropicana, Quaker, Aquafina, and Frito-Lay brands as well a Got Milk? campaign. Giant "S's" were projected on Chicago's Sears Tower, Niagara Falls, and other recognizable sites in about 10 major US cities. Sky divers made an "S" in parachuting formations in Boston, Dallas, and several other cities on June 27. (Link) "By the time 'Superman Returns' [opened], the 'S' logo was used to sell everything from soft drinks to motor oil. And toy manufacturers hoped that products like the Superman InflatoSuit would help to revive a sluggish licensing industry." (Link) Routh was seen on the covers of countless magazines, often more than once, and he, Bostworth and Singer made various appearances at press junkets worldwide. Warners also dumped a boatload of cash into Singer's blogs and ComicCon marketing. As Warners VP of targeted marketing, Viviana Pendrill once said, "you'd have to be living under a rock not to know about big releases like 'Superman,' 'Batman' and 'Harry Potter.'"

In terms of release, they covered all the bases. Print distribution was at blanket saturation levels. "Warner shipped out a whopping 8,500 prints of the film in North America, insuring there wouldn't be a cineplex in America that wasn't likely to have the big fella flying in." (Link) The studio "decided to wait until the World Cup ended July 9 to go outside Asia and Australia, launching in mid-July in Brazil, France, Mexico and the U.K.; it will wait until mid-August to open in Germany and Japan." (Link) Release date was carefully chosen; it was "perhaps the best date any studio has had in years: the Wednesday before a Tuesday holiday -- essentially giving "Superman Returns" a seven-day weekend." 'We're in good shape, and we have the primo date of the summer with a very long weekend ahead of us,' declared Warner Bros. distribution prexy Dan Fellman. 'Now it's up to the movie gods.'" (Link)

They should have started with the script writing gods, because an entertaining film will market itself.

"'Superman isn't caught up in the same angst that other characters like Spider-Man or Batman are,' says Gaetano Mastropasqua, Warners' corporate senior VP of global promotions and partner relations. 'Superman stands for truth, justice and a positive way of life.'"

Obviously, the suits in marketing had a handle on the big picture.

"In marketing Singer's version, Warner Bros. has paid particular attention to the comicbook's fan base, some of whom were wary of previous incarnations and expressed their opinions so on high-trafficked Internet sites. Last summer, in the midst of shooting, the studio flew Singer via private jet from the film's Australian location to San Diego, where he screened footage at the annual Comic-Con comic book convention. The response was enthusiastic.

'You are never going to satisfy everybody,' says producer Michael Uslan ("Batman," "Batman Begins"), who has started a new company called Comic Book Movies with financier M. Jonathan Roberts. 'But if you can't satisfy the main part of the fan base, you are going to have problems. These are people who are not only schooled in the characters, the mythology and the history but also in the creators over the years. They know what they like.'"

So what happened with Singerman? Was it the film itself? Why yes. Yes! We think it was.

Word of mouth is arguably, the single most important aspect of any film's success, and good WOM is directly related to how well a film reaches people. Look at the 2002 film year, for example. Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations, a Los Angeles-based company that monitors box-office results, said...

"Without question, the two movies that exemplified the year (2002) were 'Spider-Man' and 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding.' They couldn't be more different in terms of budgeting, marketing, everything. But they were both mega-blockbusters. It just says that moviegoers are open to anything. As long as it's a good movie of course."

Miscellaneous Bits: 12/1/06

Some rather interesting tidbits from around the internet about the goings-on with Singerman, the DVD, Warner Brothers, etc. that dont quite deserve their own postings, but are none the less still intriguing to read.

• Gasp! Even more shady marketing from WB to sell their DVD's? Shmuel Tennenhaus has a theory about something fishy going on over on YouTube, and it seems to have some merit. [Cost Per News]

• Apparently there are some BIG problems with some of the DVD's in the "Superman: Ultimate Collector's Edition" Box Sets. And we mean besides that DVD they shoe-horned in there with Singerman on it to try and help boost it's sales numbers. [DigitalBits]
  

• Singerman's box office apparently wasn't the only thing that we were expecting to be "bigger." Those Hi-Def DVD's show EVERYTHING, don't they? [Defamer]

• You know how Singerman having a kid in the film really sucked? Well Singer doesn't care, and he wants to give you a whole lot more of him in the sequel! Better hide your musical instruments! [Rotten Tomatoes]

• An amusing review of the Singerman HD DVD: "Bryan Singer's 'Superman Returns' is instead best described as an unapologetic cinematic love letter to Richard Donner's 1978 blockbuster 'Superman: The Movie.' Never have I seen a movie so in love with another movie -- I'm sure if Singer could have somehow CGI'd Christopher Reeve and Kate Bosworth together, and had them spawn bald children that looked like a cross between Margot Kidder and Gene Hackman, he would have done it." [High-Def Digest]

• OK, so which one of you anonymous commenters is a TV critic for The Boston Herald? [BostonHerald.com]

• This guy wants Hiro Nakamura to help him get the time back that he wasted playing the Singerman video game. [The Daily Bulletin]
  

It Doesn't Take X-Ray Vision to See Through This Marketing Ploy

In case you've been living under a rock the past few weeks, you might've missed that Singerman was released on DVD yesterday along with a slew of other DVD's that actually relate to the character we know as Superman. Like any other big budget film, ads were all over the place for that one last grab at revenue from the rather lucrative home video market.What really caught our attention was not the volume of ads for the Singerman DVD, but one particularly egregious piece that WB tried to pass off as something charitable, but came off looking about as disingenuous and sleazy as you can possibly get.

On Monday's edition of the Hollywood gossip show "Access Hollywood," sandwiched in between advertisements for the Singerman DVD aired the following piece featuring Singerman star Brandon Routh at a children's hospital.



On the surface you may be thinking, "what's wrong with that? He's visiting sick children." Which any other time, it may have been just that. But given the timing of this segment (the day before the Singerman DVD goes on sale) and the way it's presented by the AH hosts, it's rather obvious that this was solely done for the sake of selling DVD's, which if you ask us pretty damn exploitive and in very poor taste. Where's the evidence for that, you ask? Well consider this?

• C'mon let's be real, it's aired the evening before the DVD release, it's screaming marketing ploy.
  
• After the teaser for the segment aired and before the segment itself, there's a Singerman DVD commercial. (you can see these in beginning of the clip)
  
• the female host shills the "2 disc Special Edition DVD" coming out before they introduce the segment.
• When the hosts introduce the segment, there's a picture of the DVD on the 20 ft tall video screen behind them.
• Billy Bush makes sure to tell us that "they asked him to do this months ago" so we're not to think this just came up out of the blue, which might've meant it was ya know, spontaneous and somewhat sincere. Of course they asked him months ago, when they planned the rest of the DVD marketing. Duh.
  
• look at the huge team of people that are there with Routh to film the segment. If he was just coming to cheer these kids up, why did the cameras need to be there in the first place?
• the kids in the hospital are WATCHING THE DVD's!!! And Routh makes sure to point that out for us.
  

Look, and we'll make this really clear, this isn't a shot at Brandon Routh. From all accounts he seems to be a nice guy, though he's been known to have his moments. He's obviously got to go along with this sort of thing to fulfill his PR requirements, and he seemed to actually care about the kids. Who should be taken to task are the marketing people at WB who were trying to pass this "gesture" off as being something genuine on the studio's behalf.

You want to do something meaningful? Do this 6 months from now, or in the months in between the theatrical release and the video game/DVD when you're not peddling anything, and don't do it with the camera crew. Hell if you REALLY want to make a difference in those kids lives, instead of giving them posters and crappy DVD's, why don't you donate some of your precious revenue from those DVD sales to the hospital to ease the burden of paying for the care of those kids?

Last time I checked, Superman didn't seek recognition or attention for his good deeds. He just went about his business happy to know he was making the world a better place. Then again, its not like these guys seem to know much about Superman anyway so maybe I shouldn't be surprised.

Singer Blames the Marketing

In an effort to appear even more clueless and arrogant, "Lord" Singer sat down for an interview with Newsarama to talk about Singerman. From the text of the interview, it's obvious that once again, the guy just doesnt get it. I dont think the initials "BS" could be any more appropriate for this guy.

NRAMA: What happened in America?
BS: In my personal estimation I felt it was an issue with the marketing. You’ve got a dense summer and you’re resurrecting a character. There’s a different kind of approach you’ve got to take when you bring in something new. Even though he’s Superman and the character is ubiquitous, a Superman movie is a very new thing and it has to be presented in a new way. So a lot of that burden falls on the kind of presentation it is given.

He's making this MUCH too easy for us. First off, he blames the film's marketing for it's poor domestic B.O.. I dont know about you but you couldnt swing a dead cat around here without hitting an "S" symbol for about a month. Maybe it''s just the fact that movie sucked?
Secondly, he says the film needs to be presented in a "new way." Ummm this coming from the guy who gave us a retreaded version of Donner's 30 year old film? Take your own advice, hoss.

NRAMA: I was really surprised that the plot of Superman Returns mirrored the plot of Donner’s Superman movie so much.

Gee, ya think?

BS: It takes you on the same journey that the original one did but
as an adult which was quite intentional. Right down to him sinking in the water.
It is not remaking the first one but I wanted to take the audience on the same kind of journey as the first one but with a mature guy who’s going through a dilemma that wasn’t in the first one. It’s in the marketing. I don’t know how to specifically qualify but it has to be understood how to present something that hasn’t been around for a while. The last Superman, Superman IV, in its American release made 15 million dollars. It is still something new and it has to be launched on the flip side of the other movies of its ilk.

here we go.... It's the same journey but it's really new, and you have to be able to understand the difference?

NRAMA: After he gave up his powers in Superman II, Lois and
Superman slept together. I’m going to assume that that’s when he got her
pregnant…

BS: Possibly.

NRAMA: Then he gives her the kiss, which made her forget
that they even slept together. Was the pregnancy a mystery for her?

BS: I ignored that part. I just assumed she remembered sleeping with him.

Blah, blah, blah, vague sequel, I picked and chose certain aspects but other aspects that are necessary to form a cohesive plot in the viewers mind are ignored simply because our hack writing team couldn't figure out a creative way to tie it all in since Donner never covered it. Though I guess in Singer's defense, pulling excuses out of his rear is better than just stammering in front of the microphone, so perhaps he's learning?