Umm...well there's always The Shawshank Redemption. Huge studio film, critically acclaimed, adored by fans and...tanked at the box office. A good movie (script, casting, direction, technical) might do well with an appropriate marketing plan. A bad movie can break box office records with a lots of hype and a huge marketing push despite negative word of mouth (Hi there, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). Quality aside, a major factor in the movie not performing at the box office is highlighted in the first bolded sentence. I'm guessing They (whoever made the final marketing decision) thought that a fan that had as many posts of his messageboard as you AND was invested enough to attend a premiere would be talking about the movie all the time. That there wouldn't ever be statement from his core fan base like "none of my friends knew/heard about the movie." And I'm not picking on you; a dozen posters with hundreds of posts and years on the message board said the same thing "When is the big marketing push? None of my friends know about it!" The WOM/grassroots/F Hollywood marketing plan couldn't work if y'all didn't even know you were the plan. And I'm not blaming the fans. I don't recall a direct call of action and, if I remember correctly, the marketing plan was hyped but sorta kept secret, definitely not outlined. So the fans didn't really know their role or what was expected of them. One of the biggest mistakes one can make in selling something is not telling the consumer what is expected of them. Another route They could have taken was to say "This is what we are doing [insert plan]. Let's make this movie win: You go out and buy tickets tonight and tell all of your friends to buy tickets tomorrow." Outlines the plan and follows with a direct call to action. Worked for the President.
After performing as it did at the box office, fresh off predictions of the movie becoming revolutionary and beating the Hangover, to now predict that it will become one of the best selling DVD's of all time is laughable.
My responses in bold. I think the fan's role was pretty clear, and they would've done their part had they felt compelled to. Speaking for myself, I respond honestly whenever someone asks about the movie: It was all right, better than most movies out, but it's not perfect. When The Departed/No Country For Old Men/There Will Be Blood came out I was dragging all my friends to see them because they are fantastic movies beyond reprieve, regardless of their marketing budget .
Let me state something at the outset: I'm speaking with some measure of authority here. I don't know as much about Hollywood as that Biscuits guy and I don't have an IMDB page but I know a lot. And even more about marketing. Major distributors. Larger marketing budgets. And the most important factor: loyal demographic. Selling a horror film, death porn, or rom com is idiot science. Unfortunately, the single no kids male 18-34 demographic is hugely unreliable. Two characteristics that might work against a film -- they pirate instead of purchase and they'd rather be the exclusive than included. I'd rather spend an evening pulling my toenails off one by one than be on a team marketing a movie to that demographic. Studios have a lot of money and spend a lot of time trying to figure out what motivates that demographic to buy and refer. Without a traditional studio or distributor Beer didn't have access to any of that. I didn't say that Shawshank was a marketing failure. I said it performed poorly at the box office. Not the same thing. I wasn't comparing it to Beer in Hell, I was merely addressing your assertion that good movies necessarily do well at the box office. Not that it matters (because I wasn't comparing it to Beer) but although Shawshank was not a comedy it sold to the same demographic. And demographic is the key, here. Those in charge of selling Beer in Hell did not understand their demographic or how they behave. Without that understanding the movie could not perform well. Umm...okay. The premiere tour WAS the marketing push (or at least a major part of it that we saw). Anybody that went to one of the premieres was key in selling the movie. And my point is made if anybody who attended a premiere didn't know their role. How closed? I didn't limit it to the messageboard. I only stated that is where I saw feedback like "None of my friends knew about the movie." For the record, there were 72K+ registered members on his messageboard at the time the movie launched. And yes, I strongly believe that his Internet presence in whole was a key component of selling the film. If it wasn't y'all would have seen a greater saturation in traditional media outlets. And not to be pedestrian or condescending but yeah...that's how marketing works when it works. One persons tells five tells eleven and on and on... Well, again, I never said he was relying only on his messageboard. And I don't know Tucker well enough to comment on your final statement. You are correct: Fantastic, Oscar quality movies have great word of mouth. But a good film with great word of mouth does not always pay out at the box office. My initial point.
But speaking on terms of good films that had large success at the box office with small marketing budgets and limited release all seemed to have the same thing in common, they were all good and struck a cord with people. Movies like Slumdog, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Juno, even Blair Witch and PA. The WOM over came the standard problems associated with marketing (what the typical demographic does to x or y genre of movie). Tucker seem to just totally avoid the possibility that the movie wasn't good enough to succeed with the general strategy he took. I think that's the Grinds point.
Firstly, we can't really speak in terms of large and small budgets when it comes to studio films or films with major distribution. As part of the machine, they have resources that independent movies don't have. So a studio dollar is not necessarily equal to an independent dollar. (There is probably a more technical way to say that but I fail at finance). To your second point, Slumdog was a foreign film but I'm not sure that it was independent. Maybe it was, I just don't have that information. Given the level of saturation on television and trailers I'd gather Slumdog had a significant marketing budget. It was also marketed as love story. Greek and Juno are rom com/rom dram respectively -- selling a girl a romantic anything is like selling her a tampon. Blair Witch and PA are horror films -- again, hugely reliable demographic. For all of your examples, I'm suggesting there weren't any standard problems to overcome because they had traditional Hollywood, money and loyal demographics. I agree 100% that good movies usually do well at the box office. Maybe Beer is only just good, maybe it is bad. Not for me to say. I just don't think the quality of the movie is capital T The reason it didn't do well at the box office. Dozens (hundreds?) of bad movies do very very well at the box office because they are high profile studio films that are well marketed to their target demographic. I'm a writerly type. I so so sooooo wish success was all about the quality of the product. But unfortunately it's not that simple.
I think the third sentence here is something that needs to be addressed. I agree with that statement completely seeing as how almost every guy I personally know falls into this demographic. As I mentioned before on the old board I am in college and I know firsthand logging onto a student's media folder at a college campus is like a digital version of walking into Ed Gein's house. Personally I do not pirate at all (I am even crazy enough to pay for all my music on itunes) but almost every person I know at college has no sense of decency when it comes to this. One friend of mine literally has every major TV show and movie that came out in the past 5 years and has it meticulously organized on a 1TB hard drive. Hell if I am not mistaken this very board has a thread dedicated to this sort of thing a few topics below this one and a good deal of us fit the demographic. Before I diverge to far off topic on that I will share two experiences I had the past few weeks with similarities to what Tucker posted and in support of grits: 1. My girlfriend loves Tucker's book. Bought it, talked about it for weeks after reading it, and has loaned it out to others to read. It is currently sitting on the desk next to her bed in her apartment. A week before the movie came out we were relaxing and I asked her if she was going to see the movie. Her response was, "What movie?" I should mention she is not an old fan. She was reading the stories on the website for the first time mid summer and bought the book around the same time. 2. My friends and I were at school when Tucker came up during the course of the conversation. All of a sudden almost everyone in the room admitted to being a fan and once again I mentioned the movie. I got the same exact response as above. This was 2 weeks after the opening weekend. One of the first responses I received when I offered we all go and see it was, "Let's just download it." I can repeat the story above a few other times with similar experiences that occurred over the course of the past month or two. The one difference between myself and everyone above was I was a member of the board. Until I joined the RMMB less than a few months ago I had NO idea about the movie despite being one of Tucker's fans for awhile. Tucker did hit the nail on the head when he said he did not get into enough contact with his fan base. The general crowd that Tucker was trying to get to advertise his movie was not an ideal crowd to do so and to complicate matters he only reached out to a very small portion of it. I completely agree with grits that the target demographic is a nightmare for this sort of movie the way he was trying to distribute it. Personally I do feel it will pick up with DVD sales because much more people will know about it by the time the DVD hits and I am sure people will have a bunch of wonderful gift cards and holiday money they will be looking to blow.
I listed those movies because I thought they transcended their demographics and were widely popular, at least from a dollar standpoint. What I am saying is that to market a movie like those movies did, small numbers of theaters and limited P&A, quality of the film does become paramount. Even the studio backed ones didn't have the full confidence of the studio until they had shown they could do well in a limited release. Maybe it was a movie that needed more traditional types of marketing to do better. I know it's just my personal opinion but I don't think it could have done the astronomical figures Tucker wanted even if they would have cleared that marketing hurdle simply because the film wasn't a good enough movie to do them. This was the other major things that started to show up a little on the old board and a lot more here, people just weren't thrilled with the end product "good but not something I'd rave about/see multiple times". It was the other elephant in the room besides the limited marketing. It's a factor shouldn't be ignored and should be given its proper weight.
I think what gets lost in the hub hub here is that this entire endeavor was conceived out of the virtue that ownership be given back to the artist. I think many of you are forgetting that, this was a movie that was cheaply made and cheaply distributed and more importantly, cheaply marketed all for the sake of shunning the traditional studio method of making movies that so routinely screws artists out of their work. Look at Juno, look at Slumdog, look at Paranormal Activity and Blair Witch and what not - what these movies don't have is complete ownership of their work. Yeah, they were great movies and independently made and financed, but in the end, they lost out to the powers that be, mostly for the sake of money. Diablo Cody's a great example. The point isn't that Tucker could have done better, the point is can a movie that lives and dies by these morals actually succeed. So far, I'd wager it hasn't happened. But if anything, it's at least been tried. [If anyone can call me out on my facts here, I think I got some of them wrong, i.e. Slumdog independently financed. But I think I'm mostly right. I'm not in the biz.]
Relax, dude. Juno wasn't perfect. MBFGW wasn't perfect. Slumdog wasn't perfect. To be honest Juno really isn't that great of a movie, once you get past the somewhat witty dialogue. Personally, I feel that the movie WAS good enough to succeed, based solely on quality of the movie. My friends all feel the same way. Just so you know, we're all in film school, and while that certainly does not make my opinion better or worse than anyone else's you should know that we're generally far more critical of any movie we see, and for a rather good reason: Most movies suck. IHTSBIH dragged from about 2/3 of the way until the wedding, there were plenty of flubbed lines, the cinematography was...strange and off-putting at times while at other times being pretty good, the colors changed halfway through the movie, etc. I could go on about Beer in Hell, or any other movie, but it doesn't matter. What it comes down to was whether or not it was good enough to put people in seats, and it most definitely was. There's really no arguing that, but it's a little sad going from RMMB to here, reading everyone's reviews and watching them change from there to here. I'm not saying you can't dislike it, it has its problems, but the disconnect was huge and to be honest somewhat expected. We were all hoping that this thing would blow up, if not just to have a good movie but to also say "OMG I WAS THERE I WAS FIRST INDIE CRED." Had this movie done amazing it would have opened plenty of doors for up and coming filmmakers, and I wanted nothing more than this to succeed. But Tucker really fucked up with the marketing and distribution. For one, the budget was rather lackluster and he got ahead of himself thinking that WoM would immediately sell it to everyone. He wasn't counting on...nobody actually knowing about it. EVERYBODY knew about the Hangover, and the question on everyone's mind was, "Is this movie actually going to be good?" So people who thought it was going to be good went to see it, lo and behold it was a pretty okay movie, which leads to "OMG HILARIOUS" because there really aren't that many good comedies coming out. Every single one of my friends who saw it based on someone else's recommendation said "It wasn't that funny." The premiere tour didn't really work out as well as he thought it did...those 150000 people who saw it didn't go immediately out and tell everyone they knew how great it was because, like grits said, they didn't really know they were supposed to. Sure, they got some people into the seats, but not enough. In short, he overestimated himself as a marketing guru. Whether that's more to do with him just not being good at it or circumstances out of his control that he should have accounted for doesn't really matter, because in the end it was a pretty big failure. He was going off the WoM of his BOOK, which took how long to reach the top? It certainly didn't take a month, which is about how long before the movie was released that the greenband trailer was released. And the redband, which was actually a good trailer, was released like 4 days before the movie was out in theaters. I do expect this movie to do well on DVD, because it is a pretty good movie. We'll see what happens though. [edit] KIMaster said things below that I was also going to say but then I forgot about. But yeah he's right for the most part.
Dude sincere apologies if I am wrong but didn't you give a gushing review of the movie in one of the tour videos?
I am not sure exactly what you're trying to say but I'll try to re-word it so that it makes sense to me. 1. Tucker wanted to use WoM from his fans as the primary marketing tool. 2. Tucker believed his fans wouldn't enjoy the movie as much having been so familiar w/ the source material. Conclusion: 3. Since Tucker's fans wouldn't enjoy the movie as much, it seems like a bad idea to depend on them for WoM. Assuming I stated this to your liking, your two premises have a major disconnect. Word of mouth depends on people enjoying the movie. Inability to be objective is not the same as saying they won't enjoy it. It just means he doubted they would be able to judge the movie in and of itself. They might actually enjoy the movie even more because they aren't objective. Not being objective can work both ways like that. Beyond that you need to define things like "core fan base." Is that anyone who purchased his book? Anyone who visits his site? The message board? The #'s for these various levels of fandom differ widely.
Beefy Phil pointed out this link in the "Random Links" thread. Charlie Hoehn's analysis of the IHTSBIH tour. The site has been a bit flakey for me, so I'll post the content of the article here as well:
FYI, for those interested. I'm going to unlock the thread in case anyone wants to discuss it, but the first time someone goes on a "I-hate-Tucker" or similar rant/tangent, they're taking a day off. Tread lightly.
The DVD, more so than the theater release, is what I have been awaiting. Tucker wrote many times about how the dvd will include all kinds of behind-the-scenes, interviews, deleted scenes, scripts, etc. Amazon.com sells it for $15, but it lists only 1 disk as being included. Is it possible to have this many extras one one disk, or might this hint at a change? My Google Reader popped up with the DVD trailer video a few hours ago, and since then I haven't seen anything official regarding the release. If anyone finds anything, please link it. Also, does anyone know if there's a place to track the pre-order sales? I honestly don't know anymore whether I should be excited about the DVD or not, but I still want to see how "IHTSBIH's Last Stand" starts to play out. It's interesting, and I feel like I have a personal stake in it, even if I don't.
During the Austin Screening, he actually said that the DVD wasn't going to be that fantastic. I'm not planning on buying it.
I'll be buying it. If anything to say "thanks for the memories". I spent a fair bit (a LOT) of time on the old boards, and they entertained me greatly. Hell, I would have gladly paid a monthly subscription for them, and it would have easily been less than my weekly coffee habit. I was listening to an Adam Carolla podcast today and he was talking about free online content and his thoughts about getting paid, and he basically said "I really don't care if they pay for the online content or not, but all I ask is that if/when I put out a movie, or a book, or something like that, spend the $10-$20 and buy it as a way of thanking me for doing what I'm doing." Instead of trying to monetize every little fucking thing, and DRM'ing the hell out of stuff to try and enforce it, he's hoping that you'll be a reasonable human being and show support for things that you've enjoyed or have entertained you. That makes sense to me.
It depends on what the DVD gives us, Im huge into the extras on DVDs. The Fight Club special edition comes to mind. I love watching anything I can get my hands on. I'd be willing to spend extra on a super packed version with 9 commentary tracks etc... Ive bought the book and took a friend to a premiere tour stop, I'd say I've helped the cause, if it is a bare bones DVD Ill pass. BTW, I love the Adam Carolla podcast too. Check out The Hammer it is a pretty funny movie, albeit a very safe one story and content wise for the Ace man.