The Wonderful World of Movies (Marketing)

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We are used to seeing big blockbusters with big production budgets that, ultimately, make a lot of people a lot of money. But how does that work, you might ask. Why do some movies do better than other at the box office? 

Of course there are always the names involved. Marvel here, Leonardo DiCaprio there, James Cameron right there, Jerry Bruckheimer over here, and so on. There are also other factors involved, and those factors usually mean Marketing. See, studios have these things called Tent-pole movies, and what that means is, these movies are expected to support the studio, much like a tent-pole would support a tent. For those movies to do as expected and support the rest they need to be big box office hits, and the best way to do that is to promote the hell out of them. Let’s take The Avengers, for example. The Avengers was a major hit at the box office, it is the second highest grossed movie of all time. They had a production or operational budget (meaning actors, staff, scenarios, special effects, the whole crew and then some) of 220 million dollars. Wow, that is a lot of money! A lot of money they recouped in the first ten days alone. This is a movie that has made over 1.5 billion dollars at the box office, not counting Blu-ray and DVD releases, merchandise and rights and licensing sold world wide. One of the reasons it was this monster hit, but certainly not the only one, was the marketing budget (meaning what they spent to promote the movie) which was over 100 millions dollars.

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Marketing and promotion have become an even bigger deal when it comes to studio movies, because they want them to not only succeed, but also crush the box office to be the ten-poles they are supposed to be.

Forbes Magazine has recently published an article titled How has movie marketing and distribution evolved over time? and they talk about this exact same issue. There are movies, most of them in the horror genre, that have marketing budgets four times larger than their production budgets, meaning that they don’t care if the movie sucks, as long is it does well in theaters.

What does this mean for Indie Films? Well, the news is not good. Since independent movies have a hard enough time raising a production budget without the backing of a studio, they have an even harder time coming up with the money to promote that movie. When they open at the box office next to Fast & Furious 18: Wheelchair in Motion, a movie that has been bombarded though the media three months before its opening weekend, that Indie Movie will do horribly because all people will care about is that drag racing wheelchair that has been constantly in their faces.

We are rapidly evolving into an industry that cares less and less about content and are becoming another Proctor & Gamble or Unilever.