Chris over at Movie Marketing Madness comments on the rumors that a seven-minute Dark Knight trailer will debut before the Will Smith film I Am Legend in December:
This makes sense to me for a couple of reasons. First, as I mentioned, both movies are coming from WB. Second, the audiences for both movies are likely to overlap considerably. I Am Legend will (hopefully, if you’re WB) bring out sci-fi fans, as well as a few action and maybe even a handful of horror fans. Dark Knight is going to draw heavily from the sci-fi/comic world.
But there are two things that occur to me that cause me to question these rumors. First is that seven minutes is a significant chunk of time, about three times as long as the average trailer. So that means either the trailer block is going to run even longer than usual in front of I Am Legend, or theaters will opt to show two or three fewer trailers. Neither really sounds like an attractive option, especially not for other studios or for theater owners.
The second thing is the same thought that occurs to me whenever an announcement like this is made. Call it the “Meet Joe Black Rule.” It basically makes me wonder whether WB is having doubts about turning people out for Legend’s opening weekend and so are going to entice people to pay for the movie largely so they can see a highly anticipated trailer.
Meet Joe Black, the very long and kind of boring Brad Pitt movie, received a nice sales boost because it was one of the first films that had the trailer for Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.
October 18th, 2007 at 9:47 am
Meet Joe Black was long, true, but it was also fantastic – how can you go wrong with Anthony Hopkins and Claire Forlani?
October 18th, 2007 at 10:22 am
Meet Joe Black…and the word “fantastic” don’t belong in the same sentence unless the name “Claire Forlani” is somehow behind fantastic, modifying it–it’s a rule of grammar, I don’t know if you knew that.
This is just me–but I Am Legend has most fans of the property cringing and gathering up their torches and pitchforks. It won’t hurt my feelings to catch the Bat-trailer on the internet the day of the release–it’ll be on YouTube in no time. Does that make me a bad person for not supporting EVERY movie that comes out of Hollywood?
I just think it makes me savvy enough to notice that a marketing scheme has been attached to a movie that probably won’t do so well at the box office.
October 18th, 2007 at 11:05 am
The first movie that I remember getting the trailer for Phantom Menace was Wing Commander. I also remember theatres that had signs on the doors saying “No refunds for Wing Commander.”
October 18th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
Which probably would have been there even if it didn’t have the STAR WARS trailer.
October 19th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Meet Joe Black was a great movie. I loved every second of it. I watch it atleast once a year.(I don’t rewatch movies I’ve ever seen within years. I almost Never buy movies) I still don’t have the DVD though, the tapes getting long.
December 4th, 2007 at 5:23 pm
Meet Joe Black was a great movie. It is a slow movie that is more about the characters than events.
What a great addition the open pledge to watch a pirated copy of the trailer the day it comes out is, in light of all the mothership articles about comic book piracy. Maybe the WB can send a cease and desist and we’ll have an article on the front page that says, RAMA’S EKSTROM: DC WARNS RE: PIRACY.