Genre Conventions: Basic Guide

Mark Kermode Reviews: 'Captain America: The Winter Soldier' & 'Divergent' (Possible Case Studies)

Viral Marketing: ‘Devil’s Due’ Sends Evil Baby On Scary Rampage in New York City

Innovative marketing stunt uses YouTube to generate buzz around low-budget horror pic

In a twisted new promotion for “Devil’s Due,” a demonic baby in a carriage is sent off in the snowy streets of New York City to scare anyone that approaches the infant.

The prankvertisement, as it’s quickly being called, is the latest stunt byThinkmodo, the agency behind an equally creepy gag for “Carrie,” which featured a telekinetic girl in a coffee shop. The stunt was viewed by over 53 million people on YouTube. Thinkmodo also worked with Fox on a promo for “Chronicle” that sent people flying into the sky over New York City, and generated considerable press coverage before the film went on to open in the top spot at the box office.

New indie film noir: 'Trouble is My Business'

Here is a new indie film noir, Trouble is My Business, that harkens back to the 1940s, with a thriller-mystery scenario about a gumshoe on the skids who gets mixed up with two seductively dangerous sisters. The film’s 8 minute trailer certainly gets you interested, and the production values are impressive. Nice noir visuals and characterisations with a flavor of the irony reminiscent of that great 1948 film noir I Love Trouble starring Franchot Tone, promise a fascinating ride.

Check out the Vimeo trailer below.

Read more: http://filmsnoir.net/film_noir/trouble-is-my-business-new-film-noir.html#ixzz2jnZK64p9

'Safety Not Guaranteed' (2012): Released Boxing Day

Safety Not Guaranteed is a 2012 American comedy-drama film inspired by a 1997 Backwoods Home Magazineclassified ad – written as a joke filler by Backwoods employee John Silveira – by a person asking for someone to accompany him in time travel. It was screened at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival where it won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award.

Budget = $750,000
Box office = $4,001,58 (US - Released 8/6/12)

Safety Not Guaranteed received critical acclaim with a 94% approval from 109 critics on Rotten Tomatoes—an average score of 7.6 out of 10—where the consensus reads: "Safety Not Guaranteed's ostensibly modest ambitions are outmatched by the movie's strong performances, beguiling charm, and heartfelt story." Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote that the story's shenanigans are "harnessed to a plaintive underlying theme about the fading dreams of those aspiring professionals in their 20s and 30s."

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rules for Watching Psycho (1960)

Psycho, one of Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic films, didn’t come together very easily. Hitchcock’s studio, Paramount Pictures, didn’t like anything about the film and denied him a proper budget. So the director went solo and funded the film through his television company Shamley Productions. The budget was tight — less than $1,000,000. Costs were firmly controlled. Hence why, in 1960, the film was shot in black and white.

When Psycho hit theaters, Hitchcock controlled the promotion. The stars – Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh — didn’t make the usual rounds in the media. Critics weren’t given private screenings. And Hitchcock created buzz for the film when he exerted directorial control over the viewing experience of the audience. Showings of the film began on a tightly-controlled schedule in theatres in New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia. And a firm “no late admission” policy was put in place. You either saw the film from the very beginning, or you didn’t see it all. Signs appeared in front of cinemas reading:

We won’t allow you to cheat yourself. You must see PSYCHO from the very beginning. Therefore, do not expect to be admitted into the theatre after the start of each performance of the picture. We say no one — and we mean no one — not even the manager’s brother, the President of the United States, or the Queen of England (God bless her)!

Theatre managers initially balked at the idea, fearing financial losses. But Hitchcock had his way. And he was right. Long lines formed outside the theatres. Psycho enjoyed critical and commercial success, so much so the film was re-released in 1965.

Source: openculture.com

'Stoker': Marketing

Here's an interesting piece of movie marketing -- it's a music video for the upcoming suspense thriller "Stoker" starring Mia Wasikowska, Nicole Kidman and Matthew Goode. Featuring a song from the soundtrack ("Becomes the Color" by indie artist Emily Wells) the video contains a few bits of fresh footage from the film, and unveils a look at an exquisitely drawn international poster -- released by Empire.

Directed by Oldboy helmer Park Chan-wook (his first English-language effort), "Stoker" centres on a troubled teenage girl (Wasikowska) who suspects her abusive mother (Kidman) and her mysterious uncle (Goode) have, somehow, caused the untimely death of her father. Did they straight-out murder him -- or are they keeping a dark family secret? The mystery will be unlocked when the movie hits theatres on March 1st.

Source: empireonline.com

'Star Trek: Into The Darkness' - 17th May 2013

The minute-long teaser for 'Star Trek into Darkness' has been released for the first time.

The teaser for JJ Abram’s Star Trek sequel shows fighter jets flying over a futuristic London- gherkin still intact- to Benedict Cumberbatch’s voice over.

“It’s an illusion, a comforting lie to protect you. Enjoy these final moments of peace. For I have returned. To have my vengeance,” the actor says.

The teaser shows scenes of earth under attack, with Chris Pine as Captain Kirk and his crew watching in horror.

The plot synopsis released by Paramount Pictures says: “When the crew of the Enterprise is called back home, they find an unstoppable force of terror from within their own organization has detonated the fleet and everything it stands for, leaving our world in a state of crisis.

“With a personal score to settle, Captain Kirk leads a manhunt to a war-zone world to capture a one man weapon of mass destruction.”

Star Trek into Darkness is released in the UK on 17 May 2013.

Re-posted from: independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment

Why Bella is beating Bond in the great box-office battle

The success of Twilight has led to a host of tough female heroines dominating Hollywood, says Ed Power.

He's seen off supervillains, global conspiracies and, during the Roger Moore years, a multitude of crimes against fashion. But James Bond finally met his match last week – in the form of a willowy young girl with alabaster skin and big, creepy eyes.

The 'girl', of course, is Twilight heroine Kristen Stewart and, together with the rest of the cast of Breaking Dawn Part 2, she handed 007 a multiplex trouncing, knocking his latest foray, Skyfall, off the top of the American box office.

At first glance, maybe that isn't such a surprise. With the possible exception of Harry Potter, the five Twilight films have, since 2008, proved to be the great cinematic juggernaut of our time.

Bond is essentially a creaky nostalgia trip for those who still think the measure of an action hero is the number of gadgets he can cram into a retro sports car.

From another perspective, however, Stewart's muscling aside of the most super of super agents can be regarded as a seismic shift.

In one corner stands the ultimate alpha male icon, in the other a movie for, and largely about, teenage girls. We now live in a world where guys with guns can be outmaneuvered by intense young women with romance issues.

"Despite arguments that could be made about the portrayal of women in the Twilight films, they have demonstrated that films with female lead characters can find a mass market, and that they are worth producing and investing in for the studios," says Darren Mooney, author of Pass the Popcorn: Movie Memoirs 2011.

'Approximately 80pc of the opening weekend audience of those films are young women, a demographic that is often overlooked in favour of young men," he added.

"Twilight has done so much to change the culture of Hollywood and it does not get the acknowledgement it deserves because it is about a girl," said Melissa Silverstein, editor of the blog 'Women and Hollywood'. "It is gigantic. It has shown women can fuel box office. But it still is something that Hollywood does not know what to do with."

Predictably, Twilight has unleashed a flood of movies in which teenage girls with serious attitude very literally punch above their weight.

One of the more high profile, Snow White and the Huntsman, actually starred Stewart. The film put a very different spin on the age-old fairytale – rather than a passive victim of the wicked queen's machinations, in this contemporary version of Snow White, Stewart rides a horse, swings a sword and leads an army into battle.

Shrugging off overwhelmingly indifferent reviews, it was an enormous success, a fact subsequently overshadowed by revelations that 22-year-old Stewart was conducting an affair with the movie's 41-year-old married director Rupert Sanders.

When the scandal finally dies down the film will be seen for what it was: irrefutable evidence that, marketed correctly, a butt-kicking heroine can conquer the multiplex.

An even clearer example of a studio pitching to Generation Twilight was the $680m (€523m) earning Hunger Games, which has propelled its rangy star Jennifer Lawrence to the very top of the A-list.

A stereotypical tomboy, her character Katniss Everdeen has a greater amount in commonwith Rambo than the stereotypical doe-eyed leading lady.

She hunts, rocks a crossbow and does not seem to have much of an internal life. For the bulk of the film, romance is the last thing on her mind.

On the face of it, the idea that Jennifer Lawrence and Kristen Stewart are the spiritual descendants of the exaggerated versions of themselves Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger played through the 1980s seems absurd.

They were non-ironic slabs of beefcake, whose day job consisted of shooting goons by the hundred. And yet, the argument may be advanced that Bella and Katniss are every bit as two-dimensional as Conan the Barbarian and Die Hard's John McClane. They have the same strong moral centre, the same belief that, sometimes, the good guys just have to go out there and kick some ass.

Hollywood has some previous form though. Darren Mooney points out that, in terms of strong female leads, there was Ripley from the Alien movies. Or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the first screen heroine where a facility for karate kicks was part of the appeal.

"James Cameron actually made considerable progress in the portrayal of female characters during the 1980s and 1990s," he says.

"Ridley Scott's Alien introduced us to Ellen Ripley. However, Cameron's sequel gave us Ripley as a take-no-prisoners action heroine. The character Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 helped cement Linda Hamilton as one of the very few female action stars." But there's been little real development until now.

The movie industry has glommed onto the success of Hunger Games, Twilight and Snow White and, in the months ahead, will churn out a stream of action flicks starring sassy heroines.

In 2013 audiences will be introduced to tough-cookie spell caster Lena, the star of the Beautiful Creatures fantasy book series, and to Lily Collins as Clare Fray, protagonist in the first Mortal Instruments movie.

"I think we're seeing the studios concede that there are people out there interested in action movies with female heroes," says Mooney.

"The Hunger Games is the most obvious example, with Katniss a far more dynamic heroine than Bella ever was. However, there are indications that the influence is spreading even further.

"One of the amendments that Peter Jackson made to The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings was to expand the roles of the female characters and there's even talk of an all-female version of The Expendables coming out."

So should feminists be reaching for the champagne? Perhaps not.

One difficulty is that female A-listers are too easily stereotyped, says movie writer Nicola Timmins. "A lot of actresses get pigeon-holed into a type early on – for example Reese Witherspoon into romantic comedy, Natalie Portman into drama," she says. "And while they can break out occasionally, there aren't the female action roles there for an actress to establish themselves with. There are few women in Hollywood who can open a blockbuster as the lead and, with no established women in action, it's unlikely that we'll see a female opening an action film as the hero any time soon.

"Beyond Angelina Jolie, Scarlett Johansson is probably the best example – she stepped in to the role of action hero in Avengers. However, a film based solely around her heroine, Black Widow, would probably still be too much of gamble."

It's notable that this new generation of female action stars are all in their teens or early 20s. There is no equivalent of Sigourney Weaver or Linda Hamilton. The closest was Lena Headeyin the Sarah Connor Chronicles, a TV sequel to the Terminator saga cancelled after two seasons. You look around the movie landscape and the only grown up female action heroine is Angelina Jolie, an icon who has always followed her own singular course.

"Girls can be powerful and strong. Women can't," according to Melissa Silverstein. "We are comfortable with girls kicking ass, but not a woman who is in her 20s or 30s, unless she happens to be Angelina Jolie. She is an anomaly."

But perhaps now times really are changing for women in Hollywood.

Re-posted from: Irish Independent

First TV Spot for Monsters Inc 3D – ‘New Look'

Taken from: http://www.heyuguys.co.uk

Scoop.it Resource Page

I have now set up a Scoop.it Resource page, that can be found in the right hand column, to blog any posts or news that will be useful in developing your knowledge of the film industry and other aspects of the subject.

This will contain extra features and sources not covered in the AS Film Studies blog.

The Skyfall's the limit on James Bond marketing

From Heineken to the Olympics, the producers of the 23rd Bond movie have exploited every possible brand connection.

When Skyfall, the 23rd entry in the James Bond series, finally hits UK screens on Friday, the British public will be divided into two factions: those planning to see it, and those assuming it had been out months ago. Even by the unsubtle standards of studio tentpoles, the marketing push for Skyfall has been a long-haul assault, stretching far beyond the standard (if especially ubiquitous) bus-side billboards, and trailers that have been on rotation since the spring.

Though not a man averse to material pleasures, Bond himself might balk at the amount of promotional tie-ins being attached to his name this time around. The new film raises the bar for onscreen product placement, from 007's Tom Ford-tailored suits to Q's Sony Vaio hardware, as well as offscreen alliances ranging from Coke Zero to perfume retailers. (Yes, if you've always wanted to smell like Bond – presumably not after an intense chase sequence – the option is yours.) His new tipple of choice, Heineken, has proved an ongoing sticking point with fans, particularly after a big-budget ad that actually roped Daniel Craig into the action.

However, with the Dutch beer having stumped up over £28m for the privilege of seeing Bond sip from a green bottle in an early scene – coolly covering almost a third of the film's estimated £93.7m ($150m) production budget in the process – the producers are willing to endure that indignity. Craig himself has been a diplomatic spokesman on the issue, acknowledging that their reliance on brand associations is "unfortunate," before countering: "This movie costs a lot of money to make [and] nearly as much again to promote, so we go where we can."

That quote is about as close as we're going to get to learning the film's actual marketing budget, given Sony Pictures International's customary reluctance to divulge such details. It would be a grey area in any case, since it's more difficult than usual to tell where this film's marketing begins and ends – particularly in this year of the Bond films' golden anniversary, when any number of external forces are collaborating to sanctify the franchise as a great British institution. 007 practically received a knighthood in his amiably goofy skit with the Queen in July's Olympic opening ceremony – a stunt that may not have had Skyfall's enigmatic name anywhere on it, but pointedly raised awareness of the agent's return to a global audience of a billion.

Indeed, while few of Bond's brands of choice – the venerable Aston Martin notwithstanding – are British, much of the marketing has worked towards underlining his UK heritage. Most prominent in this regard is a joint campaign with Visit Britain, which will be using the film to hawk British tourism to international audiences through viral and print advertising, as well as its first ever cinema ad, all united under the slogan "Bond is Great … Britain."

That's hardly an incidental affiliation for a film that, unusually for latter-day 007 entries, was largely shot on home soil in the wake of budget cuts at MGM, which filed for bankruptcy in 2010: climactic scenes may take place in London and the Highlands, but keen-eyed Londoners will also notice the capital doubling for Shanghai elsewhere. It may not look it, but the high-gloss, name-heavy Skyfall came in significantly cheaper than 2008's £125m Quantum of Solace.

The budget may be lower this time around, but the stakes are arguably higher. With a UK gross of almost £51m and a global total of around £369m, Quantum of Solace fell short of the numbers attained by the series' first Craig-led outing, Casino Royale, in 2006. It was far from a flop, but it disappointingly failed to build on its predecessor's gutsy brand reinvention – except, that is, in China, where it significantly outpaced the previous film. Industry journalist Ian Sandwell, who recently studied the film's release strategy for trade magazine Screen International, describes the film's Shanghai-set sequences as the film's "ace in the pack": given the vast Chinese market's sympathy toward blockbusters with local involvement, the decision to locate a major stretch of Skyfall's action there is no accident.

With Skyfall looking to right the ship and exceed Casino Royale's global gross, the marketing materials haven't taken many chances, with posters chiefly highlighting the 007 brand and not bothering to name its starrier-than-usual cast or its unusually A-list director Sam Mendes, the first Oscar-winner to helm a Bond film. Sandwell believes this focus on fundamentals is the right approach: "This could be a reaction to the perception of the Craig era to date, where perhaps the grittiness might have attracted the Bourne fans, yet alienated the Bond diehards. Skyfall's marketing has primarily been aimed at reassuring the traditional audience that they haven't been forgotten."

So far, Skyfall is tracking well enough to suggest that the approach has paid off, buoyed by one factor the marketing men couldn't control: the overwhelmingly positive reviews that greeted its first screening nearly two weeks ago, which had some excitable journalists even predicting Oscar glory. The Guardian's box office expert, Charles Gant, tweeted a prediction that the film will top Casino Royale to become the highest-grossing Bond film at the UK box office. That appears to be the expectation in the US too: the number-crunchers at BoxOffice.com are forecasting a Stateside gross of $216m. As it turns out, the lyrics of Adele's theme song (another marketing coup, as the series' first chart hit in years) aren't strictly accurate: the film's standing tall, all right, but the sky isn't falling.

The Guardian

Can film trailers reveal too much too soon?

Marketing a film in the digital age can be tricky to get right. There's perpetual tug of war between fans who want to find out about the film before its release and the film companies who want to protect their project; at the same time, film-makers also want to promote and create excitement about their films by giving the fans snippets of what they want.

But consider this: in a situation where the fans think they have won the tug of war by extracting snippets of new information about a particular film, it could be that the film company marketing gurus have simply let go of the rope. A few days ago, for example, pictures of Joel Kinnaman surfaced online, wearing a thoroughly un-robotic Robocop suit on the set of José Padilha's new remake. Despite the largely negative reaction from fans and bloggers, the pictures got people talking passionately about the film. A savvy marketing coup? It's not beyond the realms of possibility that these pictures may even have been leaked by the film company.

Giving the fans what they want can, however, be a dangerous game to play. Earlier this year Ridley Scott's film Prometheus launched what must be one of the most impressive marketing campaigns ever; it even included a company website for the fictional Weyland Enterprises and a video of a fictional TED talk launching the Prometheus project. Combine this with the release of multiple viral video trailers and you have the perfect example of a hype-building, excitement-inducing machine. The campaign took the film to a $380m global box-office takings, but a question remains: did Prometheus' marketing strategy give too much away?

The bombardment from grandiose marketing strategies shows no sign of letting up, however – and we are now seeing almost as much attention directed towards the first airing of official trailers as we have towards the release of the film proper. The teaser trailer has, of course, been around for ages, but the pomp and circumstance surrounding their release has taken a step up lately. Steven Spielberg's new biopic Lincoln offered a 44-second trailer advertising the official premiere of the full trailer on Google, followed by a webcast with Spielberg himself. This may engage the fans, but the whole process is getting very close to the edge of parody. How long before we get a trailer for the teaser trailer?

On top of this, trailers themselves are getting longer, with most official ones clocking in at well over two minutes in length. This means that, assuming there are two or three trailers released for a film, you already have over five minutes of footage to examine before you've even thought about buying a ticket.  It's the equivalent of giving away all but the last chapter of your book for free in the hope that people will cough up for the final chapter.

Do film companies really think this plan is just about crazy enough to work? But the day will surely come when they reveal too much, extinguishing the desire to see the film itself.

Edited from: guardian.co.uk

Too Many Tattoos?

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo has been made twice - once in Swedish and once in the English language

The Hollywood remake has had a favourable reception but what does the box office tell us about the two films?

From: Kermode Uncut

'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' (2011): Case Study - Marketing Campaign

'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' | Edited from Movie Marketing Madness
Post Published: 20 December 2011 Author: Chris

The new American remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. based on a Swedish novel and the first story in a trilogy this version is directed by David Fincher, with Roomey Mara starring as the enigmatic Lisbeth Salander who must work with Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), a journalist.

The Posters
The first poster was a tad bit NSFW and I’m amazed this was released as an official one-sheet. The image has Mara standing in front of Craig, his arm draped around her. But she’s completely naked, and while the image starts to fade out below her waist and one nipple is covered by Craig’s elbow, the other one – while obscured by the title – is still clearly visible. So the studio is clearly selling the sexualized version of the character. An international version of the same image would move the title treatment completely so you could more clearly see nipples.

A second poster was a bit more traditional. It shows Mara’s head with Craig’s image within that and some floral patterns surrounding him, a icy looking setting in the background. There are two bits of copy – “What is hidden in snow, comes forth in the thaw” that tie in to some online viral action that’s outlined below. The monochromatic nature of the poster makes it all the more striking and indeed this does look like a high-end piece of art photography. It’s very cool.

The Trailers
The first trailer starts off down a long snowy road and then just gets montagey. We see all sorts of things – people being shot at, people coughing, people running down streets, people getting out of cars – all no more than a second in length and all backed by an industrial rock remix of a Led Zeppelin song. It’s funky, it’s frantic and it works to tell audiences that this is likely not a watered down American version of the original film.

The next trailer slowed things down a bit and actually went into the story. We see Salandar delivering her report on Blomkvist and his personal life. He is summoned to do his own investigation into the murder of someone’s wife. The two are eventually paired together to investigate that murder, an investigation that takes all sorts of twists and turns as they’re obstructed at every end and each one continues to deal with their own issues.

Just a couple weeks out from release an eight-minute trailer was released that had previously been seen as part of the promotions for the film’s soundtrack. The long-form nature of this spot obviously allows for more of the story to be shown and more depth.

Online
If you do nothing after the official website loads you’ll be treated to a slide show of a dozen or more images from the movie rotating around.

After you do that a bit you can click the Menu and dive in to the site’s content, the first of which is “Characters,” where you can learn more about them and the actors who portray them. “Photos” has some very mysterious looking pictures. “Videos” then has the trailers.

There was also a website and Twitter account setup called Mouth Taped Shut that featured set photos. Eventually the “viral” campaign would end by leading people to early screenings of the movie designed to spark some pre-release word-of-mouth.

Advertising and Cross-Promotions
In what many saw as an extremely odd promotion, retailer H&M created a line of clothing designed to help you achieve the look Lisbeth Salandar sports in the movie.

TV spots were also created and run that introduced us to the characters and some of their motivations, showing lots of action and drama unfolding without (naturally) going in to all the different levels of deception and psychosis that are in play here since that’s barely contained in the full trailers.

Media and Publicity
Some of the first publicity for the movie came in the form of a profile of Mara in particular and the movie in general (W, February 2011) that featured some of the first looks at the actress in character in a variety of provocative shots.

After a bit of a break then things really heated up around the first of June when a European trailer was “leaked” and started everyone’s tongue a-wagging (Los Angeles Times, 6/1/11). The trailer featured lots of violence and a brief bit of nudity.

A feature interview (Esquire, 7/6/11) with Craig gave some insights into the actor’s approach to violence, what sort of things he does in his down time and what he thought of the movie’s themes and such. Craig continued to weigh in on the subject of the film’s violence as well as the controversial poster featuring a topless Mara.

Overall
There’s a lot of good stuff and some very engaging content in this campaign, but my concern is that it’s speaking almost exclusively to two audiences: First, existing fans of the book and the original film (admittedly a sizable group) and Two, fans of David Fincher.

For many more examples visit the site here.