Marketing Disaster

Well the film continues plodding along -- its at around $187 mil domestically and another $132 mil foreign. Why was the U.S. performance not as strong as was expected?

One reason is the weak economy (don't belive the propaganda -- out here in the real world, times is tough) and people limit entertainment spending when gas is $3 a gallon. So they saved their money for that piece of shit Pirates and didn't go see Superman.

But the main culprit, I believe, was the shitty marketing effort for this movie. First, let me say what I would've started doing the week Pirates came out -- I'd have run "man on the street" type spots featuring moviegoers saying something like "Yeah, Pirates was OK, but for my money Superman was the movie of the summer!" Everyone who saw it knew they'd been ripped off with Pirates -- it sucked big time. So why not take advantage of that? But I know that's not how things work in da bizyness.

One thing I will say about the marketing is that they completely ignored the women's audience. Where were the mushy spots on Lifetime or Oxygen or all those home improvement/cooking networks? Where was the marketing aimed at the teen audience for Routh and Bosworth? Yeah I know they were on TRL but the only teen magazine cover I saw was Bosworth on Teen Vogue. The lesson of Titanic was that teen girls will go see a movie over and over again -- but that was ignored in the marketing of this movie.

I also have to say that I saw almost no TV ads in the weeks leading up to the film but I saw a shitload of them for Pirates in the 2 weeks before it came out. I've seen plenty of Superman spots in the last 3 weeks -- and the movie opened more than a month ago -- but that's probably because Singer pitched a fit (entirely justified) about the lousy marketing of the film.

I did see a lot of film and entertainment magazine covers on Superman, so clearly some part of marketing did their job. But they didn't spend enough money on TV and they ignored entire segments of potential audience.