Tuesday, April 7, 2009

How Hollywood Sells Movies

By Avery Prosper

Nobody ever sets out to make a terrible movie, but a large majority of them do end up very bad and ultimately under-perform at the box-office. But how do these movies go bad? How does a movie such as Speed Racer, with its huge budget, special effects and big stars completely sink in the theatres?

With the ever increasing complexity of big budget movies, the filmmakers often overlook the obvious. Mistakes can be so easy to make. I've seen so many films where the solution to these problems could have been easier if just one person would have looked through the forest to see the trees. Some solutions are so complex, it's like circling completely around the world rather than turning around and arriving at the same point only a few feet away.

Of course, even if Hollywood turns out a truly awful movie, it doesn?t mean it can?t have moderate success at the box office, if only briefly. The lesson is that it doesn't matter what truly awful movies Hollywood wants to throw out at the public, people are going to show up and spend their money.

Put all that extra effort and money into the advertising and you just might get a few tickets sold. The lesson here is that if you advertise hard and fast, you will be able to sell a bad movie to the public and make a reasonable amount of money from it, before the public realise and word spreads about it.

If a movie has turned out to be so bad, then why throw even more money after it with the hope of getting your cash back? The studios in Hollywood have always followed this principle. A lot of the success of this depends on getting the best clips in the trailer and getting it out in the theatres as intense and fast as possible.

Build everything up about the film to be many times bigger than it really is. Don?t undersell as a simple love story. Sell it as an action-packed love story where the two characters are extremely good looking and the movie is full of action.

You can get the audiences rushing to see the movie with the trailer including all the best shots from the movie, even the ones that didn?t even make it into the final cut of the movie.

When big budget blockbusters fall far short of expectations and bomb dramatically at the box office, movie production companies and reputations can be completely ruined by the experience. At this point, no amount of advertising can ever save it and change the public?s opinion of the dramatic fall.

Your movie could have the latest top director, the biggest stars in Hollywood, fancy special effects and the biggest budget available, and this still wouldn?t guarantee a success at the box office.

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