Okay, let’s say you are a movie company, for fun lets say Warner Bros. You have the story, and it is a great story. You have the characters all lined up and you have hired bankable movie stars to play them. Not only do you have stars, but recognizable solid character actors are ready to go in supporting roles, maybe even a gimmick casting like the time Disney got Oprah to do a cameo/small role for the Princess and the Frog. You have a tie-in song from a hit recording artist ready to make a comeback with the most powerful of ballads. And merchandizing, toy line ready to go along with a fast food deal for the kids movies where you get a sweet toy when you order the meal which can work for adults too if you do some awesome Lord of the Rings toy at Burger King where there are figures for each of the Fellowship that light up and/or talk and can be clicked together around a really big One Ring coming up out of flames and the toys look really cool and awesome and I might have no problem shoving like six kids out of the way to get the last Legolas… but I digress.

Everything is in place and ready to go you just need to sell it to people. Yes even if you have the funniest music biopic parody of all time you need to convince people that A. This is what the movie is and B. They need to spend money to see it. Most of the time this is fairly straight forward. Big action scenes, a few quips maybe something bonkers to draw people in. If they marketing guys are doing their jobs right they can entice viewership without giving away too many, or any spoilers (I am still mad about that second Avengers trailer giving away the ending and to this day will not watch any second trailers for movies). Good marketing could be things like Will Ferrell doing interviews in character as Ron Burgundy leading up to the release of Anchorman, or one of my personal favourite movie marketing campaigns of all time was before Lilo and Stitch was released Disney did a bunch of classic scenes from other animated movies like the ballroom scene from Beauty and the Beast but inserted Stitch into them to cause a bit of trouble and it was so much fun I had to see that movie(Full Disclosure: Lilo and Stitch is still my favourite movie of all time so I may be biased). But what if they do not do their jobs right? People make mistakes, every profession has employees who are bad, have bad days or just don’t read the room right. What then?

Usually the answer to that question is the movie flops, and then later on if you are lucky people will look back and acknowledge that this piece of entertainment is in fact a cult classic with bad luck, or at the very least a good or decent movie done dirty. Bad marketing can come in basically 3 forms: 1/ Misleading, this one particularly irks genre movie fans such as horror fans. If you have to pretend your movie is something else in order to entice people to see it you usually have a problem, with the exception of movies such as In Bruges which ended up being a great movie but not at all what the trailer made it out to be. 2/ No or lack of marketing, we will get to this in a bit. Or 3/ Just not knowing how to sell what you have with a confusing mish-mashed campaign. For whatever the reason many movies fail every year and some of those really do not deserve such a fate.

Which brings me to today’s prompt: What movie do you think was particularly, sinisterly, deviously betrayed, backstabbed, or victimized by marketing? For a movie to count it should be at least good, have flopped or underperformed and specifically had marketing issues, but I also loosely accept pretty much anything so knock yourselves out. For my money I always remember Iron Giant I strongly remember this particular movie because I myself was duped by Warner Bros. and it’s lack of marketing (double call back… nailed it) so I skipped out on the original theatrical release as I was not convinced it would be worth my time. It was as if Warner Bros. was afraid to spend any money on it after Quest for Camelot failed before it and animation was fairly strictly Disney’s domain at the time. There was almost nothing outside a teaser poster and a fairly low rotation trailer. I feel bad because I really do love that movie and give thanks to cult followings for keeping it visible so I could eventually come around to it as it is possibly the best animated movie of it’s decade.