Maybe we just watch different channels or something, but I saw all sorts of commercials for Serenity in the weeks leading up to release, and I seem to remember reading about them generating quite a lot of buildup at various comic and scifi conventions. As one of the dozens of people who actually watched Firefly every time it aired on Fox, before getting the DVD set, I was getting pretty hyped. Then I went to see it opening weekend in a theater that held hundreds but only had maybe a dozen people in attendance, I knew that this was it, no third chance for the franchise if all that push led to so little response.
Yeah, naming the movie Serenity, that was probably not the best idea, no arguments there. It probably would’ve been doomed anyway, though. Much as I love the cast, none of them are really big box office draws. The movie probably would just be damned confusing to anyone who hadn’t watched Firefly, but even the rabid fanbase of Whedonites mostly didn’t watch the show when it was around, so you had a movie counting on a built in fanbase yet didn’t really have much of one. It was like a perfect storm of making sure no one turned out except hardcore “browncoats”.
Clint Eastwood’s The Beguiled was a marketing mess.
“One man…seven women…in a strange house!” - alrighty then! Universal hadn’t a clue - so they pretended it was a love-torn “meller drammer” and it crapped at the box office (I think it grossed less than $1M) and if you did the LA Farmer’s Market Test, I bet 8 out of 10 people have never heard of it. However, it remains my favorite Eastwood film.
I vote for The Magic Roundabout (2005), a CGI version of the classic Anglo-French stop-motion animation from the 1970s. Or rather the US release of the film, which came out a year later and was called Doogal. It wasn’t a huge hit in the UK and the reviews were mediocre; but the marketing men in the United States had the answer, quoth Wikipedia:
In 2006, the film was released in the US as “Doogal”. In the North American version of the film, where audiences are unfamiliar with the series, the majority of original British voices have been replaced by celebrities more familiar to the American public, such as Jon Stewart and Chevy Chase. Only two original voices remained - those of Kylie Minogue and Ian McKellen. The US version also featured narration by Judi Dench and a new storyline made to accommodate multiple pop culture references (mostly references to Lord of the Rings) and flatulence jokes (neither of which were present in the original release). This version received negative reviews. Rotten Tomatoes ranked the film 83rd in the 100 worst reviewed films of the 2000s, with a rating of 6%. The film currently holds a rating of 8% based on 49 reviews. Entertainment Weekly gave the film an F rating. It was also a commercial failure, only earning a total of $7.2 million in the United States, which is considered exceptionally low by CGI animated film standards (the average domestic gross for a computer animated film is $134,571,721), thus making Doogal the lowest grossing CGI feature in history.
Bloody awful poster too. Is it me, or is Google up the duff? I search for “magic roundabout 2005” to see what the newspapers said, and the first fifteen results are from the IMDB listing, and then there’s six from Youtube, a couple from Wikipedia, Yahoo etc.
another mishandling of Mike Judge was Office Space. the marketing it did get spent way too much mentioning Beavis and Butthead when the movie couldn’t be any further from it (except for Judge’s character in Office Space sounding exactly like Mr. VanDriessen.)
Definitely the winner. I remember hearing it was coming, but then it disappeared.
I’d say Serenity from Joss Whedon was extremely poorly marketed. It focused on that one shot early in the movie where River spread her legs out and pinned herself to the ceiling. Nobody realized it was anything more than a very forgettable scifi adventure.
This is actually the rule rather than the exception for Christmas movies. The release dates for the three Santa Clause movies, for instance, are Nov 11, Nov 2 and Nov 3. See also: Jingle All the Way, Elf, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, The Polar freaking Express - all November releases. The theory is that you get both Thanksgiving weekend and Christmas business - Thanksgiving being about as lucrative as Christmas for movies - any movies.
But made about the same amount as the second film in the series. ($35 million to $38 million). It’s just not that popular a franchise.
Maybe it was just me but when “This is Spinal Tap” came out in 1984, I had the impression it was an “Airplane” of rock groups- a silly parody. I thought it was alright but not great, mentioned it to some friends who agreed. it wasn’t until it came out on VHS/cable a year later and reading some reviews in music magazines suggesting it should be seen as much as an nod to the love-hate relationship that groups like The Who, Rolling Stones and Beatles often have.
The TV series of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was superior to the film (by a whole lot) but the film actually wasn’t bad. But I have wondered if the title alone hurt the attendance-it sounds like a cheap drive in film. And Pee Wee Herman was actually pretty good.
The mid 1970s “Filmgoers Companion” which was a readable synopsis of a lot of films, actors, etc (and stolen from me by my father when I moved out) suggested the “Bedford Incident” had poor advertising, or rather a campaign that tried to give thw wrong impression of the film.
Ironically, probably more people have seen this movie due to the notoriety of it’s suppression than would have seen it if it had been marketed normally, making it perhaps the best marketed movie in this thread.
Beat me to it. I had no intention of ever watching that movie until a friend dragged me to it. Blew me away. I think a lot of my love of that movie was specifically because the trailers were so misleading.
The worst was Sum of all Fears. It was a fairly mediocre Tom Clancy movie, but it had one innovative twist two thirds of the way through that probably would’ve made it memorable if you didn’t see it coming: that:
Unlike other “find the nuclear weapon in time” action movies, in this one the bomb actually goes off
Except of course, the twist is shown in great detail in the trailer.
Similarly, a recent re-release of the original Planet of the Apes had the famous last scene reveal printed on the cover of the box. I mean, I realize its a famous scene from an old movie, but still. There are plenty of people who weren’t alive when it was in theaters and will rent it to see it for the first time without knowing the ending.
The worst offender was What Lies Beneath. The trailer literally spells out the movie from beginning to end, hitting each twist along the way. I felt ripped off when I paid money to see it.
Right now I’m re-watching** Gosford Park**, because the excellent podcast Up Yours, Downstairs! is discussing it. Like one of the hosts, I hated it the first time I saw it. IIRC, it was marketed as a lighthearted, Agatha Christie style murder mystery. It’s really a drama about aristocrats competing to be the douchiest rich bastard while their servants watch it all unfold and sometimes get sucked in to the machinations. The murder is a maguffin for getting people to stay in the house longer so they can be assholes to each other even more, and more secrets can come out. The murder investigation is pretty much irrelevant.
Now, it’s a masterful interpersonal, inter-class drama, and I’m having a lot of fun watching said aristocrats be assholes this time around. But the trailers were terribly misleading and ruined the experience the first time.
This is a funny and smart animated movie that I can easily sum up in three words “time travel comedy” but for some reason the trailers shown on TV never even gave a hint it was about time travel. I remember some heavily edited punch lines to jokes and the singing frogs, baffling marketing!
It is a light hearted time travel comedy with plenty of genre satire.