Hello World! Sorry it's been a Sahara's trip without water since I last posted a blog post. Hopefully, you'll see the fruits of my labors soon as I vie to get my latest novel, Gamespace, published ^_^. In other news... a lot of stuff has happened, from our new prez providing REAL news (As opposed to the fake kind) yet bullying businesses to make employees vaccinated or fire them, to a military standoff with Russia where one side doesn't want to be surrounded by Capitalists while the other doesn't want smaller nations to be bullied into being Communist. What is right? Who knows... But I'll tell you here what is wrong: Deceptive Marketing! I was listening to Chris Gore (Haven't looked into his background yet... Hoping he's not crazy or have a MeToo case pending...) on Film Courage talk about marketing in movies and how he believes marketing has been SO good recently that awards should be given out to marketers. I agree with him on both fronts there, but then he said his third, much more relevant point: That the marketing often doesn't match the finished product. It was a revealing point to me, because I thought I was the only one who created a Youtube list for awesome trailers, but I could barely stomach the viewing of the same movies those trailers supported, notable examples being The VVITCH (So boring with an EdGy stupid ending, and I love tragedies), X-Men Age of Apocalypse (Ugh...), and recently, Nightmare Alley (It was a decent movie but was more anti-climatic than a dud grenade). Yeah, I hear you saying even bad movies have to advertise, and it's not the marketer's fault if the movie sucks yet they do THEIR job properly, yet I'm saying it's not the bad movies you have to worry about, and this in turn creates far worse problems for marketing as whole. Take for example the Marvel cinematic movies, notably Infinity War and Spiderman: No Way Home. Everyone knew these movies were going to be bangers, but Marvel still felt the need to release misleading trailers on both ends to misdirect rumors and surprise expectations (The Infinity War ones misled on the sequence of events by playing with Thanos's stones, no pun intended, while the NWH one was so laughable they had to take it down. Mind you, an entire panel of people must have greenlit that trailer...). However, when does a trailer, essentially a commercial for a product, downgrade from being misleading to being an outright lie? When does experimentation turn into malpractice (a genius correlation I'm paraphrasing from Chris Gore)? Is the line only drawn when the movie is successful? It appears the answer to that question is yes because, as a wise man once said (Many wise men have said this, but I'm going to pick Squealer in Shinsekai yori): "If you win you're a hero; if you lose you're a villain." Again, a paraphrase, but the point being I never saw such marketing tactics as acceptable. If a billion dollar, entertaining movie did it, why can't a less successful movie do it? Why can't a movie create a purposefully misleading trailer to trick a different target audience into seeing it (After my wife and I saw The Favorite, we joked on how it would be funny if a Conservative Christian family brought their children to see it, thinking it was a 18th century black comedy, which is how the movie was advertised, when it was actually a lesbian love story)? The danger is, like when a customer for a miracle tonic gets disappointed when his grand panacea tastes like piss, the problem with creating misleading trailers for movies is eventually you'll have your audience lose confidence in your median all together. They'll no longer be able to trust the trailers, the movie equivalent of a product showcase, just as gamers are becoming more weary of highly hyped yet buggy games in their industry. Yes, Video games are different than movies, but movies are currently under threat from streaming services. So why lie about what your movie is presenting when people can just instantly stream it? Why include the misleading trailer to begin with? In conclusion to my rant, audiences should no longer tolerate when a film studio, whether they're as big as Marvel or as small an Indie warehouse with a shoe-string budget, decides to create purposefully misleading trailers to attract audiences, or even mislead, audiences. What's good for the goose and good for the gander, and what people are mildly annoyed with now might become a large selling point to ditch the movies when a misdirecting trailer leads viewers to something insulting. I could even go off on how this misleading advertising for results has become an even more fervent trend everywhere, especially in politics, but that's an argument for another time.
And so ends my first rant of the year. Do you think misleading trailers are a problem, or do you think they add excitement to entertainment? Did you think Squealer was right in Shinsekai yori? Was The VVICH a better family movie than The Favorite? Please tell me what you think down below, and Peace out...
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MAYJOR E. JohnsonAll updates for my projects, any news I find interesting, and my personal thoughts will go here. Archives
February 2022
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