Here is why our BDM didn't take off like we had hoped!
POSTED BY: GutsC1
UPDATED: Thursday, February 2, 2006 21:40
VIEWED: 8715
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While your theory on the action trailer is apt there were a number of other problems with marketing. For example there were a few comercials on tv before our BDM opened. I caught a few around 11:00 pm during the Daily Show. However, after the opening weekend, when we reached number 2 at the box office all the advertising just faded away. How can you pull advertising after just the first week and expect that people will know the movie is out there? Unfortunately, many people I talked to had never even heard of the movie. Too few people saw the trailers and commercials, which as stated above where not that appealing to begin with.
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I believe it was also just a bad year at the boxoffice. People just weren't going to the movies as much. I know lots of folks that wait for a movie to come out on DVD, even if it's one they WANT to see, because it's cheaper and more convenient.
Also Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent raise in fuel prices hit peoples wallets. Made it hard to justify going to the movies for regular folks.
I think the poor marketing, bad year, late release, too short a time in theatres and the hard to market concept all ganged up on our beloved movie and made for heartache.
We will just have to make them understand with DVD sales. That is all there is to that.
" You hold. Hold til I get back." Mal
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I also think that the marketing of the film misfired bigtime. Not that Universal weren't behind the film, (cos I think they were -in a way Fox should have been) but I think that they simply focused on the wrong demographic.
As I understand it, the first batch of prescreenings were not organised solely for the fans, but for the general public. However once word got out amongst the Browncoats that the BDM was being shown in advance, the hype snowballed and I honestly think Universal thought they had the marketing sewn up. The only problem is, they never needed to market the film to us in the first place!! They were just preachin' to the choir. Even if I had never seen one trailer or poster or scrap of media coverage before the film opened I would have been there opening weekend.
Don't get me wrong I loved the trailer, especially the UK one, I loved the River Tam sessions, I actively looked for any and all interviews and articles I could find on the BDM, but my point is - I was already a fan. To me, the marketing campaign was tailored to the sci-fi/teenage/MTV audience - which limited it's appeal - instead of a broader audience.
Anyone I tried to sell the film to was just plain confused: is it a comedy, a horror, an action film, a western, a sci-fi? In my humble opinion the marketing should have sold the film as an action-adventure, a la Indiana Jones - but darker. We all know how difficult it is to sum up Serenity accuratley in a few short words but that is what was needed to draw in the uninitiated. I was also disappointed not to see any of the actors appearing on chat shows like Jay Leno or Conan O'Brien, I think that could have helped persuade people to go out and see it. Ah well, my rant's over. What? I'm not bitter, not in the slightest.... 
We're still flying.
That's not much.
It's enough.
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Based on last weekend's US boxoffice results, my theory is that the BDM didn't take off because it didn't have enough men dressed as fat old women. When your movie has a man dressed as a fat old woman, it practically sells itself.
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lol at the fat old women thing!
But seriously, the problem with "action heroine flicks" is that they are written by guys, for guys, and then the hottest possible star is found to star in them.
Frankly, they suck.
We need action about women written by WOMEN with actresses who can act. Wouldn't that be charming?
And yes, the marketing for "Serenity" was entirely WRONG! Hell, I didn't even know what it was about until AFTER I'd seen it.
Sad. But true.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SuicidalDuckling:
When your movie has a man dressed as a fat old woman, it practically sells itself.
The realization that Big Momma's House 2 made more in one weekend than the entire domestic run of Serenity is rather horrific to me (like a story H.P. Lovecraft would write using long chains of adjectives like "eldritch" and "abominable" and whose protagonist would eventually go mad).
------------------
"Remember, there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over."
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I heard about Firefly when it came out because I was a Big Buffy/Angel Fan but the show has cancelled before I ever saw an episode all the way through.
-The trailers last year just made the film look stupid so I never saw it until I saw "Out of Gas" and "Our Mrs. Reynolds" on the Sci-fi channel Marython. Only then did I go rent the DVD. Which I loved
...
come to think of it those were the perfect episodes to watch before the seeing the film because they had nothing to do with River
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Yeah, I never saw FireFly on Fox, though I would have had I known it existed, as a fan of BTVS/ATVS.
SBDM's full-length trailer spoils the entire story in a nutshell. Once you've seen the trailer, there's no need to see the movie. It's possible to OD on "action", as my own music video of Serenity The Pilot proves. Fox execs should have done a pre-series trailer like this, to presell FireFly for 6 months, like done with Star Wars episode 1:
FIREFLY SERENITY PILOT MUSIC VIDEO:
http://radio.indymedia.org/news/2006/01/8310.php
That's amazing that SBDM "broke even" when star movies lost money, probably due to payroll for overpaid stars.
But the average American is hurting, strangled by a 50% tax rate that Gangsta Govt wants to double ASAP. It's hard to pay $20 a head to see a movie, when you can't afford to fill up your gas tank. Or if you're living in a FEMA concentration camp, because your city was bombed by the White House and CIA.
It's hard to buy a movie ticket if you're dead, because you're one of 2.5-million Americans genocided in Death Camps, er, "hospitals" every year:
www.lef.org/magazine/mag2004/mar2004_awsi_01.htm
2005 was a horrible year for the US economy, with 200%/300% inflation for gasoline, 40% devaluation of the dollar, and currently the US govt is billions of dollars overdrawn on its Federal Reserve Bank Corporation overdraft loan of $7-trillion (Fed Bank Inc run by Sir Alan Greenspan Knight of the British Empire). 30-million criminal aliens are sucking millions of jobs and billions of dollars in welfare, exported to the Mexican economy, with immunity from arrest and prosecution. The US govt is borrowing billions of dollars from foreign investors to pay US factories and farms to export millions of US jobs, to nations like Communist China that brags how it wants to nuke 200 US cities to invade Taiwan. GM and Ford fired 1-million US employees in 2005, as they exported their factories to Commie China. $70-trillion dollars was looted in 2005 from govt CAFR pension funds, not counting the private pensions that disappeared from the bankrupt airlines, the dead steel mills, bankrupt ENRON, et al. King George II has outspent/outborrowed all the previous 44 presidents combined, selling his slaves as collateral to foregn powers that now own the mortgage on USA, including Commie China (is Joss psychic?).
VIDEO DOWNLOAD:
State of Dis Union
Voice by our Commander In Cheat
Music by Counter Coup and John Lee
http://radio.indymedia.org/news/2005/09/6733.php
Mafia-owned movie theaters don't have to turn a profit to survive, since they're merely laundering CIA cocaine and heroin profits, so they can survive no matter how few customers they have.
The owners of Serenity, Universal Studios, is owned by Carlyle Group, the CIA-run Pentagon profiteer, owned by Sir George Bush Sr Knight of the British Empire (CIA), British Prime Minister John Major (MI5/6), the German Queen Elizabeth Sax CoBerg Gotha of England (MI5/6), and the Bin Laden family (CIA/MI6). After King George II promoted a Knight of the British Empire as president of Afghanistan, heroin production is up 10,000%, with its "parliament" now legalizing opium farming, just like the Bolivian "parliament" did with coca farming after the CIA's cocaine-coup. At $1-billion/ton retail price, heroin is worth its weight in gold, and that money has to be laundered through CIA/MI6 banks and Wall Street, including "Hollywood" (which is already 80% exported). So the narco-kingpins who own Serenity have unlimited money to launder by marketing Serenity, IF they wanted to. War is a racket, and business is GOOD.
SBDM tells the story of the Bush Gang's CIA MKULTRA Project Monarch mind-kontrolled slave program. Either this is whistleblowing by Joss, or an inside joke and insider trading by CIA, to cash in on their investment, and perhaps to reinforce their multi-million man/woman army of sleeper zombies. So is this why Fox censored FireFly, owned by Sir Rupert Murdock, Australian Knight of the British Empire (MI6), and why Universal sandbagged its marke
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Why didn't any of the stars do the talk-show circuit? I don't remember seeing anyone from Serenity on Leno/Letterman/etc.
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Any thoughts on the release date? I've always been of the theory that this should've been a summer movie...where people do more things, people get out of the house more, see more movies (even if moviegoing in general was down it would've done better than a late Sept. opening???)
Also, 7 weeks in theaters? And if you look at the numbers, most of the "big movies" get 3100 screen openings where Serenity got 2100 screens for TWO weeks. The third week was 1700, then the next week less than a 1000?
Jesus crimeny on a pogo stick...the movie has to be IN theaters for people to go see it! (not to mention that September was the WORST month ever....unfortunately you can't really blame anyone except Mother Nature and oil companies for that one. Well...you could blame.....oh never mind....)
The only reason I got to see Serenity was because I happen to live in a major metropolitan area, and I saw it on the last week of it's release (I came really late to the party). I saw it on the last night that I could've possibly seen it. It was a sunday night, late, and the theater was half full of people.
On a Sunday.
Sunday, LATE.
In the 7th week of the release.
OK....someone explain to me why these people get paid so much to constantly F*** up everything they get their hands on?
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How much is that little Geisha in the window?
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