Having a good movie isn’t enough to draw people to the theater these days. You need a killer movie marketing campaign. Click here to check out some of the best.
It doesn’t matter how good the movie is. If it isn’t marketed properly, it will fail at the box office. Hollywood studios understand this and go to great lengths to market their movies in unique and provocative ways.
While many movie marketing campaigns have been successful, some of them have reached heights that were never even thought possible. Below, we’re going to get into three of these campaigns. Let’s go!
The Most Successful Movie Marketing Campaigns
There have been plenty of successful film marketing campaigns over the years. However, the following 3 marketing campaigns surpassed all others.
1. The Blair Witch Project
There was no way that 1999’s “The Blair Witch Project” should have been as big as it ended up being. Featuring a cast of essentially unknown actors, and directed by the little-experienced Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, it should have been the exact opposite of a box-office smash.
What helped it rise to its remarkable popularity? A provocative, unique, and intriguing marketing campaign in which the film was treated as authentic, found footage. To solidify this idea, the filmmakers passed out missing-persons flyer design signs, televised fake broadcasts, and released phony police reports.
Slowly, but surely, the film became the talk of the town. And, before it was all over, a movie with a $60,000 budget had earned $248,600,000 at the box office.
Due to the campaign’s massive success, many horror movies are advertised with the same techniques to this day.
2. Borat
These days, Borat is a known commodity. Everyone in the western world and beyond is familiar with the naive, overbearing, and mustachioed reporter from Kazakhstan who is constantly making others feel uncomfortable.
However, it wasn’t always this way. In fact, until the film “Borat” hit the big time in 2006, he was nothing more than a bit character on the UK television show, “Da Ali G Show.” While some in the UK were familiar with him, very few individuals throughout the rest of the world had any idea who he was.
The result of this? Many of us thought he might actually be a real person.
So, when he showed up on foreign TVs acting like a fool in front of politicians, reporters, and famous television personalities, viewers were understandably intrigued.
This would lead to the film being a huge box office success. Though it had a budget of just $18,000,000, it ended up bringing in around $262,000,000 at the box office.
3. The Dark Knight
Unlike the other two films we reviewed, the 2008 Batman film “The Dark Knight” was designed to be a box-office hit. After all, it was made with a budget of $180,000,000. However, it far surpassed expectations when it went on to make over $1 billion at the box office.
While it is, indeed, a great film, one of the big reasons for its success had to do with its marketing campaign. With advertising for the film appearing a full year before the film was due to hit theaters, the general public was absolutely saturated in the “The Dark Knight.”
Promotion existed on a number of different fronts. Scavenger hunts were held in cities across the world. A fake political campaign was staged for character Harvey Dent, and a fake newspaper, The Gotham Times, was even passed out in some areas.
Are You a Movie Buff?
Sometimes movie marketing campaigns are more important than movies themselves. After all, the movies reviewed above aren’t the only ones which took off due to great marketing.
