Ever feel like your opinion as a movie fan doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things? That Hollywood simply goes about its way with no concern for the hearts and minds of the audience? Me too sometimes, but then I see evidence that we’re not just idle cash machines to them.
In Variety there’s a great article about how the web presence of movies, driven mostly by creative fans, is changing the entire landscape of how movies are marketed. They use current fav SNAKES ON A PLANE as an example of the changing times. You can click here to read the whole write up, or check out some snippets below.
THE MOVIES that shatter Hollywood’s marketing conventions are never the ones that people remember 50 years later. They’re feckless genre movie that come crawling up from the bowels of the studio system and somehow take up residence in the popular imagination.
Now there’s “Snakes on a Plane,” the trans-Pacific airline thriller from New Line starring Samuel L. JacksonSamuel L. Jackson, recently dubbed the “best worst movie of the year” by Wired magazine.
If you haven’t heard of “SOAP,” as it’s known among its many online enthusiasts, just think of the most obvious reason a movie would be called “Snakes on a Plane,” and there you have it. What makes “SOAP” more than a footnote in a typically cacophonous summer is the marketing storm that’s formed around it. Most of the hype has been generated by people who aren’t on New Line’s payroll. Not all of it is flattering. And there’s almost nothing New Line can do about it.
“You used to create your trailer and one-sheet and TV spot and you were pretty much done,” Nancy Utley told me. “Now you create all this Web material and give fans access to the tools to play with it. It’s much more fun.”
If that’s bit baffling to the studios, who are famously control-freakish about their intellectual property, it’s equally baffling to YouTube, whose staff of 25 people in San Mateo, Calif., can’t even keep up with what’s on the site. YouTube launched in December. Today people are watching its videos at a rate of 40 million a day.
So keep at it compadres. Oh, and get started on the anti-CLASH OF THE TITANS remake buzz right now!
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