Many of the other tracking numbers are finally shooting upward these last days leading to release because of the studio’s Hail Mary marketing onslaught. The “First Choice” numbers for kids doubled over the weekend, and “Want to See” among tweens, teens and young adults has risen. Meanwhile, the studio is dragging out every trick in the Christian playbook, including that PR firm to the religious right, Grace Hill Media, to persuade Holy Rollers in flyover country to see this takeoff on the already tired Noah’s Ark tale.
However, I suspect the Passion of the Christ crowd wants stories based on the New Testament rather than the Old Testament. Leave it to heathen Hollywood not to comprehend that. But while the movie now has a very high “Awareness” factor, which is a given for a follow-up to a successful film, the crucial indicator of “Unaided Awareness” is still too low.
“All our different marketing campaigns are finally starting to really crystallize and accelerate. But we don’t have ‘Unaided Awareness’ yet where we need to see it,” a Universal source admitted to me last night. That’s the risk a studio takes when 40 percent of its marketing campaign, by design, is back-loaded like this one.
Rightly or wrongly, that strategy was devised for this crowded summer marketplace, where tent pole after tent pole is opening weekend after weekend, and moviegoers are already showing signs of sequel fatigue. But it’s already pissed off producer-director Tom Shadyac, who had an explosive meltdown during a Universal marketing meeting about his pic. I’m told Ryan Kavanaugh of Relativity Media, whose Gun Hill Road 2 independent co-financing fund is one of the movie’s principal investors, is among those privately criticizing ’s marketing as well.
Then again, Universal is accustomed to being crapped on for this movie by more than just the animals. No one would have given a rat’s ass if the movie’s budget hadn’t done a slow creep way beyond its initial $150 million comfort zone to $210 million and if the film hadn’t been an 89-minute, CGI quickie in a genre that’s usually cheap to make. (Universal’s own R-rated this summer cost a mere $30 mil.
) But reporters couldn’t ignore the first smells of failure surrounding a piss-poor combination of animals that didn’t want to perform, children who couldn’t work long hours and weather in Virginia that didn’t cooperate. had already been put into production when Marc Shmuger and David Linde entered into their shotgun marriage to run Universal Pictures, with Universal Studios president-COO Ron Meyer playing minister. There wasn’t much the duo could do for this inadequately budgeted film in the first place, beyond renegotiating profit-participation deals so the studio could have at least a prayer of recouping its dough.
the studio worried about Many of the other tracking numbers are finally shooting upward these last days leading to release because of the studio’s Hail Mary marketing onslaught.
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