John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood
Page 25
I published the post, then read a heartfelt comment from a reader, Daniel Quesnel in which the author made a plea for “the Community” to rise up and help John Carter overcome the deficiencies of Disney’s marketing. There was a certain poignant innocence to the writing -- and I found it even more compelling and heartfelt for having that quality. I decided to publish it as a guest blog post:249
I'm not a professional writer but I want to say something. I've been watching the promotion of John Carter, and seeing the reaction. Somehow it seems that even though John Carter is likely a great film and has been getting a lot of positive reviews . . . still it can't get a good box office? Why? I don't really get how it works, when a really good movie is in trouble like this. We need to give this movie hope. I know in my heart, that this movie deserves it.
This is kind of like Bad. vs. Good characters, the Bad Character’s are always stronger until the end, but then a Good Character steps in, and gives hope. Disney did their part on advertising, but now it’s the Community is the only thing to help Disney. like basically how a Bad Community doesn’t give anything to a movie, and bashes on it, and calls it a copycat and everything, then we have a Good Community which is basically a shield for Disney, and the Good Community basically tells all those people that bash the movie that this movie is based this great book that brought sci-fi to the big screen, you know what I mean?
My point: It’s the community that needs to help this movie, not Disney.
I was intrigued by his reference to the “Good Community” and how we had to help. Throughout the brief history of The John Carter Files, a community of fans and potential fans had been growing and the tools of the internet and social media provided new opportunities to use our voices, and be heard.
Was there enough of a community now in place to make a difference?
The truth was, as the campaign had progressed, I was of two minds about our roles. On the one hand, The John Carter Files seemed to be having at least some minor but measurable impact by helping stimulate the appearance and reposting of more positive articles than would have been the case without JCF -- and it was doing this at a time when positive articles were needed. But on the other hand, realistically, how much of an impact could that add to a $100M marketing campaign?
Answer from my real self: Not much.
Answer from my dream self: Who knows?
Maybe if something happens . . .
Maybe if the fans band together using all the tools of social media . . . .
I won’t deny it -- of course I wanted to be some kind of leader who helped the little guys rise up and make a difference. That was my ERBian dream-self talking, that inner voice that believed, or wanted to believe, that the little guys weren’t helpless in this equation -- that the fans, and the influencer bloggers (who had more in common with fans than they did with corporate Hollywood, after all), could get together and turn the tide. So many of us had waited decades for this film, and now it was slipping away into oblivion. Maybe we could really do something, really make a difference.....
Nah. Who are you kidding?
Not gonna happen.
You’re being delusional, Sellers.
This is big budget, corporate Hollywood, not the indie-ville that you’re used to, and you -- even with all the other fans that have showed solidarity on JCF and elsewhere -- are nothing more than fleas riding on the Disney elephant. Be real. The movie is going down. ERB is going down. Your dreams of John Carter catching the imagination of the world are just that -- dreams.
It’s pretty much game over.
I stretched out on the couch and started looking for a Sunday night movie to finish off what had been a frustrating weekend. As I flipped through the channel guide, a text beeped in on my cellphone. I ignored it. Then another came through. And a third.
A flurry of emails were starting to hit my laptop as well.
Curious, I checked email: “Stanton pimped ya!” read one subject line, then inside: “On Twitter he pimped your fan trailer!” I checked and found the tweet.
Well that’s something, I thought.
It did not immediately occur to me that this could be the start of something substantial. If it had, I would have immediately started monitoring to see what happened next. But I didn’t do that. I registered the fact that Stanton had given us a pat on the back, allowed myself to feel slightly pleased, and that was it.
At least you put your money where your mouth is. The director likes your trailer. You weren’t completely delusional; your ideas at least made sense to him.
The next morning I saw that Stanton’s tweet had been retweeted 32 times, and following some of the retweets, I saw that many of them had been retweeted 20 or more times.
Nice.
Then I ran the aggregator program looking for John Carter stories for the daily John Carter Files News Feed and saw that a few influencer sites had posted our Fan Trailer, or more specifically, had posted articles about Andrew Stanton tweeting about our fan trailer, with an embed of the trailer that would play it on the site.
One of the first was Brendan Connelly, writing in BleedingCool.com, posted an embed of the trailer and wrote: 250 “That trailer was sanctioned by Stanton himself, given his blessing via Twitter. I think’s Kudos with a capital K and U at least, and perhaps even the D.”
Another blog, LiveForFilms.com, posted: “This is a brilliant trailer put together using bits from all the John Carter footage released so far. Director Andrew Stanton enjoyed it.”251
My first thought was that Brendan Connelly was someone who gets read widely . . . was it possible others might pick it up?
I felt a flicker of hope.
But it was just a flicker. It was 16 days until the release and the original hearty band of influencers, who were the ones most likely to pick this up, were being swamped now by the mainstream media that had come late to the game, as would always be the case, only getting into the act at the end but now dominating the narrative and reaching the many millions of potential viewers who only become aware of a movie in the final weeks before it is released.
The moment for the influencers had been earlier, much earlier. Realistically, ever since the campaign had moved on to the All Media phase on November 30, their role had shifted from being the dominant voice setting the buzz, to a niche of ‘insider’ voices with the mainstream media now in the game. Their seeds had been sown prior to the launch of the final push. Seeds that were sown now were just being planted too late.
But still . . . . could they still have an impact?
Dream self: Sure they can.
Real self: Nope. Too late.
Others began to pick it up.
One of those who read about it was Adam Chitwood at Collider.com. Chitwood published an article on the morning of the 21st under the headline: “New Fan-made Trailer for JOHN CARTER Sells the Movie Better Than the Film’s Previous Trailers,” which stated: 252
We’re merely a couple weeks away from the release of Disney’s John Carter and I’m willing to bet that a good deal of the general public still has no idea what this movie is about. The previous trailers and TV spots have tried in vain to sell the film as a big action-adventure pic, but none of that matters if your audience doesn’t understand why there are a bunch of CG people monsters hanging out in the desert. A fan-made trailer for the film has recently hit the web and it’s leagues better than what the Disney marketing machine has come up with. It clearly sets up the story and rightly sells the Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation as the precursor to basically the entire sci-fi genre. From Star Wars to Avatar, Burroughs’ source material served as the inspiration for some of the world’s most beloved sci-fi stories, and finally the tale that started it all is getting a film adaptation of its own. That’s how the movie should have been sold.
The embedded trailer followed the article, as it would on all the sites that picked it up. Readers were not just reading about the trailer -- they could click and view it without leaving the page they were on.
Harry Knowles and Alan Cerna (aka “Nordling”) of the geek-centric and highly trafficked movie site Ain’t It Cool News also saw it and posted: “A Fan-Made Trailer for JOHN CARTER sells the Movie Better Than Any Other Trailer So Far”253
This fan-made trailer seems to do what the official ones have not - sell the legacy of the stories as well as show how good the story is. I like this trailer a lot, and Disney could do worse than just buy this trailer cut from this guy and release it.
The Collider and AICN posts ensured that the story of the fan trailer would “go wide.” Within an hour other influencer movies sites were picking up on the story.
Russ Fisher at Slashfilm ran with it under the title: “The Best ‘John Carter’ Trailer Yet” and noted: “It’s a lot better than any of the others, both from the perspective of laying out the story, and for showing the scope of the film.”254
Neil Miller at Film School Rejects noted “If the marketing minds at Disney have proven anything with their campaign for John Carter, it’s that taking a vacation and leaving their first big movie of the year to the interns and office robots is probably not a good idea....” then went on to say:255
Behold this completely badass fan-made John Carter trailer, which outdoes everything Disney has put out thus far. I’m sensing a trend, here. Perhaps Disney, like anyone would be, wasn’t quite clear on how to market such a genre-defiant film. This trailer is far more representative of the movie you should be seeing on March 9.
All within a span of 12 hours, others followed -- Fused Film, Metacafe, Blastr, Badass Digest, Flick Daily, Live for Film, Hollywood News, Screen Rant, and more -- so that by the end of the day on the 21st more than 50 movie tracking sites had carried the embedded Youtube trailer, causing a viral bump on YouTube.
By February 22nd the number of sites carrying the trailer had grown to more than 100, and now mainstream media outlets were picking up on it. At Wired, Angela Watercutter posted: “Fan Trailer for John Carter Tops Studio’s Best Efforts,” and wrote: “the new video uses footage we’ve already seen before, pulled from fan site The John Carter Files. But it’s far more engrossing than the actual studio trailers we’ve seen to date — right down to the “epic tale that inspired 100 years of filmmaking” tag line.”256
Fox MovieFone’s Mike Ryan wrote: “pay the guy who made this a few thousand dollars for editing Disney’s footage together better than Disney did and get it out there. Everywhere.”257
The Hollywood Reporter ran an article that said in part: “this is the kind of trailer that should have been out there in the first place, something that gives you a sense of the story and the scope. In fact, one person in the office here just had his mind switched and now wants to see the movie.”258
Eventually the LA Times259 and CNN260 wrote about it, exploring the phenomenon of a fan-generated trailer having an impact on the promotion of the film.
Visitors to the John Carter Files quadrupled overnight, with page views spiking to 50,000 a day before leveling off in the 30,000-40,000 range.
On YouTube, the views began to pour in, 21,000 in the first day from the embed on Ain’t It Cool News alone, and by the end of the second day it had registered 100,000 views overall and was outdrawing the official trailer by a 2 to 1 ratio. In terms of “likes” it drew a ratio of 92 likes for each “dislike” -- 8 times better than the official trailer and six times better than the official trailer for The Hunger Games.
Watching the reaction unfold, I was under no illusions that what was happening around the fan trailer could have enough impact to right the promotional ship for Disney. But it was clearly causing some degree of measurable uptick in the media coverage of the film--at last there was something positive being written about it.
I began to daydream again.
What if fans, with the tools of social media at their disposal and supported by bloggers and creative professionals, were able to “change the narrative” about John Carter. It was a long shot -- but then, to use a word Burroughs had liked, the whole “damphool” enterprise was a long shot.
Perhaps, after all, belief in self and the ability to affect outcomes was not just a daydream or an indulgence in personal fantasy. Perhaps you have to be a dreamer in order to believe in the possibility of having an impact and going for it to do something. Perhaps that dream-self was not just an indulgence -- perhaps it was an essential persona that all those who “dream big” and go on and do it possess.
Or maybe I just couldn’t tell the difference between fanciful fiction and cold Hollywood reality.
The Premiere and the Tweet Reviews
Disney normally holds its premieres at the company owned El Capitan Theater on Hollywood Boulevard but Oscar preparations made that impossible for the John Carter Red Carpet Premiere on February 22nd, so the L.A. Live Theater became the venue, with the after party held in the ballroom of the JW Marriott Hotel.
Coming six days after the unveiling of Nikki Finke’s “Shockingly Soft Tracking” debacle, the premiere faced an uphill struggle but Disney, recognizing the grimness of the situation and knowing the film itself wasn’t a stinker, partially lifted the embargo they had placed on dozens of journalists who had viewed the film at the press junket in Arizona, allowing them to tweet about the film, but not write full reviews yet. This turned out to be one of the few shrewd moves of the campaign, as Disney and Stanton were rewarded on the day of the premiere with a “floodlet” of favorable tweeted mini-reviews about the movie that were picked up by the entertainment media and replayed throughout the ecosystem. This, plus the positive chatter about the fan trailer and a new unofficial “Mondo” poster by J.C. Richards that far outclassed the previous official posters, plus premiere buzz (what’s to criticize about a premiere?) added up to a better day than the campaign had seen in quite awhile, if ever.
At ScreenRant, Sandy Schaefer posted “John Carter: Fan-Made Trailer, Mondo Poster, & Early Reviews,” saying:261
Disney is pushing hard for its John Carter adaptation to become a ticket-selling smash when it hits theaters next month, but early tracking results are not boding well for the film’s box office prospects. Many people have chalked that up to the bulk of the movie’s marketing material, which has mostly painted the classic sci-fi literary adaptation as a bland “Disney-fied” variation on such effects-heavy blockbuster properties as Star Wars and Avatar (and other thematic descendants of author Edgar Rice Burroughs’ trendsetting John Carter source material, ironically enough).
Today, however, we have new material in the form of a nicely structured fan-made mashup trailer, a beautiful Mondo poster, and the release of several entertainment journalists’ Twitter reactions to John Carter (spoiler: they’re largely positive). All of these items suggest that director Andrew Stanton’s adaptation may turn out much better than Disney’s official marketing campaign has indicated.
At the premiere, after the screening Taylor Kitsch was feisty when anyone probed him about the publicity. “We made a f---ing great movie. It’s such wasted energy if I worry about what a million people I don’t know are going to think. I’m excited for people to enjoy the journey.”
Producer Jim Jacks, who’d had the film at Paramount, praised Taylor Kitsch to anyone who would listen, and claimed Stanton’s ending was “better than the book.”
Twitter reaction in the hours after the film screened was the best yet, with strong positives across the board. “John Carter is much better than you’re expecting it to be,” tweeted Slashfilm’s Peter Sciretta. Hitfix’s Drew McWeeney tweeted, “I am no longer in danger of being killed for saying that I quite liked John Carter.”
Other mini-review tweets rolled in praising the film:
JOHN CARTER is a great movie. For 2 hours I was transported to another time and place. Can't wait to see it again. Don't miss it.
— Steven Weintraub (@colliderfrosty)
Also the effects were amazing. The action scenes inspiring. And the music was fantastic. Seriously....JOHN CARTER is not to be miss
ed.
— Steven Weintraub (@colliderfrosty)
I am no longer in danger of being killed for saying that I quite liked "John Carter.”Full reviews are still embargoed, though.
— Drew McWeeny (@DrewAtHitFix)
The best parts of JOHN CARTER are Woola and Dejah Thoris. A generation will be ushered into puberty by Lynn Collins.
— Devin Faraci (@devincf)
John Carter (aka John Carter of Mars) is MUCH better than it looks. A great sci-fi film. Plan on seeing it!
— John Campea (@johncampea)
The tweets, passed about on smartphones among those at the premiere after-party, bolstered what two days earlier was expected to be a funereal mood, generating high spirits that carried many of the key players well past midnight at the Marriott.
Could it be that the tide of negativity was turning?
Throughout the last week of February and first week of March a struggle for control of the narrative played out in a way that underscored the sense of inevitability and doom on the one hand, and last-ditch-maybe-this-can-be-saved optimism on the other. On the positive side, on blogs and in social media there was a ripple of positivity that had proved elusive until this moment. There were a number of elements that converged to help make this happen: The lifting of the tweet embargo was generating positive digital word-of-mouth as journalists tweeted mostly favorable quotes about the movie; the Andrew Stanton-endorsed fan trailer eventually would land on 400 media outlets; the unfolding press junket was being used by Andrew Stanton and producer Lindsey Collins to fire back at those pushing the “Hollywood-out-of-control” storyline, and the new Mondo movie poster by artist J.C. Richard arrived featuring the sense of scope and wonder that had been lacking thus far in Disney’s promotion of the film.