Tim Tebow, the side-armed, truck-sticking, too-nice-to-be-real quarterback heaven-sent to the NFL (by way of Florida) might be coming to the New England Patriots. It has been Tweported (reported on Twitter – clever right?) that if Peyton Manning, one of, if not the biggest free agents in NFL history signs with the Denver Broncos, that the nicest guy in sports will be shipped to Foxboro to play for the most vilified franchise in professional football.
I can’t even imagine.
Here’s the tweet from Louise Cornetta, the program director of ESPN Radio, informing the Internet of the juice potential trade gossip provided by NFL insider and troll from Mordor, John Clayton:
Hyped-up headliners leave fans overloaded
March 20, 2012
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When Warner Bros released the first photograph of the new Superman, the studio clearly wanted to spark some advance fanboy and fangirl chatter. Super-advance.
The picture of actor Henry Cavill, muscles rippling beneath his heroic pseudo-leotard, was unveiled online last August. But the movie in which he will wear that familiar ensemble, Man of Steel, won't arrive in cinemas until June 2013. That's right - June 2013. If the Mayans were even half-right about this whole doomsday thing, we'll all be dead before then.
This approach to movie marketing, where the buzz machine cranks up early and feeds the blogosphere often, is commonplace. The Dark Knight Rises, The Amazing Spider-Man, the multiple instalments in the Twilight saga and The Hunger Games, the adaptation of Suzanne Collins's young-adult novel about a government-sanctioned teen death match, are among the many films engaging in varying degrees movie publicity foreplay.
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Sneak peek ... Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer in The Lone Ranger. Photo: Ross Duncan''There is so much competing for audience's attention that I think to go out there early and engage fans and make a project feel like an event is certainly an important thing to do,'' Heather Phillips, the chief marketing officer at Aspect Ratio, a movie marketing firm in Los Angeles, says. ''But you don't want to take away the mystery around it. You don't want to give away too much.''
The notion of engaging in a bit of premature audience seduction, particularly online, is hardly new. (Didn't The Blair Witch Project do that in 1999?) But, as the power of social media swells, the intensity of these marketing efforts - as well as the need to activate them increasingly early - is changing the game, allowing a movie's publicity campaign to often kick into gear well before production has even started.
Anne Hathaway as Catwoman. But devotees aren't the only ones who pay attention to the blitz; independent websites and traditional media outlets are itchy to share this material with their readers, too. And that means the past year has yielded what has felt, at a conservative estimate, like 5000 blogosphere mentions of The Hunger Games per day.
''It becomes news when there's a new poster,'' Anne Thompson, a veteran film journalist who writes the ''Thompson on Hollywood'' blog for Indiewire, says. ''It becomes news when you have the first look at art in a new movie, even if it's in Entertainment Weekly or USA Today's print edition [first]. It still goes viral very quickly.''
Jennifer Lawrence portrays Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games. Hence, they expect to watch Peter Jackson's video blog from the set of The Hobbit well over a year before the movie comes out. They want to examine controversial still shots of Anne Hathaway's Catwoman ears in The Dark Knight Rises. They insist on receiving a first glimpse of Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer dressed as Tonto and the Lone Ranger in the 2013 Disney film based on the ''Hi-yo, Silver'' hero. Otherwise, how else can anyone have a lengthy workplace conversation about how weird Depp looks wearing face paint and a crow on his head?
Actually, Depp and his bird raise an important point: the potential for all this movie marketing to backfire if it's not executed correctly.
''You can campaign however you want and you can be clever,'' Joshua Jason, head of a PR firm that publicises films and orchestrates Oscar campaigns, says. ''But you have to have a product that stands up.''
Hence, despite its attempts to fire up fans with striking posters and trailers filled with roaring white apes, John Carter landed with a loud thud at the box office. And even though, a year before its release date, director Jon Favreau brought Cowboys & Aliens stars Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford to the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con, that 2011 Western/sci-fi flick still flopped.
There's also the risk of overdoing the marketing to the point where potential audience members are already sick of the movie before the first screening.
Henry Cavill as Superman. ''They had released so much that when I saw the movie, I thought, I've seen this already,'' she says.
The Washington Post
Read Sandra Hall's review of The Hunger Games on Thursday.
