Reply #134: advertise in saturation, hope for a good opening weekend

[jobendorfer]

The first time I saw this tactic was back in 1977 or 1978 with a film called _Damnation Alley_.
Yeah, the one with George Peppard spitting out the immortal line "Tanner! This town is filled with killer cockroaches!"
(Quite hilarious, since they're driving through the ruins of Las Vegas.)
I think they spent about five hundred thousand bucks making it, and probably half of that went into the Sherman-tank-on-steroids they drove around in the film.
THEN they spent probably forty million bucks advertising it on TV.
I mean to tell you, for three straight weeks, it didn't matter what channel you were watching(*), every 15 minutes, BAM! A _Damnation Alley_ trailer.
And it worked! They got a lot of people into the theaters, for about a week. Then the word got around. But by then they had made their money.

This is one thing that Twitter might actually help. If a new film opens at 7:00pm Friday, by 9:15 everybody in the TwitterVerse will know if it's a clunker and stay away. It might actually force Hollywood to raise the bar a bit.

In my own case: Hollywood is competing with Netflix and its vast library of old movies, old TV shows, the material that makes its way from the premium cable channels to DVD, and of course, foreign films. I'm afraid that Transformers II just doesn't stack up all that well against Hitchcock, Von Stroheim, Welles, Eisenstein, George Roy Hill, David Lean, Norman Jewison, Stanley Kubrick, Peter Weir, Geez, even a complete hack like Brian DePalma is cerebral by comparison.

When Hollywood can make a comedy as funny as _The Goodbye Girl_, or a drama as good as _In the Heat of the Night_, or an epic as good as _Lawrence of Arabia_, I'll start going to movies again.
Until then ... I'll stick to Netflix.

(*) To all those under the age of 35: back in 1977, there were only 3 channels, plus your local PBS station. But EVERYBODY watched them.
And if anybody knows how the hell Dominique Sanda ended up in _Damnation Alley_, I'd love to hear the story.