In sum, there was no doubt that, coming out of D23, John Carter had now officially transitioned into the “troubled” promotional zone. The film had gone from being an anticipated sci-fi tentpole without any measurable negatives as recently as of April, to a film that was now the object of a relentlessly negative narrative that varied greatly from any narrative the studio would have willingly put forward.
There was clearly a problem.
What would Disney do to counter the problem?
Media Silence From Barsoom
There is no definitive reading on when, precisely, M T Carney knew it was “game over” in her tenure at Disney. Most estimates from those knowledgable place it as likely coming in the aftermath of D23, in the early fall of 2011.
Carney being preoccupied with resuming her life in New York is certainly one explanation for what happened after D23 to John Carter publicity. There may be other factors as well. But regardless of why, what happened was that after D23 the Disney publicity machine yet again went silent about John Carter -- this time inexplicably so, because the release was now only 7 months away. There was another in-house marketed film under Carney’s supervision that was ahead of John Carter in the pipeline, and was occupying staff and resources -- The Muppets. There was also The Help and War Horse to consume resources -- but whatever the reason, in the weeks and months after D23, a baffling (for a $250M “tentpole” release) period of media silence ensued - a remarkable period of three months during which promotion for John Carter came to a complete standstill.
To place what Disney marketing did, or did not, do in the aftermath of the less than stellar reviews of the D23 presentation, it is helpful to make some comparisons to John Carter’s stablemate, The Avengers, which also debuted footage at D23 and which was slated for release on May 4, 2012, 8 weeks after John Carter.
First, the reaction to The Avengers presentation at D23 was, across the board, substantially more favorable than the reaction to John Carter. On Slashfilm, Germain Lussier reported, “The Avengers looks like it’s going to kick ass.”168 Ezequiel Guttierez of Hey U Guys 169 wrote that the film “could be everything Avenger fans have been waiting for.” Matt Holmes at WhatCulture.com170 reported on the “thunderous ovation” the footage from The Avengers received, and Joblo.com171 reported, “The film looks terrific, and yes, my expectations are pretty damn high.”
So, the argument could be made that coming out of D23, if anything, John Carter was the film that needed a high intensity marketing effort to counter the negatives that were piling up, and to make up for the fact that it was entering the marketplace with no large preexisting fan base. And The Avengers, riding a positive buzz en route to an expected successful release, might be forgiven for taking its foot off the pedal and relaxing slightly, confident in its position.
The opposite happened. The Avengers, secure in its market position and with 9 months until its release, came out guns blazing. During the week after D23, article placements emanating from the film’s publicity team included 140 buzz generating press placements comprising more than 20 different topics, all generated by official release of information on behalf of the film. The week after that; 120 placements on 40 different topics or releases of information. In all, between the end of D23 and the first week of October, The Avengers, with a comfortable nine months until its release, placed 390 media placements, never leaving the media or public consciousness.172
John Carter, acutely insecure in its market position and with only 7 months until its release, went silent. During the week after D23, the number of publicity placements emanating from the studio? Zero. And the next week? Zero. And the week after that? One -- a lone release of “new Helium Airship Design Concept Art” which was picked up by a handful of outlets.173 In all, between the end of D23 and the first week of October, John Carter generated 5 media placements monitored by IMDB.
Once again, John Carter had drifted into yet another inexplicable media silence period that would not end until an extensive interview of Andrew Stanton would appear in the October 17 edition of the New Yorker -- an interview that would stir up further woes for the now seriously troubled and largely invisible John Carter promotional campaign.
What about Facebook? During the same period, the John Carter Facebook page produced the following posts to the Facebook page:174
August 23, 2011: “Let’s test your knowledge of the Barsoomian language: do you know the word a Thark would use to say “Earth”?
September 19, 2011: “Show your support for the city of Helium with these concept art wallpapers of Dejah Thoris’s homeland at dusk.” (with downloadable graphic of Helium at Sunset.)
October 14, 2011: “Your ships cannot sail on light in Virginia>” - Dejah Thoris (with downloadable graphic of Barsoomian airship)
As an indication of how far behind John Carter was, and how damaging the inattentiveness and lack of marketing was -- the Internet Movie Data Base maintains weekly “MovieMeter” rankings which track the number of hits in the IMDB movie page and forums for any film, and from that generate a ranking. Going into D23, John Carter’s ranking, as of the week of August 21, was 899. The next week, August 28, it went to 804 presumably reflecting the D23 coverage. Then, as the radio silence descended, it’s weekly rankings plummeted from 804 on August 28 to 1545 on October 2nd.
The Avengers, by contrast?
The Avengers went into D23 ranked 17 on August 21. It came out of D23 ranked 15 on August 28 and never dropped more than 12 spots to 27, as a continual flow of articles, images, video clips, and more continued to emanate from the marketing team.
How could it be, one might ask, that two “stablemate” films, both tentpole franchise efforts at the highest budget level, both from the same studio and both about to be released in roughly the same timeframe, could have such a radically different media placement profile?
One interesting clue: In the week after D23, worked leaked out through Deadline Hollywood that Disney had fired the entire Marvel Marketing department, starting with Dana Precious, EVP of Worldwide Marketing and including Jeffrey Steward, VP of Worldwide Marketing and Jodi Miller, Manager of Worldwide Marketing.175 This was a step that had been rumored ever since Disney acquired Marvel in 2009. Disney’s official line was that Disney marketing would be taking over the marketing and handling the release of The Avengers and future Marvel movies.
Thus -- as if John Carter needed one more nail in its release coffin -- Disney marketing which had been struggling horrifically with John Carter even without the added burden of being responsible for The Avengers -- now had The Avengers on its plate.
But more trouble was coming.
The New Yorker Interview
One piece of the John Carter promotion puzzle that came directly from MT Carney was an arrangement which Carney put in place to have The New Yorker run an extended profile of director Andrew Stanton by Tad Friend.176 Friend visited Stanton at his home in Mill Valley, on the set of reshoots at Playa Vista, and accompanied him to the June 2011 test screening in Portland, Oregon.
The article, while generally favorable to Stanton, referred to him as “having a midlife crisis, an aberrant fling with a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar trophy film.”
More important was this passage:
Even as Stanton banked on that confidence, he knew that Disney didn’t fully share it. He’d always planned to make a John Carter trilogy, but the studio hadn’t yet green-lit a sequel, and didn’t seem eager to discuss the topic. It also nervously lopped “of Mars” off the film’s title, to lower the barrier between women filmgoers—who are famously averse to sci-fi—and Taylor Kitsch’s smoldering aura. Disney’s caution was perhaps understandable; earlier this year, the studio’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” grossed more than a billion dollars around the world, but made only a small profit because it was so expensive to produce and market. “John Carter,” which will be nearly as expensive, will have to earn about seven hundred million dollars to justify a sequel.
How Much Does John Carter Need to Make to Get a Sequel?
Director Andrew Stanton — the Scheherazade of Pixar, as his New Yorker profile calls him — wants to make John Carter (formerly known as John Carter of Mars) a trilogy, but Disney's only going to go for that if this first film is a success. A huge, huge success, apparently: According to a long, psyche-probing article, "John Carter ... will have to earn about $700 million to justify a sequel." That would put it among the 50 highest-grossing films of all-time, above Wall-E and Iron Man and around the moneymaking machinery of the first Transformers. Taylor Kitsch in a loincloth has its appeal and all, but jeez Louise.
This was picked up minutes later by Germain Lussier at Slashfilm: “John Carter Needs to Make About $700M to Earn a Sequel” in which Lussier wrote:178
$700 million would put the film in the top 50 highest grossing films of all time, something Stanton previously experienced with Finding Nemo. However, that’s a tough mountain to climb for a movie with an unproven lead star, unspecific title and little in terms of general audience buzz six months out from a March 2012 release.
Others picked it up from there, and within hours of the New Yorker interview hitting the internet, the notion that John Carter would have to earn the highly unlikely figure of $700M just to justify a sequel had put the scent of blood distinctly in the water.
As Slashfilm’s German Lussier acknowledged, such a figure was not entirely out of reach. Finding Nemo at $867M, was number 27 on the all-time Top 50 list. And Wall-E, at $521M, was at number 90, not too far behind. But the preposterousness of launching a film with as tough a marketing proposition as John Carter with a “par” level of box office set at $700M reeked of Hollywood hubris and made the film an inviting target. The fact that the marketing had been as weak as it was thus far, only added fuel to the gathering firestorm of negativity.
From this point on, everything about John Carter would be judged not just as one of the movies coming to the screen in 2012 -- it would be seen as a film that personified Hollywood excess -- it had become “Disney’s Folly.”
And so John Carter prepared to enter the all important final push of the campaign beginning November 30, 2011. Rather than being positioned for success, it was positioned for disastrous failure. Virtually everything had gone wrong that could go wrong. The title change in May had started the negativity; the first poster in June and trailer in July had failed to excite, it had skipped Comic-con, D23 had fallen flat; tales of a month of reshoots had led to disclosure of a “ballooning” $250M budget; then Disney had gone completely silent between the last week of August and mid-October, and the New Yorker comment about $700M being needed for a sequel to be greenlit had set off a chain reaction that had, finally and forever, altered the perception of the film from that of an anticipated sci-fi classic, to that of a bloated monument to Hollywood ego and excess that was doomed to failure by those egos and excesses. Now the game was to wait in anticipation and watch Disney’s Barsoomian Titanic sail into the iceberg awaiting it.
The one saving grace was that all of this was happening outside of the view of the vast majority of the movie-going public, most of whom had never even heard of the film. But those who had heard about it, and were writing about it, were the all important influencers and they had gradually become convinced by the ongoing series of blunders, miss-steps, substandard marketing materials, and media silence from Disney that John Carter was a train wreck unfolding in inexorable slow motion.
Within Disney, MT Carney knew that her stewardship as Disney President of Worldwide Marketing was coming to an end, and she was “okay with it.” She had never moved to California from New York, returning each week to Manhattan to be with her children. Now it was just a matter of time until the announcement was made, and her focus was increasingly on what would be next for her.
In October, a key Carney assistant, Ayaz Asad, was promoted to Senior Vice President, Marketing. At 35, Asad was young, but clearly a mover within the Disney organization. He had graduated from USC with a degree in economics in 2003, and had begun his career at Disney shortly thereafter, first in the audit department, then as a Director of Brand Marketing, a post he held from 2005-2010. When Rich Ross had taken over in October 2009, he had emerged from the shakeup as a Vice President of Global Marketing Strategy and Communications, a promotion that signified he’d successfully navigated the house cleaning that Ross’s arrival had triggered, and that he was viewed by Ross as part of the solution, not the problem. With Carney increasingly disengaged, it would fall to Asad and others to rescue the campaign, if indeed it could be rescued.
Battered and buzzless, with a newly minted senior VP in charge and with MT Carney’s attention elsewhere, John Carter staggered toward the final stage of the campaign.
The Final Push Begins
Joseph E. Levine famously said, “You can fool all of the people all of the time .... if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough.” While today’s blindingly fast, social media-driven word of mouth has altered the equation somewhat since Levine made the statement, the fact remains unaltered that money and message are both needed to get the job done for a movie at the top level of budget and hence, investment.
Buffy Shutt in “Research and the Movies” writes:179
Marketers must create a visceral, nearly tribal need to attend one movie over the three or four other new movies opening on a specific Friday; over the five or six holdover movies from two to four weeks earlier, one specific movie over all other entertainment choices -- renting a DVD, going to a concert, staying in to watch The Sopranos, choosing to attend one specific movie over everything else in life they could be doing....a lot of money is at stake and a movie can only be launched once theatrically. Once. There are no do-overs in movie marketing.
Because a theatrical campaign builds to a particular date, and because there are no do-overs, it shares many of the characteristics of a political campaign. Just as political campaigns constantly monitor the feedback to the candidate and his or her appearances and statements, so too does a theatrical campaign need to keep an ear to the ground and listen to the feedback that is available.
In the early phases of a “final push” theatrical campaign, the main mechanisms for measuring feedback are online evidence of “buzz” which comes in the form of articles and the comments responding to those articles, tweets mentioning the movie, Facebook posts, message board posts on movie and entertainment message boards, and posts on other microblogs and social media sites. A percentage of the overall theatrical campaign budget is allocated for research and this research provides those managing the campaign with real-time readouts of how the creative and other materials being released are faring.
Research is also typically conducted prior to the release of materials to the public. Trailers, posters, taglines, and other materials are all typically focus group tested, and many studios hire multiple design and trailer cutting houses to create completely different campaigns, which are then tested with focus groups before final decisions are made.
Apart from various forms of online monitoring via reputation management and social media monitoring software, four weeks prior to the release of a film the studios begin to get official “tracking numbers” provided under contract and accomplished the old fashioned way, via telephone interviews of likely theater goers.
All of this is designed to ensure that once a campaign launches its final push, the studio has at its fingertips the kind of feedback that will allow it to recalibrate and respond as necessary if the campaign is failing to achieve the desired resonance among potential filmgoers.
The John Carter campaign’s “Online Phase” would end, and the “All Media” phase would begin, during the last week of Nov
ember, 2011, with the key launch event being the release of the full theatrical trailer on November 30, 2011. Covering the final 100 days of the campaign, this is the portion of the campaign where as much as 80% of the marketing budget, estimated at $100M, would be spent, with the campaign making the transition from an existence defined almost entirely by a presence on the internet among influencers, to an existence that would include all areas of mass, mainstream media in such saturation that, if successful, it would result in more than 80% of Americans knowing plenty about John Carter, with at least 6 million Americans being so highly motivated to see the film that they would view it in theaters on opening weekend.
Another Misfire
As the final all-media phase of the campaign launched in the waning days of November, the campaign was once again coming off of a period of media silence. Since D23 in August, a paltry total of 45 publicity placements monitored by IMDB. By comparison, during the same period its main competition The Hunger Games logged over 1100 placements, and its stablemate The Avengers logged over 1400 placements.
The date when Disney broke the media silence was November 23. Not coincidentally, November 23 was the release date for The Muppets -- an event which freed up internal in-house personnel who had been working on The Muppets and would now turn their attention to John Carter. The first salvo was the release of an image of John Carter facing a Great White Ape in the Thark arena -- an image that would become the dominant image for all of the promotion that would follow. Disney chose to release the image initially through one outlet only, the summer preview issue of Entertainment Weekly.180 But the striking image was quickly replayed across the web on more than 50 outlets.
John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood Page 17