Answer by Adi Shankar, My Filmography: Lone Survivor (2013), Venom: #TruthinJournalism (Short) (2013) Broken City (2013) Killing Them Softly (2012) Dredd (2012) The Punisher: #DirtyLaundry (Short) (2012) The Grey (2012) Machine Gun Preacher (2011), on Quora,
Some Recent History on Movie Marketing:
The way movies are marketed is changing, has been changing at an alarmingly rapid pace over the past 3 years, and is due for major paradigm shift in the near future. For example, 4 years ago, the P&A spend (the dollar amount spent on marketing, or ‘Prints & Advertising’) a movie received was pegged at 70% of the budget of that film. So if ‘Die Hard 16: Old and Crabby’ had a budget of 100 million, then conventional wisdom dictated that the marketing expenditure had to be $70 million. This is no longer the case today; marketing expenditures have skyrocketed in recent years. Today, major releases routinely have production costs that are a mere fraction of their marketing budgets. The recent trend of low-budget horror and thriller films are a great example: The Purge, Insidious 1 & 2, Dark Skies, Sinister, Skyline Skyline, You’re Next Next, etc. All of them had production budgets under $5 million dollars, and marketing budgets over $20 million.
The Current Flaw in Movie Marketing:
The fundamental flaw in movie marketing is that it’s both very costly, and inefficient at matching a movie with its target audience. To be clear, this mattered less when movies had astronomical budgets, and were ostensibly produced for the mass market. However, the future of the movie business lies in niche markets – not in generalized mass appeal. Audiences are growing tired of the recycled, bloated, arbitrary, homogenized movie franchises to which their cinematic taste buds have become numb. Furthermore, movie budgets for niche and genre films (as opposed to tent-poles like Batman, Transformers, The Avengers, etc.) are rapidly dropping, as producers and executives realize that the film financing ecosystem is unable to support the outrageous budgets that were commonplace just a few years ago. It’s becoming harder and harder to justify the ineffective yet expensive marketing methods that are still commonplace today.
Thus, the next paradigm shift will come about when marketing companies are able to effectively and efficiently match content with the perfect consumer – just like Netflix does whenever you log on. So with that in mind, I would argue that if you want to break into movie marketing, a strong background in mathematics and/or computer science would be immensely helpful to you. The future is data, and he (or she) who writes the algorithm holds the keys.
The Bottom Line:
In the next five years, everyone in the US will have access to every piece of media ever made, anytime, anywhere, at the click of a button. New content won’t just be competing with its contemporaries, but also with everything from the past as well. In this future, being new, fresh, original, and having a strong, unique voice will be more important than ever. Having a hackneyed “marketing hook” that can “open a weekend” (a la The Purge or The Devil Inside) will eventually become irrelevant. The era of regurgitated clichés, or as they’re more commonly known, “event movies,” is almost over. What the DVD did for the careers of John Carpenter, Walter Hill, and Seth McFarlane, this new digital distribution revolution will do for a whole new generation of filmmakers, who can continue to make quality niche content and organically grow their audience over time.
- Why has Marvel Studios chosen not to put a number in the titles for its sequels to Thor and Captain America?
- Why did Arnold Schwarzenegger go so quickly from being the biggest box office star in the world to being a so-so action hero in a few short years?
- How does the revenue from a movie get split among actors/directors and everyone else?