This Bad Marketing Is Tremendous Content

Most Hollywood filmmakers will tell you that marketing is a necessary part of their business. Movies need audiences, and that means movies need to be sold. It’s unglamorous and tedious, but if you believe in the film you’re making, you want it to reach the widest audience possible. In Hollywood, that requires a studio’s marketing department, the people who cut the trailers, design the posters, and map out a press strategy to sell the movie. As the media environment changes and becomes more crowded, the difficulty increases. Thirty years ago, you could release a couple trailers, some TV spots, do a cover for Entertainment Weekly, and run a simple junket where print journalists were clearly delineated from TV journalists. Today, you’re in the biggest attention war in human history, struggling to break through to audiences who have countless options for how they want to be entertained.

I sympathize with the movie marketers who feel obligated to throw everything at a wall to capture attention. The problem is the press is no longer the press; they’re competitors. Major outlets are vying for the same attention as movies rather than providing coverage, which means marketing departments are now in a tricky position of balancing their incentives against those of mainstream media, where selling the movie becomes secondary to gathering eyeballs for the flashiest content. However, in going to major outlets, the substance of the movie becomes lost, and you’re no longer conveying a particular movie as much as you’re merely supplying talent so a media organization can gather ad dollars. 

Look at the playful banter between Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson during a Vanity Fair lie detector video, where they were ostensibly promoting their new movie Die My Love. This is the kind of stuff that’s gold to a publication’s social media strategy because it allows for short-form video and coasts on the charisma of two bona fide movie stars.

While you can put a 15-second ad for Die My Love in the pre-roll and you can slap “Presented by Die My Love” on the title card, look at the description:

The "Die My Love" stars take Vanity Fair's infamous lie detector test. Is Rob jealous of Jennifer's Oscar? Does Jennifer think 'The Hunger Games' is cooler than 'Twilight'? Does Rob wish he was Gen Z? Does Jennifer really think everyone hates her?

These are all questions designed for virality. They’re playful without being cutting, and hitting big terms (Hunger Games, Twilight) that will pull in those specific audiences. But where is Die My Love in all this? Admittedly, any psychological drama about the isolation and madness of motherhood is going to be a difficult sell (Jennifer Lawrence knows this), but the film itself largely feels like an afterthought here. Mubi, the film’s distributor, knows Lawrence and Pattinson are a draw, but they’re being utilized here in a generic way. They could be promoting anything, and for the casual moviegoer who knows The Hunger Games and Twilight but not the work of director Lynne Ramsay’s (whose movies have always been biting character dramas such as Ratcatcher and We Need to Talk About Kevin), you could believe Die My Love is just an offbeat romance rather than the story of a new mother going insane.

Mubi encouraged this approach, making a video of its own titled “How Well Do Jennifer Lawrence & Robert Pattinson Know Each Other?” The video kicks off with Lawrence asking, “What was my go-to snack on set?” and Pattison bantering back, “A lot!” Laughter ensues. Fandango followed suit with “Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence Interview Each Other About ‘Die My Love’” although the answers include “the secrets to acting drunk, working with Sissy Spacek, being bad drivers, and secretly commenting on social media.” 

This is a common framing for all movies, regardless of subject matter or tone. It’s the “let’s have fun on the press tour” approach. Admittedly, press tours are grueling (imagine getting asked the same set of questions for roughly eight hours straight every day. I don’t care if you are rich and famous and it’s part of your job; it still sucks and I sympathize), and I understand wanting to keep things light to keep the talent upbeat, but you have to remember there’s a movie here. Marketing departments are using a one-size-fits-all approach here, catering to pre-existing structures because they want to go back to their bosses and say, “That J-Law & R-Patz video we did for Vanity Fair has over four million views!” Studio execs aren’t exactly sure how Internet traffic works, but they like big numbers, and so the marketing department works to deliver big numbers in the hopes that it translates to success at the box office. 

But it didn’t. Even by indie film standards, Die My Love underperformed. The movie only pulled in $2.83 million across 1,983 theaters on its opening weekend. Perhaps Mubi hoped that they would see a repeat of the numbers they got for the dark and twisted The Substance, a film that opened to $3.2 million before pulling in $77 million worldwide. But The Substance has a glossy finish to its body horror as well as a comeback narrative for star Demi Moore. It didn’t have to fit into the generic “The movie stars have fun hanging out” box that so many outlets push for their content needs. Furthermore, CinemaScore, which is a useful metric for understanding how well a marketing campaign lined up with audience expectations, reported a D+ score for Die My Love. Mubi, in their desire to bring as much attention as possible to the movie, not only failed to break through all the noise but also made audiences feel misled. 

While studios and entertainment outlets try to find a symbiotic relationship, the incentives of the Internet mean that there’s no room for anything outside the content designed for algorithmic success. Is there a way to sell a surreal downer of a movie like Die My Love? If there is, it’s not going to be in the Vanity Fair Lie Detector. Through that lens, the movie is vestigial to Vanity Fair’s content goals, and the outlet isn’t interested in what Die My Love is about. It’s one of those times where, if you wanted to do right by the film, you would have your chief film critic or film reporters go for the substantive material, except whoops, Vanity Fair laid off those people earlier this year. This dynamic is great for Vanity Fair, where their Die My Love video performed far beyond other Lie Detector vids (and perhaps part of that comes from Mubi or Vanity Fair paying to boost the video to YouTube users), but the film exists in the background to this content creation.

You can see a similar dynamic with Edgar Wright and his new movie, The Running Man. Paramount went all out in marketing the movie. In addition to star Glen Powell hosting Saturday Night Live this past weekend, the film has really pushed Wright’s cinephile status, even though he’s made a generic blockbuster based on a Stephen King book. He’s done the Criterion Closet, created a week’s worth of Cinematrix puzzles, did a video for Cinematrix, talked about his action influences with Letterboxd, all to make his film-loving identity a selling point for a movie that has almost none of his personality. And yet for all this, Lionsgate, a smaller studio with a smaller marketing budget, easily beat The Running Man at the box office this past weekend with the third Now You See Me movie. 

To be fair, William Goldman’s famous maxim about Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything,” still holds. There is no set playbook for making a hit movie. But watching the campaigns for Die My Love and The Running Man, I see a lot of flailing. At most, the films are helping boost the outlets, but not driving anyone out to see the films themselves. Part of that is a tough marketplace, but we can’t overlook how other recent movies have found a way to accurately convey what they’re doing and still get people excited. Director Ryan Coogler released a video to explain different formats and aspect ratios for Sinners. It’s educational, entertaining, and as part of that movie’s marketing strategy, it led to Sinners being the fifth highest-grossing movie of the year so far. Barbie did all the typical marketing stuff, but they led with the inventive “This Barbie Is” campaign, which helped separate it from all the other ad noise.

You can argue that Sinners and Barbie succeeded because they were better movies, and I agree that you need positive word-of-mouth boost to pull in bigger numbers. But marketing departments can’t always work with great films or movies that are easy to convey. Sometimes they need to do more with less, and yet we’re seeing a strategy where the movie itself is almost irrelevant. It’s not just product, but a secondary product to whatever an outlet with a successful YouTube channel or TikTok presence is producing. There are times when that overlaps, and you have a mutually beneficial arrangement. But more often, we’re seeing people toil away on a movie for years, all so someone can watch a 2-minute TikTok clip taken from a 17-minute YouTube video made during the promotional campaign.