THB #452: Selling Wonka

Many movies have failed in spite of really good marketing. No movie has ever succeeded without really good marketing.

There are so many ways to do great marketing. It can be highly reflective of past marketing and comforting without the potential ticket buyers even realizing it or it can be wildly original and challenging… or a thousand things in between.

I like and respect Anthony D'Alessandro at Deadline a lot. But he also makes me crazy sometimes. Like today. He rolls out a notebook full of the studio’s efforts for Wonka like these were the key choices to a good opening. I mean, it’s like the studio sent him the list of everything they did and he just ran it. Comscore gets its (in this case ridiculous) mention. EntTelligence gets its “really?! you can do math on the back of a napkin?!” mention.

Then Anthony makes a truly absurd run about musicals, ending with, “It just takes a hit or two to revive interest in any genre that’s been deemed dead (in other words, there’s hope for more pirate movies).” Oh, bullshit.

Thing is, The Color Purple could open really strongly next Monday/Christmas Day and through that whole first week of release. I won’t take that to be the ressurection of musical movies either. I don’t accept that musicals are a dead form for audiences… and therefore cannot be resurrected. The bigger challenge for Color Purple will be international. But we can have that conversation next week.

But back to Anthony… it gets worse… “Wonka was arguably able to have a full-bodied marketing campaign in a way that many other well-intended movies in the fall, i.e. The Marvels, The Creator could not.”

Sweet lord… really? We are covering for the failed Disney campaigns… again?!

I’m sorry… but if someone can open Five Nights at Freddy’s to $80 million two weeks before, you can’t blame The Marvels’ $46 million opening on actors not being available to promote the film or COVID or whatever excuse you have. You can blame the movie itself… you can blame the date… you can blame misogyny… and yeah, you can blame the strikes for not opening to $60 million instead of $46 million (though even that is a stretch). But the marketing did not convince potential ticket buyers. At all. That is the job.

Truth is, Warners should be pissed off at Legendary for pulling Dune 2 from November because if that film had hit - which it would have, as a sequel of a film that opened to $41 million with a day-n-date streaming opening at the tail end of the COVID closed-theater period - that would have likely added another $20 million to Wonka’s opening and another $100 million to Wonka’s overall run. Even with Tim in dry dock.