Wednesday, November 14, 2007

More Boob For Your Buck


It's hard for me nowadays to not automatically draw my attention to anything that involves having Angelina Jolie in it. Even before the huge fad of thinking of her as sexual icon, I always saw her as a role model due to how well rounded she is in everything she does. She seems to be one of the only actresses I know that can appear in such diverse roles and still sell who she is to the audience.

The newest movie, which opens this Friday, she will be appearing in is Beowulf. This movie is an adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon epic poems under the same title. I remember reading some of these poems in grade school and loving them. I'm hopeful that Robert Zemeckis will be able to bring this story to life since he did so well with other movies like Back to the Future and Forrest Gump.

The interesting, and saddening fact revolves around the item that Beowulf will actually be a PG-13 rated film. A blog that I constantly look at, Movie Marketing Madness, brought up the interesting fact that even though the movie is PG-13 rating, their marketing tactics seem to not be. This in turn brings me to what I mentioned above, and how I believe the fad with Angelina has not been subject around her work, but actually about her breasts.

I don't get as much time to watch TV as I would like to, so I am unsure about how well their marketing campaign is fairing on the "boob tube". However, after being in NYC last weekend I realized the extreme guerrilla marketing tactics they were using with their poster campaigns. As we passed station after station on the subway I noticed that pretty much everyone had not one, but at least four separate posters hanging up in their walkways. The posters can be seen pretty much everywhere you look, and not just in NYC. The main part of Chris's blog focus was the picture of Angelina, that I have showed above, and how you can see that Paramount is definitely going for the "sex sells" attitude.

I feel like the marketers of this movie however haven't tried to market the most interesting fact of the movie. Up until about two weeks ago, I thought the entire movie was not CGI, or motion capture as they call it. Zemeckis is most commonly known for using this technique in one of his previous films, The Polar Express. This idea lends itself to many ways they could have went about with its campaign, but I feel like perhaps the studio chose the easy route of slapping a big picture of Angelina's boob up on a billboard.

Paramount has also used a non-traditional advertising route by releasing four comics in October to further promote the movie. Also, look for the Beowulf game to be on your local retailers shelfs.

2 comments:

Kim Gregson said...

5 points - 1 post

Anonymous said...

No doubt about it that sex sells. Somewhat disheartening though to see the lengths people will go to to sell it. But I suppose that is merely a reflection of the general population that revels in instant gratification.
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