Move Over Lord of the Rings

So I have to admit I have been saving this blog for some time now because of all the excitement I have inside of me for this movie. I remember in high school when I first read The Golden Compass and was enthralled by the world Phillip Pullman created. It seems New Line Cinema has bought the rights to this film and are planning on releasing the first installment, The Golden Compass, this December. The film actually has some big name actors including Nicole Kidman as Mrs. Coutler and Daniel Craig as Lord Asriel. I am just hoping this movie leaves a lot better taste in my mouth than the last book-to-film movie I watched, Eragon.

It seems New Line is definitely selling out quite the pretty penny for this film. The studio is spending $150 million dollars on the first installment , which is more than half of what is cost the studio to produce all of the LOTR films . Showing of the trailer began six months prior to its release during the summer at Pirates of the Carribean: At Worlds End, and has showed no signs of stopping yet.

Since you can expect not to any brand tie ins since the movie takes place in an entirely different world, New Line has used their web site as their biggest marketing tool. The site allows you to customize it among sixteen different languages showing the broad range of audiences it hopes to attract opening day. The site begins by allowing you to explore Lyra's world as well as the people and their daemons that populate it. The site also explains to users what the movie is about just in case someone enticed by the trailer hasn't actually read any of the books.

The coolest part about the web site however adheres to coolest part about the books. In Lyra's world, each person is accompanied by a daemon (pretty much your soul that lives on the outside of your body). As a child, you daemon can shape shift from animal to animal depending on how you are feeling, but settles into a phase as you get older. The web site allows people to figure out what their daemon would eventually settle into if they lived in Lyra's world and what this means about their personality.

New Line has also tied in an agreement to show the trailer at the Rockefeller Center are the opening of the ice rink on October 9th. This promotion will eventually end in November which will result in one lucky fan to win a trip to England.

New Line has actually went as far as debuting and extended five minute long preview at the Comic Con held back in February. This clip gives viewers a much deeper look into the movie and a better glimpse at what is to come. Check it out below!

Disney and Pixar are back for more

Ok, so I'm not really sure if it's ok for me to like cartoons being that I'm at the age of 21, but I have to tell you when Disney and Pixar get together to make a movie, I can't help but go and watch it. Well the fearsome twosome are at it again. After the release of their smash hit Ratatouille which brought in over $200 million, the gang will now shift from Paris to space.

The newest movie to be added to the ranks is Wall-E, the story about a robot who is literally, the last thing alive on earth. The story takes place in the future when humans have destroyed the planet. To solve the problem of cleaning up all the junk they create cleaner robots. The humans leave earth in hopes of returning. The problem occurs when the programming fails, and the robot program fails. Well, that is, all except for Wall-E, whose programming didn't fail. Watch out ladies and gentlemen, he's a one man cleaning crew. The surprising thing is this is actually a love story about Wall-E and another robot named EVE who was sent back to earth to see what was happening.

Disney showed off their first trailer way back in June , allowing it to follow the common trail of being advertised during the premier of their newest creation. Their brand new trailer, which was freshly released on October 1st, gives viewers a slightly better view of what the movie will look like. Disney has also slapped in a nice little advertisement in the beginning of the Ratatouille video game introducing the movie in an infomercial style about the Wall-E robots. The advertisement prompts you to visit the corporations site at Buy N Large to find out more about their Wall-E line of robots. I highly recommend checking out this site. You can tell Disney and Pixar definitely put out a pretty penny to make this extremely nice site.

Check out the preview below of the newest Wall-E trailer. I have to admit, the little guys is pretty cool so I think this will be another movie I will have to kidnap my little cousins for to go and see (that way I don't look weird in a movie theater full of ten year olds. Everyone wins in this situation).

The Time and Place

Unlike most of the American public this weekend I traveled to the cinema to check out the last installment (or is it?)in the Resident Evil movies. Right off the bat let me just tell you one thing, it was a good movie. I'm tired of the movie getting bashed over and over because of some of its short falls. Come on people, its a video game movie, it's not supposed to be some Oscar Nominee. It's a movie about zombies and viruses. So, if you like those kinds of movies, I highly recommend it. If not, save your money and your views.

The biggest thing I noticed when reading the reviews was the consistent bashing people did about the apparent product placement throughout the movie. Watching it I did notice one company in particular, Sony, who had a few products included in the movie, most dominately their VAIO computer which is used by every lab scientist. I thought this might be a fun idea to explore and demote as best I could.

It's funny how people were extremely apparent to it in this film when pretty much every movie ever made has some product tie in somewhere. Resident Evil clocked in with a total of 11 products being shown throughout the entire film. To the avid reader, this may seem like a lot, but is actually a relatively low number when you look at other films. Take for instance the low budget hit Superbad that clocked in with 34 different product placements or The Bourne Ultimatum with 59.

While most people complain that they hate being bombarded with these images from corporations, I think everyone need to keep in mind the fact that movies aren't cheap. Those high tech CGI scenes that we all know and love cost the company a pretty penny. The company needs to do whatever it possible can to reduce these costs, as well as combat the costs of promoting the movie once it is done. A studio can spend anywhere up to about 18 million dollars just to get the name of its movie out there. Slap that on to 35 million dollar budget and you got a pretty hefty charge on your credit card.

I think no one said it better than Michael Bay, director of the newest summer smash hit Transformers. For a long time he had been receiving criticism for his product placement in his movies.


" There are products in everything in everyday life. Do people think there shouldn't be brand names or something? Everything is branded. I hate commercials when they take logos off of stuff. It's not real life."


I for one appreciate when I'm watching a movie and see the actually Pepsi logo on the side of a can, rather than one blotted out. It helps the movie flow. It's the little things in movies that make them believable, such as brands. It'd be funny to take them away and then see how much people start complaining.

Product placement is an extremely interesting topic when it comes to movies. A cool site to visit is BrandCameo, a site that actually counts the number of brands that show up in a movie. Another cool site all about product placement is Product Placement News. I highly recommend taking a few minutes to view each page.

That movie with the dragons in it...

So I'll be the first to admit I'm not the avid movie guy I used to be. College and sports have definitely taken a toll on the marketing messages I see and hear for new movies coming out so I feel if studios marketing campaigns can reach me, then they are good enough to blog about.

Well, that is...most of the time. Have you seen the trailer for Dragon Wars (or what people on the street are callin' it, D-Wars)? The answer to that is most likely. Have you seen the actual movie? The answer to that is most likely not. The movie was created by Director Hyung-rae Shim and stars Jason Behr (better known for his character of Max Evans on the WB's Roswell) and Amanda Brooks. What a lot of people don't know is that the movie was actually created in large part for the South Korean audience and is a sequel to the 1999 un-smash hit Yonggary, which was later brought over to the US and renamed Reptilian.

What surprises me about the movie is the huge marketing and creation budget they allowed it to have. The movie originally cost 33 million dollars to make, which is a pretty big chunk of change. It was able to make most of that money back however seeing as how the movie was highly successful in South Korea where it pulled in 55 million dollars so far. However, over here in the US where you couldn't turn a channel without seeing the movie preview, the movie has only made around $10 million in its first two weeks, which is what we refer to ladies and gentlemen, as a flop.

Shortly after its release, the movie was continually bashed and made fun of on virtually every movie web site. Rotten Tomatoes has given it a 24% and one out of four stars at my colleges very own newspaper The Ithacan (we are a film school, I trust they know what they are talking about). The even bigger shocker is that apparently the company has not learned its lesson in losing money in the United States. Hyung-rae Shim shocked the movie going world when he announced that a Dragon Wars sequel is already in the works for 2009. Apparently, he didn't get the memo.

The Grudge?.. Nope. The Ring?...Wrong Again. One Missed Call?...You got it

It seems that us fantastical Americans are having some trouble coming up with movie plots of our own these days. Following the release of The Ring in 2002, movie studios have been buying up Japanese horror movies left and right and creating their own remake.

The newest movie to join the ranks is One Missed Call starring Edward Burns and Shannyn Sossamon. This Japanese horror film remake centers around pretty much the same idea as its foreign buddy The Ring. People receive a voicemail from their future selves which describe the date and time they will die, only for it to come true. Shannyn Sossamon's character Beth witnesses her friends slowly being picked off one by one. As the police enter, most of them give her the cold shoulder thinking she is crazy. Edwards Burn's character Detective Jack Andrews however believes her due to a previous event in his past that claimed the life of his sister. Beth soon moves from the spectator position into the game when her cellphone shows that she has one missed call (duh duh duhhhhhhhhh).

Although I couldn't find any information on an apparent cell phone service they would use in the movie I began to think to myself the reason why for this. It being a horror movie I completely understand why some companies might not want to tie their name to it. It should be interesting however to see how much sales boost for the ring tone that plays when you get "the call" once the movie has been released.

So in closing, I leave you with a preview of the poster for the new movie. I've also attached the cover of the DVD for the original One Missed Call (Chakushin Ari) movie. Feel free to enjoy it or be repulsed, the option is up to you. One Missed Calls opens in theaters on January 4th, 2008 if you're interested in checking it out.

An Unusual Marketing Tactic

Its seems like it was just yesterday I was heading over to the cinema to watch the highly anticipated summer flick Transformers. After watching the movie however, I didn't come home to look up things about the movie but instead facts about a movie preview I saw.

Anyone who saw the movie knows the movie preview I'm talking about. After it was done showing on the screen, I watched as everyone in the packed movie theater turned to the person next to them and began discussing what in the world the movie could be about, or more importantly, what the name of it was.

I'm talking about the new J.J. Abrams movie that doesn't even have a title attached to it yet. Since the human mind needs closure, the title 1-18-08 (its release date) has become the known name.

The movie preview opens up as we watch a farwell party going on for a man named Rob who is currently leaving NYC to live in Japan. The party seems to be going fine, that is until the power goes out. Pedestrians run to the street to see what the noise coming from the center of the city is caused by. The coolest part of the preview is that it looks like it is shot entirely through a home video camera. Then we hear another roar, and the Statue of Liberty's head comes flying into the street.

J.J. Abrams, who is most commonly known for his hit television series Lost, is partnering with Paramount in keeping the project extremely secretive. Many speculations have come out since the release of the trailer including the idea that the movie is perhaps named Cloverfield, all that the fans know is that the movie centers around a monster attack in NYC.

With such a simple idea of not putting a title to a good movie, Paramount has created one of the most highly anticipated movies of the new year. On its release date, searches for the movie spiked up an impressive 88% with fans trying to figure out what exactly the movie was all about. If you think about it, if they did attach a title to the movie, I don't think fans would have been equally impressed. I'm sure they would have still looked for it, but not like they have been. People are always intrigued to find the answers to secrets, which is exactly what this movie is doing. The studios even went as far as to not even release the trailer to any news corporations and tore it down for the internet, making the movie theater one of the only places to see the trailer. Paramount took a simple idea of buzz marketing and pretty much used it to its full advantage. Props to Paramount.

Want to know more? Hope on over to my bestest buddie Jovanna's Viral Marketing page for her interpretation on the buzz marketing sensation known as 1-18-08.

Lets Head Back Through the Wardrobe...

Disney and Walden Media have officially released the poster for their newest Chronicles of Narnia film, Prince Caspian. Although this film is originally the fourth book in the chronological order of the series, Disney and WM have decided to produce it next to adhere to the aging of the actors as well as try to follow the storyline C.S. Lewis intended.

The four Pevensie siblings once again find themselves in the enchanted lands of Narnia 1300 years after they left. The land they once knew and loved has been destroyed and it is up to them, along with the help of Prince Caspian, to tip the scales of good and evil.

The movie was originally intended to be released in December of 2007 but was pushed back to the summer of 2008 after conflicts arose. Walden Media will be releasing another movie entitled The Water Horse which was originally supposed to open around the same time as the Narnia movie. Since the company did not want its two movies competing at the box office, they figured that Narnia would have a good of shot if any in the summer running after becoming the number one selling DVD in 2006.
As part of their beginning marketing tactics, Disney opened up its door to run a fanart contest in which internet users could submit their doodles for the film. For a preview of all the fantastic work, click here.

Disney and Walden Media have also announced their intentions of beginning the filming of the Voyage of the Dawn Treader hopefully before the big Hollywood Strike takes effect. Supposibly the contracts had with Screen Actors Guild, Directors Guild, and Writer Guild will all end sending Hollywood into a scramble to produce movies. The companies hopeful release date for this movie will be one year later in May of 2009. Walden Media has also made the fourth movie in the series, The Silver Chair, top priority.

Its no doubt that the release of the poster is just the tip of the iceberg for these movies. With powerful funders behind them like Disney and Walden Media, items such as action figures, books, and DVD collectors items will be pushed onto the shelves in no time. I for one am excited for the movies since I was read them as a child, and am looking forward to all the Narnia movies Disney and Walden Media can shove in my face.