When I told Cami I was doing a comic about Miss March, she had no idea what I was talking about. I think this teaches us an important lesson about marketing. Whereas I seemed to encounter a commercial for this film every four seconds on MTV and G4, it’s evident that the studio was not doing much by way of advertising on HGTV or TLC.
Just an observation.
Then again, considering Miss March came in 10th this weekend, maybe they didn’t advertise enough? I’m not even sure why I’m going out of my way to make a joke about it except I couldn’t think of anything funny to go along with Race to Witch Mountain.
This has nothing to do with the movie, but writing a joke about Playboy got me thinking about the first time I encountered the magazine. I was 8 years-old and was over at a friend’s house. He broke out a few copies that belonged to his dad. It couldn’t be a more cliche telling if you tried. Although I remember this kid was maybe a year older than me and, even at my own young age, I found it unfair that he had access to this kind of stuff when I didn’t.
In hindsight, I kind of have to wonder what kind of Dad leaves nudie magazines somewhere easily accessible for his 7 year-old son to find them.
I never really got into Playboy. I remember thinking when I got to college that I would get a subscription. But I didn’t have a credit card to get a subscription and I didn’t have the nerve to go to a magazine shop and to one. So, instead, I read Maxim for a year. Then I realized that Maxim is basically Playboy for guys that don’t have the nerve to buy Playboy and gave up entirely.
Maybe it didn’t matter. I had a roommate in college who had a poster of a woman taking her top off and he positioned it opposite the door so that you were greeted with it every time you waked in the room. It was a real crowd-pleaser on Parent’s Weekend. Nevermind asking Cami to come over. I didn’t spend very much time in my room that year. Seriously – where do you even buy posters of topless women? Even Spencer’s Gifts draws the line at underboob.
You may have read the news that Watchmen wasn’t able to hold on to the top spot at the box office this weekend. In fact, it was down 67%, which is kind of shocking for an event film like this. Or at least for a film with so much hype surrounding it. Even Speed Racer only dropped of 53%.
What does this mean? Well, I think it means that negative word of mouth not only caught up with Watchmen, but it dragged it into an alley and suffocated it. I guess David Hayer’s plea fell on deaf ears.
I don’t take in particular glee in reporting Watchmen’s failure. If anything, I’m disappointed that it might keep Warner Bros. from releasing a more thorough Director’s Cut.
But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit some satisfaction for keeping my expectations at a level where I wouldn’t end up feeling hurt by an inferior product. For better or for worse, Zach Snyder delivered pretty much what I expected him to.
And that’s all she wrote.
That’s about all she wrote for me, too. Incidentally, if you visited the site over the weekend and left a comment on any of the blog posts, they were probably tied up in Feedback Purgatory as I was out of town over the weekend on a little mini vacation. I went with Cami and my sister-in-law to the Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois.
This is how we kick off Spring Break in the Brazelton family. Not with warm-weather destinations, cocktails or wet t-shirt contests. We keep it educational.
At any rate, if you left a comment over the weekend, they’ve all since been approved. Most of them revolved around Watchmen. So you can either go back into those blogs and continue the conversation or pick up where you left off here!
Talk to you soon!
I think it's about a guy who falls into a coma and when he wakes up, learned his old girlfriend is now a Playboy Playmate.
Hmm! I guess I don't know very much about this movie!
This would be a good opportunity to do some more "research!"
I don’t know if I would go so far as to say Maxim and Playboy are that much alike. Maxim’s articles are much more crass, as is the overall tone of the mag. Jokes aside, the articles in Playboy are actually fairly good, or at least they were back when I read it. It was actually the only part of the magazine worth paying for. There’s certainly much better pornography out there, so buying Playboy for the three short pictorials per issue filled with incredibly heavily airbrushed/photoshopped women who don’t really show much doesn’t seem like a good value proposition if all you care about is, well, you know.
I used to really like Maxim for the jokes and the captions they would throw into photos. Yeah, they’d have a pictorial of some hot, young starlet. But after a while, it felt gratuitous. At that point, you might as well kick in the extra buck and buy Playboy.
>>”… I didn’t have the nerve to go to a magazine shop and to one.”<<???
You were in college and didn’t have the nerve to go to a magazine shop (like, say, 7-Eleven)?
Ah, typos. My bestest friend.
Rented Speed Racer this pass week cuz no one at the time wanted to see it in theatres with me. And now i am kicking myself for not going by myself!
since i rented i have watched it three times! Three Times!!! i love this movie so much!
its really a shame that it didn’t do well cuz i would have kinda have liked to have seen a sequel but o well.
and as for your cliche playboy story mine is about the same except my friend was a year younger, and his dad also had Penthouse; which just seemed really dirty when i was kid.
glad to see that watchmen is probably going to fade away. i didn’t like the movie at all. some parts were ok but not enough for me to want to sit around for almost three hours to see them again. i have two buddies who loved the film but they can’t explain why. So im chalking it up to “Lets love the movie just to spite our friend who doesn’t” well shame on them. Shame!
Underboob. Heehee!
I like that term. I’m going to make more liberal use of that one.
In all seriousness, I only ever bought one porno mag. It felt like a glorious waste of money when the internet is full of all the free porn in the world. Of course, much like Tom, I found my first one at 8 as well. I lived in a dirty trailer park (quite literally) and found one in the snow. I spent a lot of time outdoors that day.
Of course, at that age, we didn’t have computers and net access the same way we do today. Once I was a teen though, i couldn’t see spending $7 a mag for porn when a high speed internet connection was $50 a month, and I could look at port, play games, watch movies, etc.
Well, that, and for Christmas on my 16th birthday, my grandparents gave me a bag of porno mags. You should have seen the look on my mother’s face. I think she was even more embarrassed because it was HER parents. What a great Christmas. Apparently I had been REALLY good that year. =D
It’s hard to believe that was 10 years ago now… wow does the time fly…
Miss March is one of those movies where I’ll chuckle at the trailer whenever it plays, and have a Futurama marathon when it’s actually released. That is to say, it’s not on my radar (in fact, things are a bit dry for me until State of Play and Crank 2 hit theaters). But I’m sure I’ll pause on it at some point in the future when it’s replaying late-night on Comedy Central.
Watchmen may not have shot ahead at the box office, but it’s still not a failure. Domestically it’ll still pass 100, maybe end at 120. With International it’ll get back the rest of it’s costs and then some, and DVD sales will help too (I can’t imagine the Director’s Cut not being released, what with so many looking forward to it, some even waiting for the DVD (though thankfully not on a Grindhouse level)). Considering the tough sell the movie is, I think that’s about as good as it ever could hope to do, and that’s still pretty good (it just happened to be in the shadow of the runaway successes of Iron Man and TDK).
Dragon, I’m not so sure it’s the shadow of Iron Man or Dark Knight that prevented Watchmen from finding its place in the sun. At this point, I kind of blame Warner Bros. for attempting to turn a niche film INTO a blockbuster like those two.
I think if they had concentrated on the story instead of the visuals and kept the hype to a minimum, a $56 opening weekend in March would have been something to be proud of. Put your focus on the target audience. Make it a cult film. Instead, they tried to make it a movie for everyone. Ultimately, I think that’s why it failed.
Is it awful that I kind of wish it cut to the Tom and Jared “doing research” in a library looking at the dewey decimal system instead of them sitting next to each other “doing research” with boners?
Lonnie, that’s actually a really good punchline! But how does one illustrate a couple of guys thumbing through index cards at the library and use that to communicate “research?” Hmm… I’ll have to think about that.
Danielle, I didn’t put any particular thought into which Playboy covers I chose other than what was readily available and inoffensive. I knew I wanted to at least use something that was a few years old, though – as to imply that maybe they were breaking in to their Dad’s stash, or something.
Oh man, how I’ve missed punchlines like these XD
I’m just enough of an old fart that when I saw the first ad for MISS MARCH I thought, “Wow, they made a movie out of the J Giles Band song ‘Centerfold’!”
Long time reader, first time commenter – I just had to say “well done” on the Sherilyn Fenn cover 🙂 She’ll forever by Audrey Horne and Helena to me.
Well I’m not saying it being in the shadow prevented it from going bigger, merely that it will be closely compared to them (in terms of recent comic book movies), and been seen as a failure compared to them. When it’s not.
With Synder, he’s a very visual director, so I doubt the movie could’ve been toned down in that department. And I just don’t get the hype thing, probably since all I ever see about a movie before it’s released is the trailer and the occasional comment on some message boards (ignoring the boards on imdb, which I consider No Man’s Land). Being the adaptation of what is widely considered the best graphic novel ever made, it was bound to be hyped up into something solely from the comic crowd arguing over whether it’ll be good or not (a never-ending argument, it seems). And no studio (at least one the size of Warner Bros.) sets out to make a cult movie, it just isn’t business friendly. They had a movie based on the aforementioned book, and they tried to get as much as they could out of it. And they did it by trying to make it for everyone (at least, made it look like it was for everyone). And like I said, it didn’t set any records (beyond largest screen opening for an R rated film), but it wasn’t a failure.
And yet, I keep seeing it touted as a failure. It’s like it’s turning into (financially speaking) Waterworld (another movie that, despite what people keep saying, didn’t actually flop).
It’s nice to see debate about watchmen being more mature than “OMG look at all the penis!!”
However I am getting tired of people A: Not respecting opinion in the matter and B: Pretending to be insiders by judging things like grosses and numbers.
We’re fans. Not professionals. Our opinions will differ. And whether we agree or not no matter how much complainging on the net we do, it will most likely not even blip on the radar of the fat cats who actuallly make these decisions.
K.I.S.S. review: I liked the movie. It had faults and could have been better executed but I reacted the way I did in the source story. ” OMG they realy went there!” And the superhero deconstruction and right of the individual and right for the masses debate was intact.
vaguelee, I see where you’re coming from. No, we’re not professionals. But, also, the numbers don’t lie. And while the data can be manipulated to a degree, if you look at past trends and compare them to what Watchmen was able to accomplish… well, it was a bit underwhelming.
If people enjoy Watchmen, I don’t begrudge them. I’m not trying to convince them it’s a bad movie. But I am at least trying to make them a little more suspicious of marketing and the lengths studios will go to package and promote a movie for the masses when said actions ultimately end up hurting the film.
Like I said before – if the emphasis were placed on the story and not the visuals, Watchmen would have been a sleeper hit. Instead, they weighed it down with hype. When it didn’t leave a very big ripple, people start looking at it sideways.
Postscript: I also understand what you’re saying about our complaining not having an effect on the fat cats who actually make the decisions… but I don’t think that’s true. The internet is the world’s largest water cooler. People trade gossip and opinions at light speed out here. An opinion about a movie can been made even before it hits screens. So while our complaining might not change a film in production, it can certainly alter the way a film is marketed to it’s audience.
If the studios aren’t taking the temperature of the internet at least once a day, they’re fools to ignore it. Where else can you get a steady stream of consumer opinion and feedback? In the old days, they’d do a test screening or two and that was it! The rest of it was flying blind!
Tom, good points. i was kind of on backlash mode after some heated debates at the theater were I work and said the argument I thought of when I sat down here. I do agree with what I said but I am glad to have a place here to get these things out to people who think. Keep up the good work
Weird. I thought my family was the only one that went to Springfield for Spring Break…