Movie Marketing III: Mystery Box

Film is a mysterious industry, both in production and story value. It use to be that the mystery of how movies were crafted was part of their appeal, but in today's world of the internet few secrets remain about the process of making a movie. What filmmakers do hold on to, though, is the mystery of the screen. High profile films like The Dark Knight Rises or The Amazing Spiderman have a hard time staying ahead of bloggers who would spoil secrets, but sometimes it is those secrets that make a film so great. In this third installment of Movie Marketing, we'll examine keeping Mystery alive and how it relates to the different levels of spoilers.

Movie Marketing II: Trailers

Continuing our conversation of how movies are marketing, we turn now to what people have the most contact with: movie trailers. A trailer is the truest form of visual adaptation. Where a product has a poster or albums have singles, motion pictures have theatrical trailers. Trailers, from original teasers to final TV spots, serve as tools of information for the majority of movie goers who do not research films themselves, giving trailers the power to make or break how audiences perceive a movie when they make that decision to buy the ticket. As a case study for this power, I'm going to examine the progression of trailers for the upcoming release Green Lantern.

Movie Marketing Part I: Going Viral

Friday marked the opening of the viral campaign for Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises, and already it shows itself to be something to follow. The viral campaign for The Dark Knight remains, in my opinion, the best ever marketed by a studio, so I am very excited about following Nolan's 2012 production along these coming months. In light what's to come, I've decided to start a new multi-part series. In this new age of constant journalism, internet rumors, spoilers, and leaks, keeping secrets in the movie business is harder than ever, especially when working on such highly publicized productions like superhero movies. Hundreds of websites and blogs across the internet are dedicated to movie rumors (including my favorite: SuperHeroHype), along with those internet followers who are always willing to leak anything they can just to show dominance.

Chris Nolan, Jim Cameron, JJ Abrams, and Zach Snyder are all noted for their notoriously tight-lipped productions, but this series will focus less on the people and more on the styles through which studios market films. The mystery behind a project is, after all, one of film's greatest allures. More often than not, though, this marketing campaign is the product of the studio rather than the director. One of the newest forms of movie marketing came along with the rapid expansion of the internet in the past half decade by way of viral marketing, made even more prominent in the past few years with social networking media. It amazes me the extent to which a studio can go to get people involved with the marketing of a film, all as a way of both giving in to their demands to be kept informed while also distracting them from the real rumors. Nearly all movies nowadays create Facebook pages and Twitter trends and Tumblrs as a way of spreading themselves around the internet, but none have taken the possibilities to the extend of Nolan's Batman trilogy, led by the company 42 Entertainment (at least for TDK - DKR's company has not been made public).

--Be advised that an official promotional photo of Bane is shown after the break and is considered a LOW-LEVEL SPOILER--