Lights Camera Money: The Hollywood Market

 

What makes a film or even a television show successful boils down to many factors including marketing campaigns. The most recent example of this is with what has been deemed "Barbenheimer". For those unaware, Barbenheimer is the term for this past box office weekend when Greta Gerwig's Barbie film with Margot Robbie and Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer with Robert Downey Jr, Cillian Murphy, and Matt Damon came out the same day. While these movies are vastly different for obvious reasons how they handle marketing to their given audience has worked wonders for their audience. Barbenheimer is a phenomenon that in the marketing world is called counterprogramming. What that means is that you release two tonally different films with one of them being a blockbuster film. Universal is behind Oppenheimer while Warner Bro's is behind Barbie. This is not a new phenomenon just look at last year in 2022 when Avatar: The Way of Water came out at the same time as Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.  

Hollywood works well off of marketing. Take Christopher Nolan's film The Dark Knight. One thing that the movie and the people behind the film besides Mr. Nolan did was create a realistic-looking website that featured campaign information for Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent. At the same time, people would sell Joker-inspired cards at comic book stores to help promote the film. Why are both of those things important? Both get the message of the movie across while also getting viewers interested in the product behind the message. In Hollywood, it is also important to know how to be interactive in your storytelling. When The Hunger Games franchise came out, marketing campaigns came out for digital versions of the Hunger Games where you would get with other people like you and act out the Hunger Games like they are in the films. Another thing that is key is doing the research. Films are only successful if the people behind them do the research to craft a strong plot and strong characters. That is why Ron Howard failed when he came up with Solo: A Star Wars Story. The plot was all over the place and the characters were very hard to connect with. 

With the SAG-Aftra strike going on, film and television marketing has taken a hit. Look at it this way. The film and television industry is worth $134 billion. You may say what does this have to do with the marketing issue. Let me break it down. With studios shut down and actors and writers out of work, there is no one to promote the film or television series and therefore the market goes down. The one caveat to this is that production deals can be made that are small in value. Amazon's tv show The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power has a budget of $715 million dollars which itself totals 5.1 million Amazon subscriptions to the Amazon Prime service. However, the show has a great job of marketing to its audience in different ways to create buzz. That being said, with the strike comes no new film and television content which then creates burnout when it comes to what everyday people are watching on tv. Streaming networks like Netflix and even Paramount+ have taken small hits but those networks will be fine. The Hollywood market is suffering and the SAG-Aftra strike is not helping. As an outsider looking in, I can not say what happens next but I will say that more needs to be done. The strike is important for the writers and actors struggling to make ends meet and the studio heads (Bob Iger I am looking at you) need to not be greedy and look at the staff of actors and writers you have and help them be able to support their families and pay rent.