cinematheque
Pencil Magicienne
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I feel like THE BLAIR WITH PROJECT really started the viral marketing thing...remember? at least, it seems that way to me.
TDK had Cloverfield beat as well - but I think a large majority of online journalists were too busy riding Cloverfield's jock to see anything else, especially the much more intricate and certainly more fun DK ARG.
This is definitely true. The Blair Witch Project's success is pretty much based singlehandedly on its internet buzz and the fact that they tried to make it look real. Because at the time the internet was somewhat underdeveloped, or anyway, a LOT less complex than it is now, they actually managed to hoodwink people into believing that this was true. Though it wasn't an ARG, it was probably the first happening of viral marketing and consequently it kicked a small, low-budget indie movie into blockbuster position and it made it one of the most profitable movies ever made.
After this game the second and third Matrix movies, which you may say suck and many may agree, but nevertheless, the Matrix movies necessarily turned the story into one you HAD to experience through the Animatrix, Enter the Matrix, the movies and the comics in order to see the whole story. This was essentially the first time a story was specifically created to function on several platforms and was way too big for any one fan to learn alone--they necessitated networking.
Then there was The Beast, the first ARG for Spielberg's A.I. Most people thought this game was better than the movie. Me, I'm hoping that this game will be like The Beast inasmuch as that game continued for like a month after the release of the movie.
But, you're definitely right here. I can site sources on all this stuff.
The only thing I can agree with in this article is that the money spent on the marketing may have been better suited for catching the "non-target" audience.
But hell, like Andrizzle said, he's brought people in that normally wouldn't have. That's the brilliance of this. Where 42/WB is marketing this towards us, we are the ones spreading it like wild fire.
The fact that Joe Blow over at YooHoo! did a piece on it shows that the marketing is working.
I think that notion is fair enough, but the Nolan version of Batman is very much a sign of the times with WB. I mean they learned the hard way when they made a mistake with Harry Potter that it was far better and more profitable in the end to work with the fans and when Nolan pitched Begins to them, they took him up on it even though he had only done some indie work beforehand because it was more important to them that the franchise regain the fans it had alienated with such lines as "ICE to see you!" in the 1997 catastrophe. They purposely made the decision to make a Batman movie that was less focused on drawing in record numbers and more focused on restarting the Batman franchise to be more successful, which makes it exactly 23498290348239048 times higher up than Cloverfield, whose viral existed solely to generate revenue on opening weekend and then fizzle out by the next week. (It experienced one of the highest second-week drops at the box office ever, although it was preceded by the highest January opening ever.)
So the fact that the WB made a firm decision this time to make a good movie that would please the fans than make an okay movie that would please the public is frankly one of my favorite things ever. In this Warner Bros sort of became a sparkling and beautiful production company in my eyes--they gave Nolan something like carte blanche on the one condition that Begins was good, and it was.
So my point here is that MAYBE using the money spent on this game on advertising would draw in more revenue if used for a more typical ad campaign bent on drawing on audiences that weren't already fans, but the key here is that the game adds new layers of complexity to a story that exists based on its potential for realism. It was important for Nolan (and Bale) to make a movie that people could imagine actually happening. I mean the biochemical terrorism stuff--maybe there's no Fear Toxin really, but in 2005, and now, it's not difficult to see where things like this could actually happen. Nobody has any superpowers in the Nolan version and everyone becomes who they are without falling in a vat of chemicals. Some of the technology is pretty hard to buy, but as is the way of things, you can imagine technology like that existing in the near future even if it doesn't yet. People say we can make flying cars but just don't...I mean it's fair enough to believe that the tumbler could exist, or that, you know, Batman's suit could be used for spelunking.
SO, in short, what the Yahoo idiot doesn't understand is that the game is created for fans because this franchise functions based on loyalty. What we'll probably find this game does is encourage repeat viewings and the extensive purchase of ancillary products.
It's just very natural to assume that if we've been involved in a movie for as many hard but usually enjoyable hours as we have, we're not just going to forget it the moment the credits roll. The game has turned casual fans into loyal ones and has made us ACTUALLY partake in the events leading up to the movie. It's so experiential that we'll probably enjoy the movie so much more because we contributed. It turned Gotham into a real place, where we have to do tasks for the Joker and beat each other down for bowling balls and catch dirty cops and march in political rallies. I mean, I think most of us always wanted to be part of the comic book world, and now we are actually playing in it.
And the public who isn't interested in the game doesn't HAVE to do the homework. We do the game because it's fun. We know that if we all gave up all of a sudden and went on strike (which, why would we? Most of us play it not for rewards but because we think it's incredibly fun), Warner Bros would STILL release the trailer. It's not like general audiences don't get the same stuff--they get posters and teasers and trailers just like everybody else. They don't do the work for it; we do the work for it. Most of them don't even know about us.
Anyway, I'm just very passionate about this kind of marketing, especially in this case. I think it's a very cool way to connect with fans who had been ignored for so long because studios favored the general public, and I think it's a very effective way of bringing Gotham into real space and time.