As I pointed out in my Hollywood Reporter recap of the marketing for The Darkest Minds, Fox took a hard left halfway through the campaign. Suddenly it stopped selling it as an X-Men/Hunger Games mashup and to start positioning it as a tear jerking love story that just happened to involve kids with extraordinary powers. I’m not sure what research or trends analysis lead to that change or if it was just something decided on internally, but it means the campaign as a whole has some strange tonal shifts from time to time as different aspects of its personality try and come out.
Online and Social
There’s not much happening on the movie’s official website. The only active elements are “Videos,” which has a collection of all the trailers and featurettes, and “About,” which has a synopsis and other information. The Fox page for the movie has a little bit more, including some stills, but that’s about it. Both sites have links to the movie’s Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram profiles.
Media and Publicity
First look stills came via EW, which also offered pretty lengthy comments from the cast and crew about their characters, the story and more.
At Comic-Con the cast showed up for interviews like this to offer insights into the story and why it would be interesting to fans. Mandy Moore showed up on “Kimmel” to talk about the movie among other things and MTV offered a behind-the-scenes look at the movie and its characters. There was also one more featurette released a couple days before the movie hit theaters.
PICKING UP THE SPARE
Director Jennifer Yuh Nelson says she doesn’t mind at all if the movie and its story invite comparisons to current real world political resistance movements.
The cast also talks more in a joint interview about how the story mirrors the recent youth-driven drives for societal change on various topics.
Fox has released a series of “Meet…” character introduction videos like this one, apparently hoping that such explainers will help audiences get interested in characters they may not otherwise be familiar with.
Cinematic Slant 