Tag: first reformed

Picking Up the Spare – Tag, Superfly and More

Superfly

More from Future on the soundtrack he produced and curated, which was a big part of the marketing campaign, here. Director X has also been giving interviews like this now that the movie is out.

Also recommended is this compare/contrast of this album with that of the original.

Tag

Star Jeremy Renner’s broken arms are part of this interview with director Jeff Tomsic where he talks about all the challenges he had making the movie.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

Star Thandie Newton talked more here about the dress she wore to the premiere featuring the faces of the characters of color in the franchise to date.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

More on the Kellogg’s promotion for the movie here.

The movie is the next release to get the AR treatment from Moviebill, which is once again handing out periodicals to Regal Cinemas audiences that can be scanned using the Regal app to unlock exclusive content, including interviews (in print and AR format) with star Bryce Dallas Howard and director J.A. Bayona, a welcome message from star Chris Pratt, an interactive “dino-lab” and a sample of the dinosaurs available in the Jurassic World Alive, the location-based AR mobile game developed by Ludia.

That game is built on location and other data from Google Maps, which is helping to promote both the game and the services behind it.

Daniella Pineda has received a few profiles like this after being identified as the breakout newcomer – or at least largely unknown – in the movie. That makes the reports that a scene clearly identifying her as LGBTQ was cut, the latest instance of that happening in a major studio franchise film, somewhat awkward.

There’s also a bit of extra attention coming to co-star Justice Smith.

Director J.A. Bayona was never the focus of much of the press in advance of the movie’s release, but there was an interview with him here and another one here.

First Reformed

More from director Paul Schrader on the film’s disturbing characters and situations as well as his feelings and thoughts on God.

Gotti

The campaign for this is one I let go by me because it seemed like a terrible mess and the post-release developments have only reinforced that decision. Here are some examples:

  • The studio, along with MoviePass (which invested in the film), published a really weird and insulting Tweet positioning critics giving it a negative review as enemies of the common folk.
  • That same message was conveyed in push notifications to MoviePass mobile users and is what the movie’s marketing team is selling as they float the idea Rotten Tomatoes is artificially keeping its score down.
  • There’s speculation that the disconnect between that score and a strangely high audience ranking could be because of a bot/fake account campaign being mounted, something the studio denies.

Wonder Woman

As the marketing for the sequel ramps up, Turner Ignite placed a paid article on Ad Age about how Turner networks and shows helped sell the first movie to audiences.

Lady Bird

Amazon promoted the movie’s availability on its streaming service with a Father’s Day clip featuring some of Tracy Letts’ wonderfully-delivered lines from the movie.

The Incredibles 2

More from costar Holly Hunter in this brief interview.

A Wrinkle In Time

It seems Disney used the tactic of pairing this movie, which is already on home video, with The Incredibles 2 at drive-in theaters around the country to help it eek past the $100m mark.

Avengers: Infinity War / Deadpool 2

Josh Brolin is interviewed about how popular he is right now and how that kind of bothers and worries him.

Boundaries

OK, I’ll grant you that co-star Peter Fonda’s Tweet about Bannon Trump was in poor taste, but right now the last person who should be asserting any sort of moral highground on literally any issue at all is Donald Trump Jr. Indiewire has the whole recap, including Sony Classics’ position on the matter.

Christopher Plummer’s character was based in part on the real life grandfather of director Shana Feste.

The Catcher Was a Spy

The New York Times delves into the real history of Moe Berg, played by Paul Rudd in the movie.

Black Panther

An exhibit of the movie’s costumes will be on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Dundee

No, it wasn’t a real movie, but the campaign for Tourism Australia that sure looked like a movie’s marketing push just won multiple awards at the Cannes Social Lions.

Chris Thilk is a freelance writer and content strategist who lives in the Chicago suburbs.

Picking Up the Spare – American Animals, Adrift and More

Adrift

New interviews with both star Shailene Woodley and director Baltasar Kormákur offer insights into the story and process of making the movie, though the latter contains significant spoilers so beware.

American Animals

The narrative that’s emerging of how MoviePass, which partnered to release the film as its first move into film distribution, helped the film succeed is that it used its own platform to heavily promote the film, utilizing the user data it has to target ads. If I’m *any* other distributor right now I’m pretty honked off.

Both the cast and crew and the real people the actors are playing are interviewed here about the blurring of fact and fiction in the movie.

Girls Trip

Details on a creative campaign for the movie involving Snoop Dogg were shared here by Viacom, which ran that campaign across some of its networks and platforms.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

To the surprise of [looks around quickly] literally no one, a Wall Street analyst has blamed the marketing for the movie’s lackluster box-office results. He’s like 27% right, in that the marketing campaign was dictated largely by the release schedule, which was dictated by the other Star Wars movies coming out before and after it.

There’s a trailer for the Solo-related material coming to Star Wars: Battlefront II.

First Reformed

Ethan Hawke continues to make the press rounds to talk about the movie, which keeps getting positive reviews and buzz.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

All of you jackweeds who have hijacked Star Wars fandom to disseminate your backwards-thinking, anti-women, regressive worldview and mindset: Please get off my franchise. There is no place here for you and never was. Leave. Now.

Ocean’s 8

More from Anne Hathaway and others in the cast here about how they hope the movie will help burst the myth that female-led movies are question marks theatrically.

Another quick profile of breakout star Awkwafina here. And Helena Bonham Carter is finally getting some attention with a profile where she talks about how fun it was to work on a light caper movie.

Hearts Beat Loud

Nick Offerman has done a bit of press in the last few days to promote the movie, which is nice to see.

Tag

Jeez, even Annabelle Wallis has been forced to talk about Jeremy Renner’s broken arms during her portion of the publicity cycle. Hamm and Helms have also done a bit more publicity.

A clip from the movie was played in an episode of Machinima’s “Inside Gaming” to try and reach that crowd.

Nice profile of co-star Jake Johnson here at GQ. And there’s more from Hannibal Buress as well as an interview with the comedian.

A Kid Like Jake

Claire Danes has continued to do press for the film and talk about the issues raised in the story.

Avengers: Infinity War

Viacom offers details on a creative execution involving Comedy Central’s show with Jordan Klepper.

The Incredibles 2

Good story here about how Pixar got the band back together for the sequel after over a decade.

Superfly

Apparently star Trevor Jackson initially rejected as the lead because it was felt he was too young. More about how he got involved in the movie here.

The Kissing Booth

I know I didn’t give this movie a full campaign review, but that’s largely because it didn’t get a full campaign from Netflix. That’s too bad since it seems like the story’s origins on story-sharing website Wattpad seems like it would have been a decent hook for the press.

Chris Thilk is a freelance writer and content strategist who lives in the Chicago suburbs.

Picking Up the Spare – Deadpool 2, On Chesi Beach and More

Deadpool 2

Fox has extended the social media presence of Peter, the non-powered member of the team Deadpool assembles, adding a LinkedIn profile that the studio has been advertising on Twitter to get people’s attention. He’s even been writing blog posts.

The constant stream of Green Lantern cracks in this and the first movie have finally prompted Warner Bros. to (jokingly) ask for the ring back, to which Ryan Reynolds had a thoroughly appropriate response.

Seems at least one British movie critic got a Royal Wedding-themed invitation to see the movie, which is a nice touch.

Kristina Monllos at Adweek adds her own recap of the movie’s campaign to the growing list. And Ashley Rodriguez has one at Quartz.

I’m not linking to them because there are a lot of spoilers, but there’s a whole series of stories that have come out in the last week that have not only gone in-depth on some cameos in the film but talked about how the cast and crew intentionally shot scenes for the trailers that weren’t going to be in the movie. The point of the latter was to run what amounts to a fake out campaign to throw people off the scent of the actual story and I’m honestly not sure how I feel about that.

Rebecca Rubin at THR is wondering out loud if the movie’s success will lead to more R-rated super hero movies. I maintain the same position I did last year that this is something that may be experimented with from time to time but won’t become “normal” and certainly won’t be adopted by Marvel Studios or even WB/DC.

There wasn’t much of a focus on Julian Dennison, the actor that plays Rusty in this movie and who broke out in The Hunt For The Wilderpeople a few years ago, but that’s changed with a few talk show appearances and this feature profile where he talks about coming into a super hero film and his young career to date. Also, this look at how his casting represents a solid move into diversity for the genre.

Artist boneface took to Twitter to show off some poster art he’d been commissioned by Fox to create, though he admitted he wasn’t sure what the studio ultimately had in mind for his work.

Finally, the team shared a “thank you” video to fans recutting footage from the movie as a sitcom opening montage using the music of “The Golden Girls” because of course.

On Chesil Beach

More here about how this isn’t the first time Saoirse Ronan has shown up in a movie based on an Ian McEwan book as the two talk about finding themselves on the same project again.

First Reformed

A solid feature profile of writer director Paul Schrader at GQ in which he talks about not just this movie but his extensive and noteworthy career as a whole.

You Were Never Really Here

Amazon Studios put out a short promo video acknowledging this was one of two movies starring Joaquin Phoenix-starring movies it was distributing this year.

Life of the Party

Adria Arjona, who plays Melissa McCarthy’s daughter in the film, talks more here about working with the veteran actor and what she learned just by being in the room with her.

Mary Shelley

Director Haifaa al-Mansour finally got a profile of her own where she talks about getting involved in the story and how she broke into the industry.

Avengers: Infinity War

Moviebill, the company that put those AR-enhanced magazines in the hands of opening week moviegoers at Regal Cinemas, is reporting that with 1 million copies distributed there were 2 million scans that weekend, meaning at least some people were repeatedly going back to the Regal app to view additional material.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

It’s the most wonderful time of the year because Matt Singer at ScreenCrush chronicled his day spent eating the entire movie-themed menu at Denny’s, as did Heather Mason at SyfyWire.

The Chicago Tribune profiles local native Bradford Young about how his upbringing in the city influenced the style and attitude he brought to his work as cinematographer on the movie.

While it’s not specific to the movie, both The Hollywood Reporter and Film School Rejects use the occasion to talk with Perry King, who gave voice to Han Solo in the NPR-produced radio drama adaptations of all three of the Original Trilogy movies.

Super Troopers 2

I think I missed this earlier, but Vice talks about the crowdfunding that got the movie made and the subsequent data that went into the marketing.

Chris Thilk is a freelance writer and content strategist who lives in the Chicago suburbs.

First Reformed – Marketing Recap

first reformed posterEthan Hawke plays Toller, a priest having a crisis of conscience in the new movie from writer/director Paul Schrader, First Reformed. Toller is a former military chaplain who now serves in a small town while still dealing with the death of his own son, though not always in healthy ways.

The priest becomes entwined in the life of Mary (Amanda Seyfried), a member of his congregation after her activist husband commits suicide. That leads him down a rabbit hole exposing the utter depravity of humanity in the modern world, something that shakes his faith even more than it has been.

The Posters

Hawke is shown as a priest of some sort in closeup, looking slightly off-camera as if he’s contemplating some point. The appearance of a fiery blaze cutting horizontally across the middle of his face seems to hint that there’s some conflict or potential division happening within him in the story, but there’s no copy to extrapolate on that idea, just a couple quotes from critics praising the film.

The Trailers

Toller explains his plan to keep, and then destroy, a journal as the trailer opens. We see him explaining to someone that he’s racked with guilt over the death of his son, who he encouraged to enlist in the military only to die in Iraq. That’s causing problems for him in his role as a priest and many people around him are trying to get him the help he clearly needs. When a parishioner calls him and shows him that someone in her house has been building bombs he dives deep – too deep – into the darkest corners of the internet and begins to question what is or isn’t a sin and whether God has a plan for any of us.

Hawke looks like he delivers a tight, coiled, powerful performance here as the priest with too much on his conscience and no outlet for his doubts. It’s all repression and inner turmoil that manifests as a quiver in his voice in public and a penchant for scotch in private. The story isn’t super-clear here but that’s alright, what we’re being sold is the performance and the atmosphere created by Schrader.

Online and Social

There’s just the trailer, synopsis and a few other details on the single page A24 created for the movie. While the movie did get some support on the studio’s social profiles, it was primarily busy promoting its horror release Hereditary so didn’t give this one a whole lot of attention.

Advertising and Cross-Promotions

Nothing I’ve seen to date, but I’d be willing to bet I’ll be seeing a few retargeted online ads now that I’ve visited the website.

Media and Publicity

The movie was one of those announced to be screened at the SXSW Film Festival, where it was very well received.

A short profile of Hawke mentioned this was one of several films he had coming out in the near future while also allow him to openly lobby for the chance to give a “meaningful” performance in a big budget sci-fi/fantasy film. He also talked here about what it like working with Schrader and what got him involved in the project. When he showed up on late night he joked about the different kinds of roles he’s taken over the years and how the big-scale films that feature lots of guns generally pay better than the small indie projects.

Overall

I really wish there had been more of a focus presented in the campaign, specifically around how this is a story about media overload and the kind of trauma that can cause and contribute to. That topic is hinted at in some of the interviews Hawke did and in the trailer, though even less so. It’s certainly being sold as a dark drama of the crisis faced by one man, I just think there could have been a slightly tighter picture painted.

Aside from that, the main attraction is that this is a new Paul Schrader film, something buoyed by the buzz that’s come out of the festival screenings. That probably won’t be enough to propel the movie to any great heights in terms of crossover success in the mainstream audience, but for those who come across the campaign there’s some good stuff offered here.

PICKING UP THE SPARE

A solid feature profile of writer director Paul Schrader at GQ in which he talks about not just this movie but his extensive and noteworthy career as a whole.

Ethan Hawke continues to make the press rounds to talk about the movie, which keeps getting positive reviews and buzz.

More from director Paul Schrader on the film’s disturbing characters and situations as well as his feelings and thoughts on God.

Hawke hit the publicity circuit again for interviews like this as we entered awards season.