life of the party

Writer/director Ben Falcone talks here about creating the story of the movie with wife Melissa McCarthy.

The Seagull

Star Annette Bening and production designer Jane Musky walk through the house that serves as the main setting of the story.

Deadpool 2

Lots more has happened since my recap column went up at THR.

There’s a Deadpool-sponsored “80s Smash Hits” playlist at Spotify that’s totally in keeping with the character’s musical tastes and which basically sounds like the radio I grew up on.

The Merc showed up on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” to try and get on the show to promote the movie and yeah, Ryan Reynolds might be a comedic genius.

Fox was one of the first advertisers to use Snapchat’s new unskippable six-second video ads to make sure that audience was aware the movie was coming out.

Carl from “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” briefly came back in a commercial aired, of course, on Adult Swim where he claimed he was Deadpool.

Another IMAX-exclusive promotional spot featured a lot of new footage from the movie.

Jeff Beer at Fast Company has his own recap of the movie’s marketing efforts that’s worth checking out, as does John McCarthy at The Drum.

Beer also caught a couple secret messages from Deadpool in the metadata of the site for Trolli, the gummy company that had a 7-Eleven-exclusive cross promotion with the movie.

Social media monitoring and management company Sprinklr analyzed online buzz for Deadpool 2 and compared it to both the first Deadpool and this year’s Avengers: Infinity War. Here’s how things stacked up:

Avengers – Infinity War (3/25/18-4/25/18): 1.3m mentions of #AvengersInfinityWar or #Avengers
Deadpool 2 (4/10/18- 5/10/18): 534,600 mentions of #Deadpool, #Deadpool 2 or #DP2
Deadpool (1/10/16- 2/10/16): 395,000 mentions of #Deadpool

Walmart offered a bunch of Blu-rays of movies like Logan, Office Space and others with slipcovers featuring Deadpool recreating the posters of the movie.

The jabs at Avengers continued in this video, where Deadpool recounts the first 10 years of his own cinematic universe, a decade that wasn’t quite as jam-packed as that other one.

Additional interviews have come out with the movie’s director and screenwriters, all of whom talk about how they approached the character and story. There was also a feature on Stefan Kapicic, who plays Colossus in this film as well as in the original, about his performance, how you never see his actual face and more.

Justice League

Henry Cavill says what everyone else was thinking last year, that it was a ridiculous conceit to hide Superman in the movie’s marketing since not only was he on the publicity tour but *of course* the character was going to come back. Plus, he was on like 22% of the marketing materials anyway, especially the cross-promotional stuff.

Avengers: Infinity War

More on the partnership with Little Free Library here.

Black Panther

There’s a new – and very cool – video for “Pray For Me” from Kendrick Lamar and The Weeknd featuring footage from the movie as well as some slick animation.

Speed Racer

Speed Racer is the movie everyone champions on Twitter, heralding it as a genius film under-appreciated in its time. The 10th anniversary of release is bringing with it a whole new wave of stories like this along those lines.

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

Once again, my standard marketing recap for the Melissa McCarthy comedy vehicle Life of the Party has been published over at The Hollywood Reporter.

In Life of the Party she plays Deanna, newly-divorced and regretful she never finished her college degree. So, seeing an opportunity, she enrolls at the same university her daughter Maddie (Molly Gordon) is at, leading to some mother/daughter bonding, the fulfillment of a dream and some belated sowing of wild oats.

There isn’t much to add to what’s shared there. The movie’s official website has the bare minimum of information on it. The first publicity for the movie came when a still was released along with brief comments from McCarthy. She later showed up crashing an “Carpool Karaoke” segment ostensibly featuring her costar Christina Aguilera and made some other late night appearances closer to release. Director/husband Ben Falcone talked here as well about directing his wife in a love scene or two.

PICKING UP THE SPARE

Nice joint profile of long-time friends and colleagues Melissa McCarthy and Maya Rudolph in the LA Times where they talked about working together and lots, lots more.

Writer/director Ben Falcone talks here about creating the story of the movie with wife Melissa McCarthy.
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.