The two movie marketing white flags

Before I get into this post, I need to acknowledge up top that Wuthering Heights made an absolute buttload of money in its opening weekend ("absolute buttload" also being the thing everyone wants to get or be given by all seven feet six inches of Jacob Elordi), and is pretty much already a success, which I would not have expected, but also kudos to moviegoers to getting out and plunking down money for The Horniest Movie on Valentine's Day weekend.

So anyway!

I'd like to write about two very different movie marketing campaigns I've seen recently, and how they're the two marketing campaigns you never want to resort to. If you see a movie resorting to one of these tactics, it either means your movie is dead in the water, or the studio distributing the movie certainly thinks it's a giant stinkeroo.

First up, we have Wuthering Heights, Emerald Fennell's follow-up to the supremely maligned Saltburn (which I actually liked, as I am firmly on record as loving trash) which is already being maligned by not being an adaptation so much as what Fennell readily admits is what she thought the book was about back when she read it as a teen. I'm all in favor of vibes-based adaptations, for the record. Let's do more of those. Well, I just remembered The Dark Tower, so maybe I'm in favor of certain vibes.

The first round of marketing for Wuthering Heights was entirely about how unrelentingly horny the movie was promised to be. Hands in eggs! Breathing in ears! Music by Charli XCX! Heathcliffe is going to fuck, y'all! That's perfect marketing for the masses who largely assume they know what Wuthering Heights is about.

But as release day neared, we started seeing an entirely different campaign. The TV spots were filled with pull quotes talking about how good the movie looked. But the pull quotes weren't from, like ... critics.

Yes, that's "one of the year's best films," as attributed to ... random social media user! And that same user has other nice things to say about the movie! Good for them! Bad for the movie, that they couldn't even find like "ABC-4 in Atlanta" or "MovieNews dot biz" for a single good glowing three words they could harvest from context.

I do really need to underline how phenomenally and universally bad the advance reviews had to be in order for a whole-ass marketing team to opt for tweets from randos to hype up their movie. The movie has a 59% on Rotten Tomatoes, so there are definitely critics who enjoyed the movie, so I took a deeper look and ... yeah, when these are the good reviews, you're not left with a lot to go on.

"Nobody makes art not wanting to provoke anything," raves NPR! When critics have to resort to qualifiers or make snide comparisons as faint praise, it gets extremely hard to extract a pull quote for your TV spot. "... Swoony reimagining," says AARP!

But you don't have to do pull quotes at all! You can just do normal-ass TV spots about, like, the content of your film. Maybe try getting at the narrative or something. Jumping straight to "Nice costumes," says @Horny4Elordi makes the whole thing look cheap right from the jump.

As has already been mentioned, Wuthering Heights managed to avoid the pitfall that usually accompanies this sort of campaign – I assume to the great joy of the marketing team and studio – but I doubt our next entry will escape that fate.

Next up, a completely different type of white flag, the "cast members insisting this is a good movie" trailer that launched Crime 101.

The first time I ever heard of this movie was when I was in a movie theater and one of these types of trailer (it turns out there are over half a dozen similar ones) played in the middle of all the other normal-ass trailers that run before Nicole Kidman gives her State of the Union address. I immediately assumed this movie is an unmitigated disaster, because the absolute number one thing you never want to do when marketing your movie is to devote half of the trailer to the actors, out of character, sitting in chairs, insisting passionately that the movie is very good, and they are so proud of it, and that you will love it. Listen, Mark Ruffalo, I love your mumbly ass, but now you're just making me think this movie stinks because you're pressing the matter.

Crime 101 has now, a couple months later, been doing regular-ass trailers.

I love crime movies. I love heist movies. I love Hemsworth and Ruffalo! I probably would have been eager to see this movie if the standard, by-the-numbers trailer was the first thing I saw related to Crime 101. But I saw the leads of the movie in press junket chairs, making hand gestures about how cool and dangerous the lead character is. Yuck, man. Don't do that. It opened third behind Wuthering Heights and Goat. Wuthering Heights has already grossed more than its $80 million budget. Crime 101 has grossed $28 million worldwide against its $90 million budget. Maybe it'll get there. I kinda doubt it.

That's the big lesson here: don't put your actors in chairs in the trailers. Never. Never do that.

I guess they should have gone with the random Twitter pull quotes.