Hollywood Grabs Blair Witch's Coattails
Judging from the fervent response to my
piece on The Blair Witch Project , the role played by the Internet in
the success of this movie is not a myth. One of the surprising things about the
response, though, was how many people hated the film. In part, it did
sound like a classic case of a movie that in two weeks went from being a
sleeper to being overhyped, so that people who saw Blair Witch after,
say, August 6 were led to believe they were about to see the greatest horror
film ever made. But I was still surprised, since I thought that the quality of
the film was not something people would contest.
In any case, there are two other interesting points to make about Blair
Witch as a marketing/economic phenomenon. The first is that the film's
mainstream success--it's now grossed more than $108 million--speaks to the
tremendous flexibility of even as hidebound an industry as Hollywood. Blair
Witch is owned, after all, by Artisan Entertainment, a small independent
distribution company that specializes in true art-house films like Wim Wenders'
Buena Vista Social Club (which you should, by the way, see at all
costs). But Artisan was able to get Blair Witch into 2,400 theaters all
over the country in the space of just a couple of weeks.
Blair Witch was obviously heavily hyped, and the buzz on the film was
good, which undoubtedly made selling the film to theater owners easier than it
would otherwise have been. But there's still something wonderful about the
speed with which theaters that normally would have had four screens showing
Deep Blue Sea adopted Blair Witch instead. It's an excellent
example of how quickly supply rises to meet demand with no planning involved at
all.
The second point is more mundane, but also more curious, and it has to do
with a weird new trend in movie advertising in which one film tries to take
advantage of the buzz surrounding another film, even though the two movies have
absolutely nothing in common. This strategy was used to great effect by
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me , which ran ads saying, "If you see
only one movie this year, see Star Wars . If you see two movies, see
Austin Powers ..." That, though, was a clever acknowledgement of
reality. What has followed seems more like a not very well-thought-out
gimmick.
First, Austin Powers mimicked the ads for Big Daddy , with Dr.
Evil and Mini-Me urinating on a wall (in place of Adam Sandler and that little
kid). Then, this week, nascent bomb-in-the-making Detroit Rock City has
run ads featuring the faces of its four main characters, with the tagline: "In
October of 1978, four high school students disappeared outside Detroit,
Michigan. Twenty years later, their footage was found."
This is, of course, a rip-off of Blair Witch (whose ads featured
similar language). But what's puzzling is the point of the rip-off. Is it that
we're supposed to think the movie was made by the people who made Blair
Witch ? Or are we supposed to think that Detroit Rock City is somehow
like Blair Witch ? Or, alternatively, are we just supposed to be amazed
by the cleverness of the ad-makers, and be inspired by that cleverness to see
the movie?
The answer, I think, is none of the above. Instead, with the buzz on
Detroit Rock City as bad as it's been, the marketing people essentially
threw up their hands and decided that there was no point in selling the film as
what it is. Instead, they wanted to see if they could catch a little halo
effect from Blair Witch. Unfortunately, even as I write this down, it
still doesn't really make sense. Who would ever go see one movie because its ad
campaign consisted of an homage to another? Detroit Rock City : "We're
not a sequel to Blair Witch , but oh, how we wish we were."
