Please do the moviegoing public a favor and don’t Click here.
By Burbanked on Jan 11, 2006 in Movie Marketing 101, Movies, One-Sheetery, Trailers | 971 views |
It’s not that every movie has to be Important or Transcendent. If a Schindler or a Shawshank were released every Friday, soon enough they’d lose their resonance. But at the same time, can anyone feel confused about the slippery slope of the domestic box office when we’re presented with the prospect of a movie like the upcoming Adam Sandler contractually obligated vehicle Click? Anyone? Bueller?
First we’d ask you to review the evidence: the silly, big-headed movie one-sheet and the silly, wrong-headed movie trailer.
Next, let’s consult our Cookie Cutter Movie Marketing 101 checklist:
- Movie poster includes a tagline that 1) tells the entire story premise and 2) includes a bad play on words.
- Movie trailer opens with an awful 80s song that tells us the central character’s conflict in an excruciatingly obvious way - this is the character’s busy life! The lyrics say “Welcome to your life”! Oh, how we appreciate the excessive dumbing-down!
- Trailer includes Christopher Walken in wacky, just-pay-me-I’ll-do-a-whole-Doc-Brown-shtick mode. (doesn’t this guy kind of look like the actor who was in The Deer Hunter?)
- Trailer hits the remaining mass-marketing staples: comic fisticuffs, jiggling female body parts, someone taking a baseball to the melon.
Thank you, Sony! Bless you, director of Around the World in 80 Days! Why, oh why can’t today be June 23rd?




My blog-love affair with cartoonist Doug Savage’s terrific daily Savage Chickens (
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because clearly Cage has decided to become action/thriller cinema’s first Polish great-grandma. (
Well, that’s too bad. Back a year or so ago when I heard that they’d be making a movie out of Judi and Ron Barrett’s terrific kids’ book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, I hoped maybe it’d be made live-action. Handled well, the idea of seeing an actual town where it rained hotdogs and baked beans in an open-roof restaurant, as well as the bit where sanitation trucks clean up all the leftover rain/snow/food and feed it to the pets would be, I thought, a bundle of CG-imbued cinema fun.












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