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Today, that kind of campaign would get a movie marketer fired. The dark art of movie promotion increasingly lives on the Web, where studios are playing a wilier game, using social media and a blizzard of other inexpensive yet effective online techniques to pull off what may be the marketer’s ultimate trick: persuading fans to persuade each other.
The art lies in allowing fans to feel as if they are discovering a film, but in truth Hollywood’s new promotional paradigm involves a digital hard sell in which little is left to chance — as becomes apparent in a rare step-by-step tour through the timetable and techniques used by Lionsgate to assure that “The Hunger Games” becomes a box office phenomenon when it opens on Friday.
While some studios have halted once-standard marketing steps like newspaper ads, Lionsgate used all the usual old-media tricks — giving away 80,000 posters, securing almost 50 magazine cover stories, advertising on 3,000 billboards and bus shelters.
But the campaign’s centerpiece has been a phased, yearlong digital effort built around the content platforms cherished by young audiences: near-constant use of Facebook and Twitter, a YouTube channel, a Tumblr blog, iPhone games and live Yahoo streaming from the premiere.
By carefully lighting online kindling (releasing a fiery logo to movie blogs) and controlling the Internet burn over the course of months (a Facebook contest here, a Twitter scavenger hunt there), Lionsgate’s chief marketing officer, Tim Palen, appears to have created a box office inferno.
Analysts project that the “The Hunger Games,” which cost about $80 million to make and is planned as a four-movie franchise, could have opening-weekend sales of about $90 million — far more than the first “Twilight” and on par with “Iron Man,” which went on to take in over $585 million worldwide in 2008.
Along the way the studio had to navigate some unusually large pitfalls, chief among them the film’s tricky subject matter of children killing children for a futuristic society’s televised amusement. The trilogy of novels, written by Suzanne Collins, is critical of violence as entertainment, not an easy line for a movie marketer to walk, even though the movie itself is quite tame in its depiction of killing.
“The beam for this movie is really narrow, and it’s a sheer drop to your death on either side,” said Mr. Palen, during an unusually candid two-hour presentation of his “Hunger Games” strategy at the studio’s offices here last month.
A built-in fan base for “The Hunger Games” certainly helps its prospects. More than 24 million copies of “The Hunger Games” trilogy are in print in the United States alone. About 9.6 million copies were in circulation domestically when the movie’s marketing campaign intensified last summer, so Lionsgate’s efforts appear to have sold the book as well as the movie.
Lionsgate has generated this high level of interest with a marketing staff of 21 people working with a relatively tiny budget of about $45 million. Bigger studios routinely spend $100 million marketing major releases, and have worldwide marketing and publicity staffs of over 100 people. The studio has been able to spend so little largely because Mr. Palen has relied on inexpensive digital initiatives to whip up excitement.
The irony is that all of this may still not be enough to save Mr. Palen’s job. In a corporate twist on “The Hunger Games,” Mr. Palen is being forced to fight for his professional life following Lionsgate’s acquisition in January of Summit Entertainment, which controls the “Twilight” franchise. That means Lionsgate now has two marketing chiefs, and there is only room for one.
Mr. Palen declined to comment on his job status, but it is clear that Ms. Collins is perplexed at the possibility of a future without him. “He’s a generous collaborator,” she said in an e-mail. “His work is so exceptionally good, I rarely had any notes. If he keeps his e-mails, he must have about 50 from me that say, ‘That looks amazing!’ ”
Early promotion for “The Hunger Games” started in spring 2009, when Mr. Palen flew to New York to meet with publicity executives from Scholastic to learn about the book franchise. Rubber didn’t hit the road, however, until last March, when the Lionsgate team, including Julie Fontaine, executive vice president of publicity, started methodically pumping out casting news via Facebook.
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