Disney’s “Frozen” took in $93 million over the holiday weekend, partly because its marketing strategy played down the princesses in the film, in order to attract more boys.
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Meryl Streep plays an unappealing older woman in the film adaptation of “August: Osage County.”
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Here's an inspired (if morbid) bit of viral movie marketing: Marvel has created a site called TheBentBullet.com that chronicles supervillain Magneto's role in assassinating President John F. Kennedy.
Flipping the "magic bullet" conspiracy theory on its head, the site reflects an alternative history in which mutant mastermind Erik Lehnsherr used his powers over metal to shift the bullets fired by Lee Harvey Oswald on Nov. 22, 1963, ensuring they hit their target. "According to the Warren Commission," a fictional article on the site recounts, "there was no second gunman on the grassy knoll that day, as some conspiracy theorists believe. There was only Lehnsherr, trying to bend the bullet."
The article obviously sets up the backstory for the events of the upcoming film, X-Men: Days of Future Past. And the site is certainly not comical fare; both the trailer below and the article treat the story line with a level of gravity that's compelling but also occasionally unsettling. When Jackie Kennedy screamed, "They've killed my husband! I have his brains in my hands!" I doubt she could have anticipated that her heartbroken panic would be quoted to sell a blockbuster action movie.
Via Reddit.
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Two big-budget movies about the mythological figure, from different studios, are scheduled for release next year.
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The second installment of the “Hunger Games” franchise set a November box-office record with its opening weekend in North America.
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The parodies of Jean-Claude Van Damme's "Epic Split" for Volvo Trucks are already getting old, but this one's good for a chuckle. Channing Tatum set aside some time on the set of his upcoming sequel to 21 Jump Street (awesomely called 22 Jump Street) to attempt his own leg-spreading demonstration. While flexibility is clearly not his strong suit, I'm sure this clip will still do well among a certain demographic or two. With that hair, Tatum could probably just pose in front of a camera for 93 minutes and still earn more in box office sales than The Fifth Estate. Via Reddit.
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A rolling realignment, seemingly change for change’s sake, has knocked out executives and producers at several major studios.
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The company is said to seek $100 million in cuts after criticism from the activist investor Daniel S. Loeb, whose hedge fund owns 7 percent of Sony.
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Proving John St.'s point that prankvertising has gone way too far, here's a stunt from Brazil in which an actor dressed up as Chucky, the diminutive Child's Play villain, ambushed people at bus stops by crashing through the glass of a Curse of Chucky ad—and proceeded to chase them with a knife. The stunt appears to be the work of a TV show, though it's clearly an ad for the movie, too. The best part is when the victims fight back, sending Chucky himself running for cover. It's all quite over the edge, though when you're promoting a horror movie, anything goes. Via Disco Chicken, who really hates this kind of stuff.
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Universal Pictures said its adaptation of the best-selling erotic novel “Fifty Shades of Grey” would be moved to February 2015. The film was initially scheduled for Aug. 1.
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Violent encounters with guns occur, on average, more than twice an hour in the best sellers in PG-13 and R-rated movies, according to a study set for publication in Pediatrics.
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China’s ambitious new film entrepreneurs, dozens of whom gathered in California this week for industry events, want something that has largely eluded them: a homemade global hit.
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Ms. Chase appeared on the New York stage, on television and in film under the name Irene Kane, before finding her voice in writing.
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Dominating the feature film nominations were documentaries about issues and politics.
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The movie industry is waiting to see if “12 Years a Slave,” a story focusing on an African-American, can garner a global audience.
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A television editor has organized a screening and discussion with the director of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” and the event is prompting strong interest.
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Michael Arndt, who wrote “Toy Story 3,” has been replaced as screenwriter of Lucasfilm’s new movie by its director, J.J. Abrams, and Lawrence Kasdan, a Lucasfilm veteran.
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Here's a pretty expensive way to say (almost) nothing: Buy two consecutive pages in the A section of The New York Times, and leave them completely blank except for a tiny URL in 12-point type at the bottom of the second page.
That's what you'll find in today's paper—and it turns out it's an ad for a movie.
The URL, wordsarelife.com, links to a microsite for the upcoming film The Book Thief. The innovative ad ties into the message of the movie's larger ad campaign, "Imagine a world without words," and the film itself, which is about a young girl in Nazi Germany who steals books from war-torn areas and shares them with others.
Twentieth Century Fox approached the Times with the ad concept, and it was approved by the paper's ad standards team. Impressively, it doesn't even feature an "Advertisement" stamp, which you might expect to be added to reassure readers that it's not a printing error.
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The producer Jason Blum’s winning movie formula relies on profit-sharing, and he’s thinking about applying it to television.
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Ten days ago, she was another mostly unknown actress in New York City. Since then, 40 million people have watched her scream her lungs out and lift a grown man halfway up a wall with her telekinetic powers. Now, USA Today has tracked down Andrea Morales, the star of ThinkModo's super-viral coffee-shop prank for the horror movie Carrie. She's obviously over the moon about how the video has taken off—in her words, it's been "absolutely insane." Here are a few excerpts from the Q&A:
On the audition:
The title of the audition notice online was just "a marketing video for an upcoming movie." And it didn't say what it was for or what movie it was for — nothing. My agents were leery, because it was very vague. It's because the company that made the video, ThinkModo, they pride themselves for keeping things very under wraps — very secretive until the video launches. Then everything goes insane, which obviously works very well for them. They were like, "We're sorry, we can't tell you what this is for. … Just pretend you're really upset, and just scream for us for a really long time."
On her scream:
That's just how I scream. But I went to grad school [at the University of Missouri-Kansas City], and we had, interestingly enough, a segment on screaming — learning how to scream properly, learning what different screams could mean. So if you're on a roller coaster, your scream tends to go way up in register, and if you're really upset, you tend to go lower. So I channeled my lower register scream. And they were like, "Can you scream for, like, 15 seconds … I mean, for a really long time?" And they weren't kidding.
On her victims:
What would happen afterward is, James [Percelay], one of the directors, would yell, "Cut!" And then everybody, including myself, would clap. And the customers would be like, "Oh, my gosh! That's crazy!" It was almost like the TV show, Punk'd. Most everyone laughed or stayed … and chatted a bit. Then they'd sign their nondisclosure [agreement] saying they wouldn't tell what happened in the coffee shop. To my knowledge, everyone left happy [and] thought it was great, that it was hilarious. They were really great sports about being scared for a little while.
Read more about Andrea on her website.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
