The trailer for “Cowboys & Aliens” presents a genre-bending film that I found riveting but a New York Times article today examines the marketing challenge to position the film correctly. The movie is a serious and edgy sci-fi yarn about hostile aliens invading the old west of the 1800s, That pushes the normally antagonist earthly cowboys and Indians to unite, and comedy ensues.
The New York Times article notes that audiences who have seen the trailer “may be anticipating the wrong film” with a lot of comedy like “Men In Black.”
Says the article by Michael Cieply, “Deceived by a title and a premise that many find inherently comic, potential viewers must now cope with a realization that (director Jon) Favreau wasn’t kidding when he told fans at the Comic-Con International convention last July that he planned to mix a ‘by-the-book, right-down-the-middle western’ of the kind once made by Sergio Leone Sergio and John Ford, with really scary science fiction, like ‘Alien’ or ‘Predator.’ ”
Indeed, some fan buzz right now on the Internet is the trailer seems too serious, meaning they expect more pronounced laughs. The very premise of cowboys shooting it out with aliens seems humorous to fans.
Universal Pictures, which made the film with DreamWorks, scheduled a July 29, 2011, theatrical release for “Cowboys & Aliens,” which the New York Times says cost $100 mil. to make. The film stars Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford. The director Favreau helmed blockbuster “Iron Man” and Steven Spielberg is a producer.
“Cowboys & Aliens” spent years in Hollywood’s “development hell” where it changed direction, originally more of a fantasy but becoming more hard edge over the years of refashioning.
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