Audience tracking surveys suggest big-budget sci-fi film “Pacific Rim” will be a box office disappointment, so distributor Warner Bros. and producing partner Legendary Pictures scramble in marketing triage.
“Pacific Rim” will premiere July 12. Warner and Legendary collaborated on Superman reboot “Man of Steel,” which is a box office hit with $271 million in domestic (US & Canada) box office in its first 24 days. However, with Disney’s $250 million production of “The Long Ranger” opening poorly, and two Sony Pictures duds with the apocalyptic “After Earth” ($130 million production budget) and thriller “White House Down” ($140-150 million production cost), Hollywood is on edge about big-budget films. Various estimates put “Pacific Rim’s” production cost at $180-200 million, which doesn’t include marketing expense (figure at least another $50 million for domestic theatrical marketing alone).
A Variety story says that new marketing materials emphasize the human characters instead of just the robots that dominated early marketing. The weak forecast for initial box office – tracking numbers—is “a surprise, given that Legendary has been courting genre fans for nearly a year since introducing footage of the Guillermo del Toro-helmed monster mash-up at last summer’s Comic-Con in San Diego,” says the “Variety” story by Marc Graser.
A Hollywood Reporter story by Borys Kit says that “director Guillermo del Toro is rallying his rabid fan base and telling them not to worry about negative press for his latest movie, the monsters-vs.-robots tent-pole Pacific Rim. ‘We just need to keep working. Our numbers are going up. Not in a minor way. Significant. We are on the right track,’ del Toro wrote on the forum of Deltorofilms.com, which bills itself as the official fan site of the filmmaker.”
The director may have a good reputation with fanboys, given his other films including cult-horror favorite “Hellboy,” but he doesn’t have a big profile on cyberspace to connect to fans. For example, he’s not on Twitter—though some del Toro fakers are. Also, the movie is handicapped by not being based on a famous property and the name Pacific Rim is rather bland.
Still, the movie’s website says that there will be 10 pm screenings on Thursday, just before its wide release, which indicates Warner Bros. believes that “Pacific Rim” can generate good word-of-mouth. A “New York Post” movie review says that “Pacific Rim” “builds to one of the most stunningly eye-popping and exciting climaxes” ever in big budget sci-fi movie.
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