Feb 15 late addition: “NY Post” article link and quote citing success of films and TV programs that show a “frank admiration for the sacrifice, bravery and personal nobility of the men doing the fighting.”
Feb. 14, 2015- A big part of audience marketing is selecting the right tone, as evidenced by Warner Bros. surprise blockbuster “American Sniper,” which avoided being overly patriotic while nonetheless projecting other pro-social themes.
Its positioning ran against the grain of contemporary news media’s distain of the military. The $59 million production about a sharp-shooting American soldier in Iraq who is troubled over his war-time experience has grossed over $286 million domestically and another $79 million overseas.
The R-rated movie comes at the end of a long line of Iraq War flops—all serious dramas. “Even the most cynical pundits credit Warners with orchestrating a shrewd marketing campaign that played on patriotism and heroism without alienating moviegoers less prone to flag-waving,” suggests a “Hollywood Reporter” story.
“Politics probably explains why it has taken Hollywood this long to make a truly great and popular movie about this war,” writes Mark Hemingway in opinion journal the “Weekly Standard”. “American Sniper” “unambiguously celebrates the heroism of the soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Meanwhile, “American Sniper’s” predecessor Iraq War films such as “Green Zone”, “In the Valley of Elah” and “Stop-Loss” had a different tone with “Hollywood’s seeming obsession with delegitimizing the war on terror and those fighting it,” notes the “Weekly Standard.”
Says a “New York Post” newspaper essay by John Podhoretz, the success of American Sniper “was just the kind of evidence the pop-culture gatekeepers at the glossy magazines and breathless entertainment pseudo-news shows love to ignore — the very same gatekeepers who continue to imagine Lena Dunham is a figure of endless cultural fascination even as her HBO show sinks to ratings levels that would embarrass even an MSNBC host.”
Says the third edition of book “Marketing To Moviegoers,” the judgmental anti-war films that flopped apparently tested poorly with pre-release audiences, so their film distributors positioned them as “generic action movies, downplaying its central political-intrigue and Iraq-war themes.” That’s the marketing angle to movie selection. For the other Iraq films, millions of dollars were spent to make films whose orientation proved a turnoff to moviegoers, so the movies were positioned in a way not completely true to their essence. Movies are multi-million dollar “products” so making something that is hard to sell isn’t wise.
Not so with “American Sniper,” whose tone made it stand apart and its drama resonated with moviegoers.
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