Let’s get one indisputable fact out of the way: movie marketing is about as blind and clueless about Chris Anderson’s book, “The Long Tail,” and its concepts as it gets. Almost all the effort — not including a token push when the DVD is coming out — is focused on getting the audience out on one weekend. There’s no room for error. It has to be that one weekend or the movie is going to be instantly (the next weekend) eclipsed by next week’s big films. Once a movie is released, the marketing efforts drop off completely. Oh, there may be some TV spots that continue to trickle, but newspaper ads get smaller and smaller, and most other components disappear. The only exception to this is when a big budget movie scores the number one slot. That triggers a whole new set of ads that tout the movie as the most popular in America.

So how can movie marketing campaigns be made more Long Tail friendly? Well, it would take a dramatic change in how studios view performance, as well as a change in distribution of the movie itself.

Source: The Long Tail of Movie Marketing