by Everyone was talking last week about an ad for Legends, the new movie starring Tom Hardy as both parts of a set of identical twins, that took a two-star review from The Guardian and made it look like it might be slightly better. The two stars are placed between the two images of Hardy in a field of four and five star reviews. So it can be implied that The Guardian’s review is actually more generous than it is and the rest of those starts are just being obscured by the rest of the ad’s design.
Lots of people have been calling this out as being super-shady, but I actually think it’s smart marketing. To be totally fair, the marketers who put the ad together didn’t do anything wrong. They accurately represent The Guardian’s review of the movie. The placement of that particular element is just maximized to make sure that the negative impact of that review was minimized. The ad is from the U.K., so it makes sense that they would want to include The Guardian since it would have been notable by its exclusion. But since it was not a super-favorable review it had to be put somewhere. And they found the most logical spot. Problem solved.
This is no different than any other movie ad that pulls out a single positive or out of context sentence or two from an otherwise negative review. Sometimes marketing is about making the best of a bad situation, which is what the studio has done in this instance. They’re not misrepresenting The Guardian’s review of the movie, they’re using it in the best possible way. If someone is looking at this ad and making a judgement on whether or not so see the movie based solely on it without doing any other research about the movie or The Guardian’s full review of it that’s on them, not on the studio. It’s their job to spin these things in the best possible way. It doesn’t leave the audience off the hook for how their marketing messages are received.
