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Here’s what I wrote in my summary of the campaign for Hotel Transylvania 2:
This is a very appropriate campaign for the target audience. The trailers play up the familiar while also offering something new – the particular trick for sequels – and are fun and engaging. And the online components, from the Tumblr site to the social networks are all made up of material that’s pretty well designed to attract and engage that same audience.
I stand by that. But after seeing the movie this past weekend I feel like it didn’t give the audience the full picture.
Without getting into spoilers, there’s a big plot twist that turns a bit dark in the movie’s third act. While scenes from this portion of the film are shown in a couple of the trailers and TV spots, they don’t do anything to hint at the context for them and are played for laughs. They’re funny scenes or lines but they’re framed by a much darker part of the story that is decidedly not funny. In fact it’s kind of out of context how dramatically things turn vengeful and nasty.
While I don’t think the campaign exactly missold the movie as a whole, by leaving this out of the campaign the studio was obviously trying to play up the laughs and the hijinks while keeping this tonal shift, which may be jarring for the younger viewers who are the target demographic, almost completely hidden from the marketing. That could lead to some people, particularly the parents who are bringing those young viewers to the theater, feeling more than a little misled.
