Movie Marketing Madness: Nasty Baby

nasty_babyKristen Wiig’s career is very interesting to me. On the one hand she seems ready to go back to “Saturday Night Live” as a guest-host or just because a friend has asked her to at a moment’s notice. On the other, the movie choices she often makes seem designed to distance herself from her “SNL” days, turning in largely dramatic performances in Girl Most Likely, The Skeleton Twins and others. It’s not that she’s never funny on the big screen, but she’s definitely trying to stretch herself, which makes returning to familiar ground on TV that much more confusing.

Nasty Baby is certainly in that “stretching” category. Wiig plays a woman who’s friends with two gay men who want to have a baby. She’s been trying to be their surrogate for months, but things aren’t progressing. So the couple decide to navigate the world of adoption, but something tragic happens that causes massive friction between this group and could bring their world crashing down.

The Posters

The first poster was a cool one. It just features the bottom half of a woman’s face, her tongue stuck out like she’s telling someone off. But the look and feel of the poster is one of an Andy Warhol pop-art painting or maybe old comic book artwork, with the heavy dots of color. It tells you absolutely nothing about the movie other than that there’s likely a fair amount of attitude but it works at conveying the feel more than the story.

The Trailers

The trailer makes quite a different impression than the poster does. We get the outline of the story right off the bat – that Wiig’s character is going to help a gay couple she’s friends with by having their baby for them – but then it descends into what I can only describe as a cacophony. All of a sudden we’re thrown all sorts of images of rejoicing, distress, emotional upheaval, celebration and more along with loud music that’s meant to overwhelm the viewer, especially when the repeated flashing title cards start.

Online and Social

As far as I could find, the movie doesn’t have a significant online presence at all. All that’s on the site for The Orchard, the company that’s distributing the film, is the poster and a link to the YouTube trailer. There’s nothing about Nasty Baby in recent updates on the company’s Twitter or Facebook page, either.

nasty-baby2

Advertising and Cross-Promotions

Similarly, nada.

Media and Publicity

The movie got decent reviews at Sundance 2015, where it debuted. Not great, but decent. But that was after it was reportedly rejected from the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival because the festival organizers were not fans of the original ending, which the director refused to change.

Unfortunately there wasn’t much else on the press front I could find.

Overall

I wish there were more here. While I understand this isn’t a huge release, I feel like at least on the social and publicity front the film could have gotten more of a substantive push. The poster is intriguing and conversation-starting and the trailer is certainly designed to get people to pay attention in a big way. But then it falls apart with no web presence to speak of. It’s too bad since this seems like a movie that could have benefited from doing more to spark word-of-mouth at the very least.