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Movie Marketing Madness: Love The Coopers

love_the_coopers_ver2Let’s be honest with each other, alright? “Holiday” movies often fill you with dread. For every A Christmas Story there’s a Jack Frost. For every Christmas Vacation there’s…a dozen other lesser movies. There’s nothing like Christmas to bring out the cliches, the corniness, the rushed characterizations and overall lazy writing. Throw a big family into a house featuring an immaculate kitchen with copper pots hanging above the island, stir in a bunch of repressed feelings and kooky character traits and you’ve got yourself 117 minutes of movie that may not be great, but it will likely make its money back.

That’s where we find ourselves with Love The Coopers. Diane Keaton and John Goodman play Charlotte and Sam, two older parents who want to bring their whole family together for, as we’re repeatedly told, “the perfect Christmas.” But they’ve got some disappointing kids, including a widowed, single-father son (Ed Helms) and a perpetually single and directionless daughter (Olivia Wilde). Add in a few other relatives, including a grouchy uncle (Alan Arkin) and you’ve got all the ingredients for a movie people will laugh at because hey, at least they’re not that bad.

The Posters

love_the_coopersThere’s not a whole lot going on in the first poster but it still gets its point across pretty well. A dog wearing fake furry antlers lays in front of what appears to be a downed Christmas tree in an attempt to establish the setting of the film as being in someone’s home at Christmastime. The main component of the poster, though, is the cast list that takes up over a quarter of the real estate here. Below that is the copy “Christmas means comfort, joy and chaos.”

It’s an alright poster, even if it seems like the kind of thing you’d see on a Hallmark card.

The theatrical one-sheet is not as good, which is a low bar to not clear. This time the cast list is across the top because most of the upper half of the poster is dominated by the “You can’t regift family” copy, which is meant to be clever but which doesn’t land very well. Below that is a badly-Photoshopped image of that impressive cast all tied up in a big holiday bow, with the title treatment and credits at the bottom.

The poster component of the campaign is just overall not very inspired. Too much white space, copy that is trying way too hard to use something akin to hip language and not very original or informative imagery. Not a strong showing here.

The Trailers

The first trailer setup a pretty familiar premise, of an extended family coming together for the holiday. We see all the kids, grandkids and so on as hijinks ensue, as one daughter convinces a soldier she meets at the airport to masquerade as her boyfriend, parents deal with kids with issues and so on.

It looks charming enough and inoffensive to the extent that a certain portion of the population will be instinctively attracted to it as lightweight and funny way to spend a couple hours during their holiday break.

The movie’s second trailer is a bit less charming and a lot more heavy-handed. Via a narrator we’re introduced to the main members of the family that’s coming together for Christmas dinner, which we know because Keaton actually gets a line about how everyone coming together is the only thing she wants.

This features a lot of the same clips and premises from the first, just not as many – this one’s run time is just over a minute – and rearranged a bit.

Online and Social

The official website opens by playing the second trailer in a pop-up window you can close if you don’t want to watch it again. If you scroll down you’ll also find a collection of videos and images you can share on the social network of your choice. Most of the images have some sort of copy overlaid on them to create some kind of sharable moment related to the movie.

love_the_coopers pic

The first section of content is “Story” and has just a couple sentence-long synopsis of the plot. Nothing you couldn’t already get from the trailer. The “Cast & Crew” section is pretty good, with longer-than-average write-ups about the main cast and director Jessie Nelson. “Gallery” has just four images and “Partners” has information on the companies that gave the movie some promotional support.

The movie had social outposts on Facebook and Twitter as well as a board on the CBS Films Pinterest profile.

Advertising and Cross-Promotion

There’s been enough TV advertising done that even I’ve seen some commercials. The studio clearly wants to sell this as a solid moviegoing option in a field that’s lacking another holiday-themed movie and so is pulling out the stops to get people to the theaters. The spots don’t differ too greatly from the trailers, just a little bit around the edges, playing up the same kind of copy and angle as the posters more than anything.

There’s also been plenty of online advertising done, including promoted Twitter posts and more. And I encountered some outdoor ads as well.

Promotional partners included:

  • Southwest Airlines: Ran a sweepstakes offering to fly you and a friend home for the holidays to anywhere in the U.S.  
  • Joss & Main: Created a special curated movie-centric sale on holiday products
  • Ricardo Beverly Hills: Had their Mar Vista line of luggage featured in the movie
  • Shutterfly: Nothing about the movie on the website, so again maybe there’s in-film product placement
  • Eventful: Partnered with CBS Films to offer a sweeps giving away a trip to Aruba.

Media and Publicity

Press coverage mainly focused on the cast. That included this profile of Jake Lacy, who plays the soldier Olivia Wilde’s character meets at the airport and brings home as her boyfriend. Then there’s this interview with Helms where he talks about what attracted him to the story as well as working with the rest of the cast, especially Alan Arkin, whom he formed a musical bond with. The whole cast would also talk about what made them want to sign on and what connection they had with the material.

love_the_coopers pic 2

Overall

The movie looks pleasant and inoffensive enough and there are likely worse ways to spend a couple hours in the theater. And there are probably a few genuine laughs in there. But overall this campaign fails to make a compelling case as to *why* people should choose this over something else. There’s nothing in the marketing that really makes you stand up and say “Yes, this instead of that.” So it’s going to be surprising if this does more than middling box-office this weekend.

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