Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile you could miss it. One day you’re in your 20s and carefree, hanging out with your friends until the middle of the night. Then you turn around and you have a career that sucks in all of your emotional and physical energy, you have kids whom you love but who demand a lot of attention and you have other responsibilities that mean you’re going to bed at 9:30 and just kind of want to sit on the couch and watch a movie on the weekends.
The changes that life throws at you and how that impacts the relationships around you form the premise of The Night Before, a new comedy starring Seth Rogen, Anthony Mackie and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Ethan (Levitt), Chris (Mackie) and Isaac (Rogen) have been lifelong friends and have spent every Christmas Eve for the last decade in an annual night of revelry. But now Isaac and his wife are expecting their first child and Chris is an increasingly-popular NFL player and they’re calling it quits with one final night out, which they plan to make an epic finale.
The Posters
The first poster put the trio of stars in an image meant to look like a stained glass window while decked out in their holiday sweaters and Santa caps. Toward the bottom is the copy “Their past, present and future. All in one night.” that hints at how we’re following these three through one night of hijinks. At the very bottom is the title treatment alone with the other movies the audience may have enjoyed from the same talent behind this one.
It’s a fun, tongue-in-cheek poster that gives the audience a lot of the information they’ll likely need to decide to see the movie. It creates familiarity while still showing a good amount of irreverence and making the gist of the movie’s story pretty clear.
The theatrical poster puts that “From the guys who brought you…” copy at the very top, above the cast list and the title treatment. The cast this time is laying on the ground looking at the camera with a playful, no-good look on their faces. It’s clear, I mean, that they’re up to no good while trying to look innocent. According to the copy at the bottom they’re “Bringing joy to the world.”
This one is a little less playful and fun than the first one, though I like the use of a festive, Christmas-type of type for all the text here.
Note that neither poster contains the URL for the movie’s website. But there is a hashtag. Sure, OK.
The Trailers
The first trailer was, of course, a red-band one. It starts out like a Christmas fairy tale but then we get introduced to the three guys, who we see are lifelong friends who are saying goodbye to a long-standing tradition for various reasons. We see them in various settings before we hear that they’re heading to the best Christmas party in New York City but have several hours to do other things first. That leads to clips of all the insanity they will get themselves into over the course of the night, culminating in a tripping balls Isaac throwing up in the middle of Christmas Eve Mass.
It’s pretty funny. If you’re a fan of the kind of movies this team has produced before – Neighbors, The Interview, Superbad etc – this will be right up your alley. It’s clear Chris (Mackie) is being setup as the straight guy, but there’s just enough going on to suggest that he will have his own backstory and arc throughout the movie along with Levitt’s Ethan.
A green-band version was released as well that works just as well, despite the exclusion of all the overt drug references.
One final red-band trailer dropped about a week before release. It opens with Rogen dealing with two weird twin girls who say he looks funny because he’s Jewish. That leads to the same “It’s our last Christmas together” scene we’ve seen before, but this time with more Mackie as he deals with a female fan (“Broad City”’s Ilana Glazer). Much of the rest of the trailer is devoted to scenes of Isaac tripping balls on the variety of drugs he’s been given by his wife. So we see him freaking out and hallucinating at Chris’ mom’s house, having a vision of the future after smoking weed given to him by a sketchy dealer (Michael Shannon in what looks to be a fun cameo) and then finally at church.
The focus on Rogen in this trailer makes it seem like someone was freaking out that the audience wasn’t convinced by the ensemble nature of the marketing to date and so decided to double-down on selling Rogen being front and center to allay some fears or turn out some additional audience segments.
Online and Social
It’s entirely possible the movie doesn’t have an official website, just this stub page on the Sony Pictures site that has some basic information about it along with some videos, a brief synopsis, cast list and a few other details.
The movie did have Facebook, Twitter and Instagram profiles, though. And they promoted the Snapchat profile in the trailers as well. That explains the lack of a URL on the poster and other materials.
Advertising and Cross-Promotions
There was lots of TV advertising done, so much so that the movie was the top TV ad spender about three weeks prior to release. The TV spots, like this one, play up lots of the jokes from the movie but for the most part don’t repeat much of what has already been seen in the trailers. They’re good in their own way without being duplicative.
There was plenty of online advertising done as well, including promoted posts on social networks.
Media and Publicity
There was a nice media bump when the cast engaged in a mock interview with “Nathan For You”’s Nathan Felder that almost reached “Between Two Ferns” territory. All three of the main cast would obviously do the talk show circuit in advance of the movie’s release as well to drum up awareness and interest.
On a more serious note, the cast would talk about how the movie got started, what they were trying to do by creating a more adult Christmas movie, how their lives have changed since they had kids and more.
Overall
This is a good campaign that takes some weird – or at least unexpected – turns from time to time. The lack of an official website is surprising simply because I thought that would be a given. The last-minute trailer that plays this as a Seth Rogen movie, not an ensemble comedy, isn’t so much unexpected as it is just a significant pivot so close to release.
But overall the campaign presents a very attractive movie. That last trailer aside, the emphasis throughout is on the bond between the three friends, even if Rogen gets slightly more screen time and attention than Levitt or Mackie. That’s likely because he’s the guy the audience is most likely to associate with a movie like this, so he’s being played up a bit more than the other two. It comes through, though, that the movie has a lot of laughs but also hints that there’s some genuine emotion – and not just of the male-bonding variety – in there as well.
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