Movie Marketing Madness: Dirty Grandpa

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dirty_grandpa_ver4There’s a lot of comedy – or drama – to be mined in cross-generational stories. These kinds of situations offer plenty of opportunities for the older character to teach the younger one something valuable and the younger to show the older that they contain a bit of wisdom as well. There’s also plenty of ground to be covered wherein the older gets the younger into a high-larious situation of some sort that results in the embarrassment of both.

Dirty Grandpa is squarely in that category. Robert DeNiro – yes, that one – stars as Dick, a man whose wife has just passed away. This apparently means he’s out from under the thumb of the woman who’s been holding him back and so he convinces his grandson Jason (Zac Efron) to take him down to Florida on a post-funeral trip, despite the fact that Jason is just days away from getting married himself. Now that he’s a bachelor though Dick doesn’t feel so great about the institution of marriage and while he’s sowing his wild oats he also sows the seeds of doubt in Jason, who is otherwise a responsible guy.

The Posters

The first poster is basically a riff on the one-sheet for The Graduate, with Efron as Dustin Hoffman and DeNiro as Anne Bancroft, only his leg showing as he pulls up his sock, complete with that little thing to hold the socks up. The actor’s names are at the top and the title is below the image, just like on The Graduate poster. And just like that classic film, there’s copy off to the right and even the cadence of the copy echoes what’s seen on the other poster. “This is Jason. He’s a little worried about his grandpa.”

I’m not sure why *this* movie is the one to lift every single design element from The Graduate, but here we are. Not many people in the target demographic are going to look at this and say “Oh, I see what they’re doing here” so it seems like an odd choice on the part of the designers.

The second poster featured a similar amount of white space, but this time the main image is pulled straight from the trailer as we see Efron and DeNiro standing next to their car with a gas pump as they’re aghast at and admiring, respectively, the shorts-wearing backside of a young female who is mostly off-screen, in case you were wondering whether objectification of women was still a thing.

A third poster just featured Efron and DeNiro in a car driving along, the former looking slightly annoyed and as though he’d like to be anywhere else while the latter is smoking a cigar and looking like he’s having the time of his life.

Yet another poster – this is a LOT of posters for a mid-level comedy like this – showed DeNiro lifting Efron on his shoulders, both of them shirtless and with the copy “What did you learn from your grandparents?” at the top. So it’s really underlining the wacky buddy comedy aspect of the movie here along with Efron’s abs.

The Trailers

We immediately get the premise laid out for is in the opening moments of the first trailer. The wife of DeNiro’s character has just died but he wants to continue their tradition of going to Florida. So he’s accompanied by his grandson, who’s just days away from his own wedding. The elder man is ready to live it up whereas the younger is more buttoned down and just wants to do his thing and get home. Eventually Efron’s character loosens up (after becoming afraid married life will deny him all the joy he’s missed out on) and joins his grandfather at parties, clubs and more. All the while DeNiro’s character has a weird thing going on with a young co-ed played by Aubrey Plaza, who apparently is into older dudes in a big way.

I’ll leave out my issues with marriage as always being presented as a huge buzzkill and say the trailer looks kind of funny. Efron certainly has comedy chops and the way he and DeNiro play off each other looks moderately amusing. The plot with Plaza hitting on DeNiro is super-creepy, but I think we all kind of know that.

A second trailer – a red-band version – was released later that’s pretty funny. It hits some of the same story beats as the first trailer, but adds in a lot more salty language, particularly from DeNiro. The sexual repartee between him and Plaza is also a lot more explicit, which unfortunately just comes off as even more creepy. Still, this is a good trailer that shows the movie for what it’s meant to be, which is an excuse to see an old man swear and be way inappropriate.

A third trailer wasn’t a whole lot different than what had come before, just slightly repackaged.

Online and Social

That the “loading” symbol on the official site is a red cup should tell you everything you need to know about the marketing of the movie. The top of the site features a recreation of one of the posters and the prompt to watch one of the trailers again. As you scroll down there is a carousel with a rotating series of quotes from the film, most of which involve bras or other sexual references. Then, because the site is built on Tumblr there’s a whole section of GIFs, photos and videos that are all sharable both natively there and on other social networks.

After that there’s a call to watch the red-band trailer, which is followed by “The Story,” where you can read a brief synopsis of the story that may have also acted as the script. Then there’s “Cast,” which has the cast, their character names and a character description that is just a few words. “Gallery” has about a half-dozen stills.

dirty_grandpa pic 2

“Redacted Scripts” is kind of a cool feature that I wish were used on a better looking movie. Each image has a still from the movie along with a couple lines of dialogue with the curse words blacked out. That’s a neat execution. Finally there are two “Fun With Dick and Jason” items that present parts of the story in the manner of a children’s book. These recreate scenes we’ve largely seen in the trailers and again is kind of a fun idea but I feel like it’s being wasted on a sub-par movie.

There were also Facebook, Twitter and Instagram profiles where the studio shared videos, images and links.

Advertising and Cross-Promotions

TV spots ran in the weeks leading up to release, most of which just reconfigured scenes from the trailers. So we saw DeNiro goose Efron with a golf club, yell “party till you’re pregnant” and more. The gist of the story is certainly conveyed, which is that Efron is an uptight stickler and DeNiro is cutting loose, with just a couple of them going into why that is.

Media and Publicity

There was surprisingly little publicity for the movie. Apparently the strategy was to stoke word-of-mouth through all the clips and other material and not expose the cast to the press too much. Julianne Hough would make the press rounds a bit to talk about the film but that was about it, at least up to just a few days before the film’s release. Kind of odd if you ask me.

dirty_grandpa pic 1

Overall

I usually try hard to focus on *just* the marketing when evaluating a campaign and see how it is going to appeal to the target audience. But this campaign is so filled with the worst kind of gender stereotypes it’s hard not to see it as the product of some other era. All the women presented here are either ballbusters (Dick’s dead wife, Jason’s fiance) or horndogs (Aubrey Plaza’s character) and the men are just trying to be themselves, darnit, despite the women who want to run everything. It’s…kind of terrible.

The focus in the campaign on those elements leads me to believe that’s not just something that being played up for comedic effect (though we can argue how funny these stereotypes still are in 2016) but is pretty representative of the movie as a whole. While sure dealing in stereotypes certainly *can* be the foundation for comedy, this just looks offensive from start to finish, without any greater societal point that’s being made. It’s as if a group of men who had just decided they were done with women got together and poured all their vitriol into a movie script that then was greenlit by a Hollywood studio. If that’s your thing this may appeal to you. Otherwise you may want to pass.

By Chris Thilk

Chris Thilk is a freelance writer and content strategist with over 15 years of experience in online strategy and content marketing. He lives in the Chicago suburbs.