Now You See Me 2

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Everything here is just all sizzle and no substance. That’s not a bad thing, it just means that it’s counting on the sizzle to be enough to pull in the audience, which isn’t guaranteed since that’s basically the same sales pitch everything else getting wide release is making to the audience. So the marketers are counting on this looking like more fun than some of the other releases, particularly the raft of “hero versus hero” super hero movies that look dour and grim. Let’s see if that focus is both representative of the movie and enough to bring in the audience this weekend.

Warcraft

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The other thing that sticks out at me is that the campaign kind of can’t decide who it’s selling the movie to. There are obviously lots of moments here that are just for fans of the game but that leaves out a significant portion of the movie-going public. So the fact that character posters don’t feature names seems very insidery and not open to non-players at all. But then the trailers assume there’s no knowledge and just try to position the movie as a big spectacle for anyone. You can make the case that this is the studio trying to sell the movie to all audiences but it actually comes off as kind of disjointed, at least from the perspective of someone who hasn’t played the game and doesn’t know the characters. We’ll have to see how it resonates with the audience in general.

Genius

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…the marketing sells the movie as kind of a bromance (I’m so sorry for using that word) between Perkins and Wolfe. The whole thing keeps the focus on the working and personal relationship between the two men, which thrives despite one stumbling block after another, always to the detriment of the relationships with the women in their lives. This campaign is telling you to come see a movie about a couple workaholics who can’t stop getting in their own way by putting work – presented here as the quest for high art – before everything else.