Variety reported this past week that tracking right now indicates that Guillermo Del Toro’s massive monster movie Pacific Rim is trailing behind Grown Ups 2. People are more hyped for another Adam Sandler flick than a rare gem of an opportunity where a writer, studio and director all decide to take a risk by working a genre with campy roots and giving it a classy coat of paint to explore its full potential.

The fact that audiences are showing more interest in Grown Ups 2 than anything else says more to me about the complete lack of discriminating taste amongst likely audiences than it does about the actual worth of these movies. Unfortunately, my belief that the majority of the public can be fooled into watching the same bad movie twice rather than an original and interesting story for the first time won’t help Pacific Rim’s box office performance.

I can tell you right now what the problem is: marketing.

Marketing this movie had to be a bitch. You’ve got no A-list stars, it’s not a sequel, and no tie-in’s to toys, games, etc. Despite a resume any legitimate director would die for, DelToro is not a widely recognized named among the movie going masses. Hellboy is the closest thing he’s done to a mainstream blockbuster and even those films, as excellent as they are, are considered the fringe of comic book films. You basically have to present this movie for what it is and hope people connect to it, which is quite difficult to do in a day when most of your major releases are franchises or remakes or just gimmicks. IMO, this is why there is so little original material outside of the art house crowd.

No sane person thinks that marketing only to fanboys is a good idea, and the fact that the WB has focused the Pacific Rim campaign on them for this long is evidence of total effing stupidity. The buzz among fanboys has been great for the last few months or if they weren’t going to use that hype to expand to the mainstream, that’s totally on them, and not on the fanboys. You have to make a choice to market to the mainstream, and WB has chosen not to put their materials in front of a mainstream audience and fight for the film with the clear backing of basically every fanboy ever. That’s on them.

I know Del Toro’s films. They always have heart, even when it’s about one demon that beats up other demons, he puts a ton of heart in them. But this movie? It’s being advertised on visuals alone, and in this day and age, that is just not enough. Just give me one commercial, ONE, that showcases the human side of the story. Last year at SDCC, they gave hints of the personal struggle the main character will have to go through when stuck without those he depends on…MENTION THAT! Or even more important, there’s got to be a love story. Can’t have a good movie this days (let me rephrase, a good selling movie these days) without something of a love story. Is there one if here? I don’t know.

Only advertising to the geek crowd is preaching to the choir, we have to get into the heads of the non-converts. Then again, if you can appeal to fans to the point where they lose their minds in some sort of mania, you can make serious money if they go back again and again.

However, when it comes to big money sci-fi, it’s all about the franchise. Make it a trilogy (at least), re-boot the thing about four to five years after the last one. Wash, rinse, repeat. Not your “sleeper” sci-fi hits like Primer, or District 9. Those are nice, but they are the exception, not the rule for studios backing sci-fi in a big way Pacific Rim is positioning itself as a tent pole release. If it’s DOA in the USA, that doesn’t bode well for a sequel, much less a trilogy.

Sure, marketing an original movie concept with blockbuster expectations is an uphill battle all the way and to an extent, this is why we can’t have nice things. The more ticket buyers choose the safe route, the less likely studios are to roll the dice on original concepts.

I do hope you give Pacific Rim a chance. This is more than just the fanboy in me talking. I would love to see this movie succeed. Guillermo is a creator who cares more about telling a good story and ensuring his audience has a good time than about making sure there’s enough product placement and Megan Fox’s ass in between all the explosions.

-Dagobot


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