This approach to movie marketing, one in which the buzz machine cranks up early and feeds the blogosphere often, is now commonplace. "The Dark Knight Rises," "The Amazing Spider-Man," the multiple installments in the "Twilight" saga and the soon-to-be-released "Hunger Games," the adaptation of Suzanne Collins's young-adult novel about a government-sanctioned teen death match, are among the many films engaging in varying degrees of something we'll call movie publicity foreplay. For several months, sometimes a year-plus, the studios behind these projects titillate fans with provocative sneak peeks — casting announcements, photos, trailers, alternate reality games — until it's finally time to deliver the full monty: the movie itself.
"There is so much competing for audience's attention that I think to go out there early and engage fans and make a project feel like an event is certainly an important thing to do," says Heather Phillips, the chief marketing officer at Aspect Ratio, a movie marketing firm in L.A. "But you don't want to take away the mystery around it. You don't want to give away too much."
The notion of engaging in a bit of premature audience seduction, particularly online, is hardly new. (Didn't "The Blair Witch Project" do that in 1999?) But as the power of social media swells, the intensity of these marketing efforts — as well as the need to activate them increasingly early — is changing the game, allowing a movie's publicity campaign to often kick into gear well before production has even started.
In the case of "The Hunger Games," which hits multiplexes Friday after a dizzying year of hype, chatter began as soon as Collins's books were optioned but ratcheted up more once actress Jennifer Lawrence won the role of bow-and-arrow-wielding protagonist Katniss Everdeen. Every subsequent casting decision — right down to the one involving Donald Sutherland — was announced and dissected online by fans of the series, who also analyzed the first widely shared photo of Lawrence in her Katniss garb and faithfully tweeted every trailer, interview anecdote and promotional tidbit that followed. But the devotees aren't the only ones who pay attention to the blitz; independent Web sites and traditional media outlets are itchy to share this material with their readers, too. And that means the past year has yielded what has felt , at a conservative estimate, like 5,000 blogosphere mentions of "The Hunger Games" per day.
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