This week's perspective from Joe Chidley:The first goes to the marketers of the ignobly entitled Hot Tub Time Machine, an unlikely John Cusack vehicle about four party animals who get sucked back into 1986. Of course the movie sounds like a recipe for disaster, but its reception has been remarkably favourable. (The Globe and Mail’s reviewer Rick Groen even allowed: “As films called Hot Tub Time Machine go, it’s not terrible.”) This has at least something to do with some savvy and persistent marketing for the film. For one, Cusack (whose film company made the movie) and his co-stars (Craig Robinson, Rob Corddry and Clark Duke) worked the media circuit big-time, talking to reporters with enough self-effacing humour that flop was averted. (Quipped Robinson to CNN: “It’s this year’s Avatar.”) That’s just good junket stuff, but it was backed up by an on-the-mark PR stunt called “The Tub Crawl,” in which Robinson, Corddry and Duke made appearances across the US in (no surprise here) a hot tub. They even landed a spot on a special float in the Mardi Gras parade—primo placement for a movie about guys getting drunk and acting badly. File this under “Phrases I Never Thought I’d Use,” but: Touchdown, Hot Tub Time Machine.
The second TD goes to the recently released trailer for Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, a nebbish-superhero flick that ended up the subject of a crazy number of tweets (second only at one point to Justin Bieber—so you know it’s big). Props to the movie (which opens in mid-August) for being set in Toronto and to the trailer for showing the city’s sights and sounds (TTC, Casa Loma, etc.), a feature that earned both lots of free buzz in Canadian online media.
0 comments:
Post a Comment