Audience and Institution Essay: Assess the importance of marketing in film

Marketing is one of the most important steps in film making. Yes, a film can be a masterpiece that is extremely well made. But if no one knows about the film, then no one will go watch it. Without marketing, filmmakers would not reach a wide audience of people and would not make much or any profit from the film. On the flip side, a decent or mediocre movie could make triple the profit that it should make if it had greatly executed marketing.

First of all, movies flop all the time due to bad marketing. “V for Vendetta” was a movie that suffered from its trailers. According to an article by the Taste of Cinema, “‘V for Vendetta’ was loved and hated by fans of the novel and eventually found an audience through home media, but the misleading trailers confused and disappointed a wide selection of cinema fans.” Another example is “The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part.” Its marketing was basically non-existent. With only small ads and a toy line, the film made less than half the money the original made.

Secondly, average movies can make a ton of money from ingenious marketing. “Jurassic World” is a film that became the third-largest grossing movie of all time dominating the box office and was nominated for a considerable number of awards. Even though the film has a Metacritic score of 59 and is widely considered not to be as good at its predecessors. It made this amount of money through its clever marketing. Superbowl ads, mobile games, an online treasure hunt, the list goes on with how many marketing strategies it employed to grab the world's attention and make known that it exists.

In conclusion, it goes to show how important marketing can be for a film. Great films fall to the bottom, making only scraps of money and barely breaking even. While other run-of-the-mill films reach record-breaking numbers and roll in cash. And it is all because of marketing.