In Hollywood, the blockbuster era kickstarted in the year 1975 with the release of Maverick director Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and this has given us some of the most entertaining releases, thus giving us enough reasons to wait a whole year until the summer blockbuster season kick starts.
The likes of Star Wars, E.T., Titanic and Avatar would have faced immense struggles to even get a release before the mid-70 epiphany hit the industry like as a revelation. It was the time when Hollywood suddenly opened up to the fact that it could release the big budget films on thousands of screens across the United States in order to get the benefits of the mass anticipation regarding such productions. And the weekend collections became the ultimate scale for film’s success which still continues.
However profitable this revelation turned out to be, there is a downside as well. As the determination of the viewers to go see the likes of Mamma Mia or Four Funerals and a Wedding more than once can very certainly be linked to the fact that the makers are now well verse in creating a mass hysteria around the blockbusters. And with that, the aggressive marketing campaigns and strategies of the marketing geniuses along with the one lined review quotes, often from the low-grade and largely unknown film critics has benefitted far worse films than these in the past.
From the business point of view this may be good and there are many good films acquiring benefits from such strategies but going with the fact that the Transformers films has made around 3.7 Billion US dollars over the past decade, it becomes somehow very disturbing.
But, is the scenario changing? Just last week, The Hollywood Reporter was seen describing the box-office “tracking” system, which is being used by the big studios to predict how well the particular film is going to perform over the weekend, as broken.
On the critic’s aggregator website, the successful films such as Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation received some good reviews which further lead to the success which was much more than expected. And to make the things better, the positive word of mouth on the social media sites such as facebook and twitter further acts as the final nail in the coffin.
The Jurassic World earned over 1 billion took their promotions online and thus got rewarded. It’s the need of the hour for the big production houses as they should take their marketing efforts online.
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