“Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World” had everything going for it: ecstatic reviews, a long ride atop Twitter's trending topics and a boffo buzz boost out of Comic-Con.
Moviegoers never got the memo.
But those who actually saw the day-glo love story almost universally adored it -- surely a recipe for word-of-mouth business in week two. Right?
Wrong again: in its second weekend, the graphic novel-based, video game-inspired action/comedy fell to $5.2 million at the box office, a 51 percent drop from its doleful $10.6 million opening.
How could something so intrinsically good -- and at $60 million, not cheaply made -- go so wrong?
Selling the film proved to be an impossible task, film marketing executives and analysts told TheWrap. Coupled with a mashup concept that defied easy characterization, the film was crippled by its lead actor Michael Cera, who is rapidly earning a label as box office poison.
“This was a case where there was a narrow demographic and where that group of people responded to the movie very enthusiastically and were loud in praise, and the internet lent it more weight than it may have deserved,” said Jeff Hartke, a former box office analyst with the Hollywood Stock Exchange.
Here are the five things that went so wrong with a movie that seemed to do everything right.
1. Genre Confusion = Epic Marketing Fail
Universal did the best it could with a steep marketing challenge, according to multiple film marketing veterans who spoke with TheWrap.
But the film’s unique concept doesn’t easily translate to a TV trailer. Its mashup of genres -- superhero adventure, romance, comedy -- left Universal’s marketing team with no precedent to draw upon; they were charting new ground.
Unlike Lionsgate's “Kick-Ass,” Universal made a concerted effort to broaden the film’s appeal. The studio spent heavily on ads and television spots, cutting certain ads so they played up the film’s comic elements, all so that the movie would play beyond the core comic-book nerds.
Its posters and billboards were often contradictory, some marketing executives said. Their initial art, showing Cera cradling his electric bass guitar, seemed to position him as a cool guy, while commercials played up the star’s awkwardness.
“They couldn’t decide if this was a true superhero movie and they should make him look like a hero, or if it was an underdog story and you were supposed to root for him to get the girl,” a marketing executive with knowledge of the production told TheWrap.
In the final weeks leading up to the movie's release the film’s art and commercials shifted away from Cera and focused more on the superpowers of the exes themselves. The plot and its comic undertones seemed at loggerheads with the action that the posters and TV spots tried to sell.
One element the spots never quite managed to convey was the film's video game aesthetic, where words like "pow" pop up in bold face letters and characters disappear in a shower of coins much as they would in "Super Mario Brothers."
