July 26, 2004

Comic-Con is more than a place, it is a state of insanity.

I spent a couple days down in San Diego at the annual center of the geek universe doing what most of the folks who attend go there to finally avoid… not fitting in. There was a time when I did go to events like this and felt more a part of things. But that was a long, long time ago. It was before the wide berth of the videotape and cable, one of the rare opportunities to see old TV shows and sci-fi movies that were out of circulation.

Cut to 2004 and there are tens of thousands of people wandering around a convention center with every kind of comic book/cartoon/sci-fi/fantasy/videogame kink in the known universe. Perhaps the most striking thing I noticed on the floor this year was how many good looking kids there were there, geeking it up. There were plenty of nerds in heat, but the genre world has, apparently, moved a bit closer to the potentiality of cool.

As for the movie scene at the convention, it continues to increase each year and this year is no different. Most of the studios have no idea what they are doing there or what kind of impact they are about to make, but there they are duking it out. This year, both the New York and L.A. Times sent top business side entertainment reporters down to cover the event. Laura Holson's story, while well reported, misses the real story entirely… and who can blame her, she is a lot more alien in that world than Boba Fett and apparently even more susceptible to Jedi mind control. I look forward to John Horn's upcoming report.

The most telling comment was made at the Batman Begins panel, which featured the befuddled (though talented) Cillian Murphy and B.B. writer and Blade III writer/director David Goyer… no Christian Bale, no Christopher Nolan, no Gary Oldman, no Katie Holmes, no Ken Watanabe, no Michael Caine, no Rutger Hauer, no Liam Neeson, etc, etc, etc and most importantly, not a frame of footage. Goyer said, "If we didn't do something, you guys would be saying something was wrong."

And he was completely right.

Comic-Con is no different than any other extension of the geek universe. It is hardcore. It is unrelentingly passionate. It is amazingly fickle. And it is often at the core of the highest grossing films in America.

The problem for these folks, and for the movie marketers, is that these hardcore ticket buyers are both more critical than any other group and more likely to pay for crappy movies regardless of the buzz than any other group. If fact, they will show up for the worst reviewed films in big geek numbers just to see how bad the film is. The one thing you don't want this group to be feeling is apathy.

That said, the internet presence of this group is significant because of the impact it has on lazy journalists across the world. In the end, it will not matter. But for the months and months before a film is released, studio execs and filmmakers can feel absolutely tortured by the buzz, which may or may not be correct and, in a universe with few rules, often shows little interest in fairness. When the weeks before release come, blanket marketing - by TV, trailers, outdoor, print ads, web ads, etc, etc - will rule the day. At that point, there is the battle between what the movie really is and what the studio feels it has to sell to open… but that's a completely different conversation.

Infinitely more gutsy, more aggressive, more risky and more important to the future of Sky Captain & The World of Tomorrow than the distribution of "limited edition T-shirts and posters designed by the director Kerry Conran" reported by the NYT's Holson, was the screening of the just-finished film (the first screening on celluloid) for 200 or so of the key writers and players in the geek universe. The screening was held under a strict review embargo, but Paramount knows that these guys (almost all are guys) will set the tone for what is published on the web in the next two months before the film is finally released. Win them over and negative buzz is lessened, no matter what happens at test screenings. Leave them hanging and the already not-so-great buzz continues. Without speaking about the quality of the film in any way, I have to say that my take on the post-screening buzz is that Paramount won the day.

The limited edition Sky Captain T-shirts and posters also stood as a landmark from which Paramount can navigate. Geeks were standing in line, about 50 deep every time I passed the booth, to get these goodies. Paramount did not have one of the bigger or showier booths on the floor. But there they stood, actually lined up around the back side of the booth and into the next aisle. This is obviously good. But one must keep in mind that if every single person who attended Comic-Con this year went to go see Sky Captain, you are looking at less than a million dollars in box office.

The single biggest event at Comic-Con this year was the unveiling of the name of the last Star Wars film, Episode Three: Revenge of The Sith. I didn't attend the two-hour Lucas event, which was scheduled for twice the time of any other studio. But I have been told by people I trust that what was shown was mostly peripheral to the film… licensing pitches, etc. There was a rumor that the first trailer for the film would be shown, but no such luck. (The title reveal has been rumored - pretty much confirmed - in geek circles for weeks.)

The story around Constantine was not the appearance of Keanu Reeves, who was well received and charming, but the 17 minutes of footage shown. And that is Comic-Con all over… they are happy to get the goodies, but what they really cared about was the footage. I saw the footage and as someone who knows nothing about the comic, it was so story-disconnected that I couldn't get excited. It was quiet and moody and interesting looking. It was too much with too little focus to overcome my personal limitations. But the geeks seem to have loved it pretty unanimously.

Sin City was another prime example of Comic-Conning. The illusion that something affirmative happened at Comic-Con for this film was reported. But the truth is, the film was among the five most anticipated events at Comic-Con going in, the geeks already knew that Rodriguez and Frank Miller were in sync and that their vision would be pure, and all that could have happened by showing six minutes of footage would be to dampen spirits. It did not, which is great. But the bigger buzz comes from Rodriquez's cooler-than-thou attitude versus the tighter control of Lucas or WB on Batman Begins.

Thing is, Lucas and WB are pretty much right. Why should they give up control of their marketing effort when the people they'd be servicing with footage are already in their pockets? On the other hand, Constantine needs the help, with a first-time director and a movie based on a comic book of a different name (Hellblazer), no one to sell the movie with but Keanu, and already endless bad web buzz (not a single person I heard praising the footage failed to start with "Against all odds…"), WB went for the open approach. The studio believed that the footage they had to show was winning. It won. So they are right, too.

Perhaps the most dangerous notion that I read in the Holson article about Comic-Con is that as studios start making films from less popular comic books, events like Comic-Con become more important. All I can say it, if you are a marketer and you take that position with anyone but the geeks, you are going to be out of a job pretty quickly. In point of fact, if you are marketing anything but the rarest of films by relying on the core constituency of the underlying source material, you are going to smash into the wall and smash into it hard. It doesn't matter whether it is a big best-seller for adults or a comic book, the job of a movie marketer is to expand to a market far wider than the original material ever reached. (Except for you, Mr. Gibson.)

This doesn't mean that there isn't a real value for the studios at Comic-Con. It is not nearly as important for a film as a Leno appearance, simply because Leno has more than 10 times the audience. But it is true publicity, it is relatively cheap, and the more babies that can be kissed for any film the better.

New Line has always been extremely conscious of its base for its genre product. Footage from the Rings/King special edition, which will add 50 minutes of material, was shown to the shriek of thousands of geek orgasms. Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle was not only shown, and not only did John Cho and Kal Penn interview themselves in front of 7000 people, but the studio took advantage of the Comic-Con opportunity and shot audience reaction commercials after their Friday night screening and Q&A.

But New Line sold Blade as a Wesley Snipes vampire action flick far more aggressively than they sold it as comic book movie… in part because they learned their lesson from Spawn, which was blazing hot as a comic book and merchandising title when it was released, but failed to get past the $55 million mark domestically and just $33 million in the rest of the world. A year later, Blade opened to less than Spawn, but beat the domestic take with $70 million and almost doubled the international take. Blade 2 added another $25 million to the worldwide take. Can Blade 3 hit the $100 million mark domestically? They hope so… one of the central ideas of the film is to build two new spin-off characters for a future franchise. (Note: Blade 3, which was originally scheduled for August and is now finished, showed a few clips at Comic-Con, but is holding its major push for November, in anticipation of a December release.)

To get to $100 million, a movie has to sell tickets to roughly 15 million people. That is a lot of people. And the majority of those people, in any genre, have never heard of Comic-Con, much less attended. Perspective…

One thing will always be true… show up at Comic-Con and you will find out what the hardcore core thinks, if you listen. Your movie won't get any better or any worse for making the trip. But if you want to stick that thermometer in, you're in the right place. There is nothing there that can't be overcome and no momentum that can't be lost.

In the meantime… Bourne Supremacy at an estimated $53.5 million… wow… that's bigger than any Bond opening in history and is really quite singular in the history of film when you look at the types of films that have done that kind of number. The only people near as happy as Universal execs today are WB execs whose Ocean's Twelve bet just got even better, with two of its stars having openings over $45 million this summer. The first Ocean film opened to "just" $38 million on its way to $450 million worldwide. I'm betting that the ultimates for theatrical on Ocean's Twelve at WB will be readjusted well over $500 million this week.

READER OF THE DAY: BILL CHAMBERS writes: "Not sure you if you meant to imply that Pitof is himself a first-time hack by comparing his obsession with close-ups to the work of same, but CATWOMAN is, sadly, not the first feature film he's inflicted on us. His directorial debut was, of course, the stultifying bad VIDOCQ, starring Gerard
Depardieu in-name-only as the famous French detective. It's hard to find in the States, but readily accessible in Canada and abroad, where it actually has a bit of a cult following. Chalk it up to the Marc Caro-assisted production design, I guess. At any rate, it's apparently what landed Pitof the CATWOMAN gig."

And this from ACTUAL HUMAN: ""the emotional disconnection of video games"?

Seriously...? There hasn't been a movie in years that can compete with the emotional thrill I can get from a great video game. How old are you, Dave? You're outta touch."

E ME: It's not that I don't like video games. But a movie is a passive experience and the video game is an active experience. That distinction changes the mode of expression significantly, no? I suspect that Riddick: The Videogame is a lot more exciting than the movie… there is a reason for that.