Scott Pilgrim Versus the World , For any of you fellow comic book geeks out there, you’d have gone out and seen this by now and have enjoyed its 2 hours of epicness. For the rest of you though, which evidently is a lot of you as you’ll soon see, something deterred you from forking over $12 and a Friday night. Lets look at the reasons why. . .
First off, I’d like to say that Scott Pilgrim was an absolutely well-done movie; the editing was great, it was new and is the first movie to bring a comic book to life into through the medium of film (aka its legit a comic book made into a movie, not a movie based on a comic book). Critics absolutely raved about Scott Pilgrim, giving it glowing reviews; some of which were even on par with Inception. Point being, this movie has value.
So, if not the quality of the movie itself, why did Scott Pilgrim yield such an unsatisfactory $10.5 million in its first weekend (a mere dent in the movies $90 million budget). This answer, I do believe, lies primarily in the marketing strategy Universal embarked on.
After the excitement the film’s Comic-Con panel set flame to, Universal threw down over $60 million into a marketing campaign for the movie. The problem it seems though, in the aftermath of the film’s box office run of less than $30 million, was that they were trying to sell something to those were already sold on the product.
That is to say, they were promoting Scott Pilgrim like mad among the comic book community (which makes up a very, very small portion of the movie-goer community), most of whom were already set to watch the movie anyways. Universal failed to reach a wider audience (i.e. people who aren’t in tune to who Bryan Lee O’Malley is). By spending, or rather wasting, their money on marketing solely to a very small, focused group, they missed out on sales from the greater, more general population.
Secondly, it seems Universal didn’t quite have a firm grasp on what it was they were marketing. Granted, trying to explain to someone the essence of Scott Pilgrim is remarkably difficult (its about this unemployed guy who’s dating a high schooler whose also in a band but then falls in love with this girl but has to defeat her 7 evil-ex boyfriends and while he’s not a superhero, he like has these powers when he fights…). Scott Pilgrim is hard to sell. In the trailers, they tried selling it as a part rom-com part action flick. . . which only led purveyors of both genres to be turned off it. (Even Michael Cera was quoted as saying that Pilgrim is “a tricky one to sell. I don’t know how you convey that movie in a marketing campaign. I can see it being something that people are slow to discover”.
Action star-stacked, The Expendables came out the same weekend and it was easy to see why action lovers went straight to the former for their fix of mindless explosions and straight-up action. With its stacked cast, the Schwarzenegger’s cameo for all its worth and promise of no-plot line to get in the way of the action, The Expendables did a good job of pinpointing exactly what their ‘product’ and subsequently had no troubles marketing it successfully. In short, audiences knew what to expect. And when it came to make a decision between throwing down $12 for the Expendables or Scott Pilgrim, the $64.9 M raked in by the Expendables gives us a pretty good idea who won that battle.
(I would also like to note that the casting of Michael Cera as Scott Pilgrim likely did nothing to help boost movie sales. Not when a) Michael Cera has done enough films now to solidify the notion that he only plays 1 character and b) he’s a whiny bitch kid who is anything but Scott Pilgrim).
To be honest, maybe what some bloggers have been saying about Scott Pilgrim is true, that the movie was just too smart for audiences. The world just wasn’t ready for it. But then again, Inception seemed like it found a niche in today’s social trends. I will continue being a fan of Scott Pilgrim (both the novels and the movie) and hope that its DVD release will have a longer shelf life than its theatre counterpart. In any case, it appears that some good did come out of the movie, for the last month, Scott Pilgrim comics have been in the Top 10 highest selling comics with Vol. 1 holding the number one spot. Indicating that a lot of new readers have been turned on to the series.
Note: many, many, many articles have been written about the Scott Pilgrim movie trying to piece together the puzzle as to why this movie fizzled at the box office. Worth checking out:
http://www.cracked.com/funny-4739-scott-pilgrim/