Marvel aggressively promotes films

There are some evil geniuses behind the marketing for Avengers: Age of Ultron. This past Wednesday, they posted the following promoted tweet: “It’s go time, Marvelites: Tweet using #AvengersAssemble to unite & unlock an epic new #Avengers #AgeOfUltron Trailer!”

And, on cue, thousands of faithful Marvelites flooded the website with what amounted to free publicity. Disney (Marvel’s parent company) dangled a third trailer for the mega-blockbuster like a carrot on a stick and sat back to watch as the Internet did their work for them. Plenty of entities have tried to harness the power of the Internet to generate buzz for their products, but rarely does a company manage it with such surgical precision.

A major reason that it worked so effectively is the nature of the overall game Marvel is playing right now. The studio is playing with house money. Their string of hugely successful superhero films — starting with 2008’s Iron Man — has essentially left them with a captive audience, ready to gobble up whatever they choose to do next. This is why the studio felt comfortable making a movie about a previously unknown team featuring a talking raccoon and a walking tree. In 2008, people were skeptical about the plausibility of standalone films for Thor and Captain America. In 2014, Guardians of the Galaxy became the third highest-grossing film of the entire year. This is the climate that Disney/Marvel are working in. The anticipation is so high for the new Avengers film opening on May 1 that theaters have already started selling tickets two months in advance. Some theaters even announced 29-hour marathon screenings of all 10 Marvel Cinematic Universe films in the days leading up to the release. Marvel is playing a different game than everyone else right now.

But even the film studio, which is arguably flying the highest out of any out there right now, can’t get them all right. The ABC series Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., though popular, has not reached the level of otherworldly success that the films have. In another attempt to use its considerable clout with the fans, Marvel planned to release the hotly anticipated first trailer for Age of Ultron during the airing of the Oct. 28 episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Instead, a grainy version of the trailer was posted online almost a week early on Oct. 22. Marvel quickly adjusted and released the high-resolution version of the trailer, along with a tweet blaming their own fictional international evil organization Hydra for the leak. They adjusted well, but the opportunity was lost.

Leaks have become almost commonplace. The Sony hacking scandal was by far the biggest example of this, but it is far from the only one. Just a couple weeks ago, the entire third season of House of Cards was posted online 16 days early. Netflix quickly took it down — and took a page from Marvel’s book by posting a funny tweet in response — but it didn’t stop plenty of spoilers from being posted online.

It’s perhaps because of these spoilers that some musicians have begun releasing surprise albums. Beyoncé’s self-titled fifth studio album was posted to iTunes without any previous announcement or promotion. The album was a smash success and the surprise release only helped it be more impactful. This model is diametrically opposed to the one Marvel is using right now. Beyoncé, and later Drake’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, created buzz when their sudden unexpected releases sent shockwaves across the Internet.

Marvel is trying to work its fans up to a fever pitch to release its film in the most hyped-up climate possible. Marvel’s strategy is the more familiar model, and honestly, it is more workable for most mediums — it would be a bit silly to imagine a major motion picture being released all of a sudden online like a Beyoncé album. There is too much riding financially on each film. A top commercial album isn’t cheap to make, but a film is another animal entirely. The first Avengers film cost $220 million to make; Ultron undoubtedly surpassed that figure. A movie studio is not going to spend that kind of cash and then risk releasing its product by surprise and watch it fall short of expectations. Remember, surprise releases don’t always succeed, as Bono and his automatically uploaded Songs of Innocence can attest to. If it is not a feasible model, however, then it almost means that studios will have to accept the likelihood of leaks as part of the new media landscape. In the past, there were complete surprises in film. Gabriel Byrne, Benicio Del Toro, Kevin Spacey, Stephen Baldwin and Kevin Pollak all thought that their characters were secretly Keyser Soze while filming The Usual Suspects. George Lucas didn’t even tell Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner the truth about Luke Skywalker’s parentage until very late in the game. In both cases, audiences were floored after the big reveal. Now, people were caught trying to fly drones into the Star Wars: The Force Awakens set in an attempt to glean a tiny bit of information. The public actively seeks out leaks and spoilers so much, it is almost expected at this point when spoilers happen.

That is, if the artists don’t spoil it themselves. Kanye West announced that his next album So Help Me God would have been a surprise release, following in his beloved Beyoncé’s footsteps. He then proceeded to release multiple tracks from the album early along with the album art and title. Kanye might yet have a few tricks up his sleeve for his “surprise” album, but so far it looks like the artist couldn’t help himself in letting the cat out of the bag early.

Marvel is guilty of this as well. The Twitter-fed third trailer contained a lot of previously unseen footage. Some of this footage was extremely spoiler-laden for those who looked at it closely. A character is clearly shown fighting for opposite sides at different parts of the trailer, giving away what will likely be played as a surprise twist at some point in the film. In the fervor to rile up its fans, Marvel has managed to play spoiler to itself. A happy medium should be in there somewhere, and companies should try to find it instead of blindly following Marvel’s lead.

Daniel Grzywacz is a senior majoring in anthropology and neuroscience. He is also the lifestyle editor at the Daily Trojan. His column “The Showbiz Must Go On” runs Mondays.