from Jonathan Klotz
| Published
2024 It’s been an amazing recovery year for Hollywood since the crash of 2023, with Disney releasing hit after hit and Universal not far behind, but success hasn’t been uniform. That’s probably why both Sony and Warner Bros. released eight minutes of their upcoming movies on YouTube this week, in a bold new marketing move that’s so desperate and attention-grabbing that it just might work. In the end, for both of them The requirements and The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrimadvance ticket sales looked so bad that at this stage anything to try to get asses to sit down is better than nothing.
Another Spider-Man villain
Kraven the Hunterstarring Aaron-Taylor Johnson as the latest D-level villain to get a movie from Sony, has been delayed for years thanks in part to reshoots and the writer’s strike, but it’s finally coming December 13. Kraven’s greatest story is the one where he kills himself, Craven’s Last Huntwhich left fans wondering how Sony could pull an entire R-rated feature film out of the big game hunter. That’s why releasing the opening eight minutes makes perfect sense: it tells an entire mini-movie that introduces audiences to the classic villain.
In the first eight minutes, with no English words spoken, we see Craven enter the prison, encounter colorful inmates, meet the local crime boss, brutally kill him, and escape in a storm as it is revealed that this was an elaborate “hunt.” ” I was aware of the film in advance, and while I still have serious doubts about the final product, this seems more likely Poison than Morbiusso if nothing else, it’ll be a fun, nonsensical superhero movie. Also, I got to see how they made Rhino, the villain that the new comic book characters beat up to show how tough they are, the big problem of the movie.
War of the Rohirrim
Within 24 hours of Sony releasing the first eight minutes of The requirementsWarner Bros released a video featuring the first eight minutes of The The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim. It also doesn’t work, not only because of the uneven animation, but also because the story is difficult to understand from the beginning, with no explanation of who is at war, why there are orcs, and why Helm Hammerhand, the King, is behaving the way he is. There are answers, and Tolkien fans already know the story of Helm Hammerhand, but as an attempt to get people to see a contractually bound film, it fails miserably.
I love fantasy and anime, so you’d think I’d be the target audience, but while The requirements made me want to see more War of the Rohirrim makes me want to wait for when it debuts Max. The bad story in the eight-minute trailer is one thing, but the terrible lip-syncing and bad animation, especially after Arcane recently showed us all how wonderful it can be, makes it look like a direct-to-DVD import. In a way, it actually is, since to stick to The Lord of the Rings license, the studio has to make a movie every few years, and that’s what they choose to do.
It will be fascinating to see how the box office fares for each film after the bold release of eight minutes of footage. I predict that Craven will receive a surge in interest and word of mouth until War of the Rohirrim he’ll be lucky to get in My Hero Academia: You are next numbers. However, if this experiment works and even one of these films starts making money, expect more studios to follow suit with extended trailer releases a week before release as a last ditch effort to generate interest.
