300 vs Grindhouse: is online marketing of movies now the best way to put Bums in seats? Edit

The opening weekend box-office gross for Zack Snyder’s latest film 300 (based on the Frank Miller graphic novel of the same name) was a remarkable $70.9 million dollars, making it Hollywood’s largest opening of 2007 to date. The box-office total for respected director Quentin Tarantino’s latest, Grindhouse, was significantly smaller at only $11.6 million. Grindhouse’s performance to date is so poor that it is rumoured that the films distributor, The Weinstein Company, may split the unique double-feature into two seperate films to attract a greater audience.

While Grindhouse’s poor box office can be attributed to several factors (the movie’s length, opening a gory, R-rated double-feature tribute to 70’s exploitation flicks on Easter weekend), according to Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News, one largely overlooked factor in the film’s poor showing may have been its near total lack of internet advertising - a marked contrast to the atypically large amount of internet advertising 300 used to build its buzz. According to Harry’s quote of Warner’s secret 300 opening-weekend exit polls, over 60% of the viewers polled said they heard about the film online…that number jumps to 65% for males, and 68% for IMAX viewers.

These numbers seem to fly in the face of traditional thinking when it comes to advertising movies, which previously relied on telelvision trailers and quotes from established movie reviewers. According to Josh Tyler of CinemaBlend.com, these days, you’re just as likely to see a quote from an online review site as you are from Ebert and Roeper. Furthermore, I believe this just a continuation of the shift towards viral marketing campaigns for movies that really took off with the “Blair Witch Project” and Steven Spielberg’s “A.I.”.

I think that 300 represents a paradigm shift in how genre movies, and perhaps all movies are marketed. The question is really how long it’s going to take the studios to catch on and catch up.