New Moon faces a new world..

‘New Moon’ faces a new world

By Steven Zeitchik

Marketing the new pic in the “Twilight” franchise may seem like the most enviable job in the world — like offering water to a dying, thirsty man — but even studio Summit has its challenges as it strategizes the “New Moon” release.

When we caught up with Summit marketing guru Jack Pan for a different piece we were working on recently, we asked him what marketing the biggest tween franchise in Christendom entailed. “Expectations are very different this year than there were last year,” Pan said. “We want to make sure we not only continue to satisfy the fans but continue to introduce new people to the franchise.”

That’s true for the industry, which is now watching eagerly/enviously to see if “New Moon” can repeat the $69m opening and $351m global take of “Twilight” from last November. But it’s also true of the fans, who have grown in numbers and increased their scrutiny (apparently that is possible) since the pic came out twelve months ago, catching up on books and forming new fan sites by the day.

(THR’s Borys Kit interviews director Chris Weitz in Wednesday’s paper, and the director acknowledges that he paid attention to the fans, at certain intervals, anyway:  “I listened to what they have to say by checking in on the Internet. I didn’t do it that much while we were shooting because I didn’t want to get swayed one way or another…But now that the footage is complete, I kind of enjoy just checking in various sites and seeing what they like.”)

The studio also must face a world saturated with vampires (that also means Weitz brother Paul, now with a “Vampire” tag on his Universal pic “Cirque du Freak”), both a benefit and a pitfall when you’re trying to lure fresh-faced new fans.

The release is in some ways much more of a commercial enterprise than last year, when many in Madison Avenue were (like many in Hollywood) largely unaware of the tween-vampire sensation before that gargantuan opening weekend. “This time around, you’re going to see a lot of promotional partners that will also be tying into the movie,” Pan said.

That means more opportunities to get the word out (not to mention more financial support for the splashy campaign) even as the studio must guard against having the campaign seem inorganic with promotional-partner overkill. The tween audience, after all, is not the Transformers audience; it’s younger and less brand-blitzed.

Compose

Marketing a franchise like “Twilight” is also a careful balance in another way. Each new clip and trailer is treated like a mini-release in its own right, carefully timed by the studio and scarfed down hungrily by an eager fan base  (one of those new pieces of material made its way around the Web Tuesday, a clip in which star Taylor Lautner introduces a werewolf-morphing scene — video below, with requisite Shirtlessness Alert — and in which one of said promotional partners, iTunes, gets a shout-out).

But it’s also about holding back key scenes that fans are waiting for. As Pan says, “Marketing is the element of surprise. It’s about not giving everything away.” Well, for people who don’t have the book memorized, anyway.

 

SOURCE

xoxo.

Rachel.