Foreign Marketing!

Most of you out there in the general reading public will have seen Transformers 3. Most of you would have been horribly disappointed with it, probably knew you would be before you went to see it, and then said “well, it was alright” when talking about it after. This is a common occurrence every summer, when the big tent-pole pictures arrive at the multiplexes, but please don’t misunderstand me – I am most definitely not one of those “Hollywood blockbusters are brainless, worthless nonsense” critics. In fact, I’m proud to call myself something of a Hollywood whore – I would much rather watch Pirates of the Caribbean  than The Seventh Seal, and in future posts I’m sure I will explain just why I feel it holds as much if not more artistic merit than Bergman’s best.

During the same summer blockbuster period, an excellent Danish thriller by the name of Flame & Citroen was around too, but you probably didn’t see it. Not that I blame you – I probably wouldn’t have seen it either if it weren’t for a special screening that I was invited too. I’m not even annoyed that most cinemas don’t show foreign films – they have to make their money somehow.

Yet a lot of you will have seen Pan’s Labyrinth, and possibly other popular foreign film of the past few years, like Let The Right One In or The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. It’s not that these films are better than the other foreign cinema output around, it’s just that they were better marketed. How? That’s the issue.

The British general public dislikes foreigners. This may appear to be a crass generalisation, and to be sure there are millions who do not buy into such a profile, but the majority of the British public see anything foreign - be it the EU, the Euro, different customs, languages or cultures - to be, if not something to be wary of, then certainly something they would prefer to avoid. It is a mountain that any internationally released film not in the English language will always have to climb, and is one very rarely conquered. In recent years for example, the most successful foreign films in Britain have been those that attempt to disguise their foreignness: the trailers for Pan’s Labyrinth, The Orphanage or House of Flying Daggers do not contain anyone speaking at all, thereby removing the deterrent of subtitles (another ignorant predisposition of a large proportion of the British public that has to be overcome if a film wants to be seen). The buzz around Let The Right One In for example gave a high British gross for the film, partially due to the critical acclaim it received at festivals, but also because was not marketed as a foreign film, thereby resulting in more casual filmgoers attending.

It works both ways too. A British film that a large percentage of British people would go to see would almost certainly struggle in an international market if it did not sell itself as something far more wide-ranging – just look at how the States responded to The Full Monty or Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Wererabbit. Distributors need to realise this if they want to emulate the success of certain films, and they of course need to tap into the nerd market – get good word of mouth going around a film and thanks to this internet world we live in, it’s guaranteed to at least have a few people seeing it. Which is far more than a subtitled black-and-white film about Slovakian pensioners would have got if it were simply advertised as that.