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Serenity Screenings Sell Out
DizzyEllie writes "Last Wednesday, Universal offered fans of Joss Whedon's Serenity the unique opportunity to screen an unfinished version of the movie in ten cities. This was originally intended to pull both fans and non-fans into the fold, but the screenings sold out so quickly (less than a day for all cities to sell-out, but reportably just a few minutes in a couple of locations), it is clear that only the hard-core fanbase will make it in. This seemed to be completely unexpected by Universal, as ads were appearing in newspapers after the sell out, and incentives for the fans to promote the screenings were removed. The screenings will be held in 10 cities on May 5. Serenity: The Official Movie Website" Definitely a unique promo thing. Shows serious stones too- I mean, if the movie sucked, they wouldn't dare do something like this. Hopefully someone will post a review for us on wednesday. And the rest of us suckers have to wait until September. Bah.
He is the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel and apparently the show Firefly which has a huge fan base yet I never even heard of it until it was cancelled and they announced they were making a movie out of it.
Don't hate. He does good grocery.
I was skeptical that this would ever really happen. Having seen the trailer, I'm very glad I was wrong. It's been a while since I've rewatched the DVD so I don't remember some of the characters names, but these clips from the trailer were hilarious, and a kind of humor sadly absent from most movies:
pilot: (flying into a battle) This is about to get interesting.
captiain: Define "interesting."
pilot: "Interesting: Oh God, oh God, we're all going to die?"
bad guy: This destruction, this is your fault.
pilot: No, *I* don't murder children.
bad guy: [smiling] Oh, well I do.
Take any movie of any size and have screenings in 10 cities. It WILL sell out. With ~300M people and lets say 1000 seats, it is not hard to find a few people excited to see it.
Doesn't this suggest (I didn't say prove, just suggest) that they're making the movie by committee with focus group data?
I don't know if that's a good thing or not. Most good movies are more organic -- they're the result of someone's vision, expressed with comparatively small amounts of interference.
But then again, I'm already planning on not going to the last Star Wars movie, so I'm out of step.
Quicktime 40 megs here:/ serenity_ifs2.mov
http://movies.apple.com/movies/universal/serenity
The networks really seem to have a love hate relationship with Sci-Fi Fantasy fans. They are not content to cater to a smaller demographic. While that same demographic will none the less be loyal and unwavering for a good show, and support said show with DVD purchases and Fan sites, proving while maybe a 1/2 to 1/3 the normal demographic for other fair, the long term property value is much Higher. Sci-Fi fans should let advertisers know that they are major consumers and will well reward brands that support our hunger for good alternate fair on TV.
I will probably hear some boos on this, but I find it ironic that Enterprise has been exceptional the last few episodes. I liked it in general, though it could have been better. I was not obsessive about its departure, but now they've decided to go out with a bang and have plots that are not retellings of TOS I am vexed. It would seem we will never get a third Evil-Universe story, it seemed like a cliffhanger. Granted the Evil-Universe thing was used kind of gimmicky in the DS9 series, but Enterprise has it right by leaving the main universe out. Probably just get tired of seeing all the PC hand ringing our characters do, and enjoying seeing people give into some raw animal emotions.
Letter To Iran
ha, I figured out why they wanted this posted:
See the u=dizzyellie in the article link?
That's to get them credits when you sign up for the site to browse! SNEAKY! (wish I thought of it)
(credits let them get free t-shirts and posters and such)
Nah, it's actually pretty good.
They gave it a Friday night, 8pm slot.
They seriously under-promoed it.
Then they showed the episodes out of order.
Then they pre-empted it several times for baseball.
Then they decided to pull it.
And, lest you think this is just fanboy BS:
They released the DVD set. It reached amazon's top 5(10? something like that) in a matter of days. That's selling like Star Wars.
Actually, there are already a few reviews out there from an Australian screening. Here's one...
http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=20089
Its by a big Whedon fan, so probably a little biast.
It is very unusual to show to a general purchasing audience. Usually test audiences are culled from standard test groups and are targetted demographics. They will be doing that also.
I suspect that this is a new interesting marketting attempt. They get paid to show the movie in advance to a small group. That will raise interest in the film and awareness a bit. It is not even free marketting as the fanbase will pay for this. I seem to recall a couple other instances of this sort of thing, but they are rare.
I seriously doubt they would do this if they did not think they had something though. A lot of the flamebait on here is blathering about the fanboy base and *nobody* flames a franchise more than an upset fanboy.
A test audience signs non-disclosure agreements. They *want* people to talk about this. Not quite viral marketting, but they definately think that word-of-mouth will sell this. Since their dvd sales were pretty much all word-of-mouth and sold about 5 million set to date, there is a certain logic to that.
There's already been a couple of reviews to hit the net. Here is one of them based on a screening in Australia.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
It was 1 million pre-orders. It would have been higher, except that was the entire production run.
It was cancelled almost immediately after airing the first episodes.
...and yet The Simple Life is still running. Does that seem right to you?
.sigh
With an announcement by Joss Whedon at the Serenity official web site, the tickets to this event went on sale at just after midnight Wednesday morning. By dawn, most of the cities were sold out. By 9 a.m., all of the cities were sold out.
I happened to trip over the announcement at 1 a.m, woke the wife, and scored our tickets. We're very excited about it!!!
What's it about? One good quote that I read was, "Imagine if Star Wars had been about Han instead of Luke." (but with much, much better writing and no damned cutsie aliens).
There have been several test screenings in the past to tune the movie. Almost always, the word leaked and these turned into flash mob events for Firefly/Whedon fans. This 10 city screening is a little different. The movie is nearly the finished product, but the purpose is to incite the fan base into a word-of-mouth guerilla marketing machine.
Universal apparently thought that there was going to be trouble getting butts into seats, and created a marketing campaign and ads just for this screening. With 30,000+ registered fans at the official Serenity website, they need not have worried about that. A couple of folks have even put their tickets on eBay with bidding now at absurd levels.
This promises to be big! Check out the trailer!
If the movie sucks, then this is early enough that they can change it.
Firefly was so badly mishandled by FOX that I'd like to add at least one more piece of information for those who are not familiar with it. When you hear mainly that it is from the creator of Buffy and Angel you might get the idea that you would only be interested if you enjoyed one of those. I've tried watching both of those series off and on but without success.
... it comes out far ahead.
I only bothered to do so because having seen Firefly in the intended order from the DVD's I'm sold on the idea that it is the best sci fi series ever made for TV. I can't say I have a similar opinion of Mr Whedon's other series but Firefly has such superior writing and characters that I can't imagine even trying to make a comparison to the other franchises that I enjoy but do not admire nearly as much.
If you haven't seen the series or only saw a few confusingly presented episodes from the FOX debacle (boy I hope some of the morons responsible for that were fired) rent the episodes in order from your local video store or NetFlix. I'm not saying I can't imagine a better series but when compared to its peers, Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, Babylon 5,
Reminds me of this past post:
MS: Beta Software Good Enough for Production Use
(Only, this time they're charging.)
The people that are interested don't care that it is still beta. The people that do not want to consume an unfinished product will stay away.
80mb ultra high res XVID trailer
It's 80mb. Well above DVD quality.
Needs Xvid. In linux, use mplayer -framedrop (you may also need "-vo x11" in linux if your graphics card doesn't handle very mad resolutions).
Also, whilst I've got your attention: I've seen the movie in London last month with the UK distributors (UIP), and it was freakin' brilliant.
Wow, when does that come out?
I was conned by an old man in a cloak. It turns out those *were* the droids I was looking for.
Given that a lot of the Firefly episodes were written/directed by Joss, I'm not sure how he was trying to do an impression of himself.
It's actually a bit more impressive than that even as far as the DVD sales go.
One of the fansites has an Amazon tracker. From it, we get:
-- The show sold out of preorders on Amazon in three days in July 2003, never falling out of the top ten the whole time.
-- When it came available again in September, it went straight to number 1.
-- Excepting two days, it didn't fall out of the top 100 through the next July.
-- It's never been below 400 in the rankings.
Not bad for a show which only got half a season.
I agree that the trailer is formulaic. That was a marketing strategy to pull in the mainstream "i want to see shit explode" audience.
But the show itself is not formulaic. It subverts a lot of different "sci-fi" and even TV-series-in-general expectations. No vinyl-clad halloween-esque aliens with more make-up than my dead grandfather, no scantily clad crew members who have no real business being scantily clad (Inara's a Companion. Dressing beautifully is part of her job description. and she's never scantily clad anyway), the dialogue is FUNNY and entirely character driven... and the characters are complex rather than based on single opposing traits.
In the "literary" sense, the series really doesn't belong on mainstream tv at all because that's not the kind of thing that gets played on mainstream tv.
Buffy had a fanbase because it had pretty faces, yes. But this series has a fanbase (much bigger and with a higher average IQ than the buffy fanbase) because it's a GOOD series.