Desperate Tactic studios use to get you into theaters because of box office bombs

Pa Jonathan Klotz
| Updated 4 days ago

2024 has been an incredible breakout year for Hollywood after the disaster that was 2023, with Disney churning out hit after hit and Universal not too far behind, but success has been uneven. Which is 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. Because for both Requirements and The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrimadvance ticket sales looked so bad that at the moment anything to try to get seats is better than nothing.

Another villain is Spider-Man

Kraven the hunterstarring Aaron-Taylor Johnson as the latest D-villain to get a movie from Sony, has been delayed for years, thanks in part to reshoots and a writer’s strike, but it’s finally coming out on December 13th. Craven’s greatest story is the one in which he kills himself, Kraven’s Last Huntwhich left fans wondering how Sony could get an entire R-rated feature film out of a big game hunter. That’s why releasing the opening eight minutes makes perfect sense: it tells an entire mini-movie that introduces viewers to the classic villain.

In the first eight minutes, we see Craven enter prison, meet colorful inmates, meet a local crime boss, brutally kill him, and escape into a storm. » I was hesitant about the movie beforehand, and while I still have serious doubts about the final product, it’s more like Poison than Morbiusso if nothing else, it’s going to be a fun, mindless superhero movie. Also, I need to see how they made Rin, the villain who gets beat up by the new heroes in the comics to show how tough they are, into a big bad movie.

War of the Rohirrim

Within 24 hours of Sony releasing the first eight minutes RequirementsWarner Bros has released a video of the first eight minutes The The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim. It also doesn’t work, not just because of the uneven animation, but because the story is hard to understand from the start, without an explanation of who is at war, why the orcs exist, and why the Hammerhand Helm, the King, is behaving the way he is. The answers are there, and Tolkien fans already know the story of Hammerhead, but as an attempt to get people to see a contractually obligated film, it failed miserably.

I love fantasy and anime so you’d think I’d be the target audience, but so far Requirements makes me see more War of the Rohirrim makes me wait for when it debuts Max. A bad story in an eight-minute trailer is one thing, but terrible lip-syncing and bad animation, especially after Arkan recently showed us all just how great it can be, makes it look like a direct-to-DVD earner. In a way, it’s actually like holding on The Lord of the Rings license, the studio has to make a movie every few years, and that’s what they decided to do.

It will be interesting to see how each film’s box office stacks up after the bold release of the eight-minute footage. I predict that interest in Craven will increase and word of mouth will spread War of the Rohirrim luck will delay My Hero Academy: You’re next numbers. But if this experiment works and even one of these films starts making money, expect more studios to follow suit and release extended trailers a week before release as a last-ditch effort to drum up interest.