If you weren’t following me on Twitter and Facebook yesterday, you may have missed my last-minute notices about my appearance on BBC Radio 4’s morning program, Today, yesterday morning. But you can listen online now, at the BBC. Scroll down to the superhero image for my segment.
Pretty superficial stuff, but for the Radio 4 audience (who have probably heard of Batman and Superman, but that’s about it) that’s probably the right approach.
Thinking about flops and risk-aversion… it seems to me that there are at least two ways of getting people to go and see a film. You can make a really good film, such that reviews and word-of-mouth encourages people to see it; and/or you can put in buzzwords, like “Superman and Batman together” or “based on this well-known book”, which become part of the advertising campaign and encourage people to see it before the reviews are out. With the opening-weekend focus of the current metrics of financial success, the latter is obviously an easier route to take; and it’s a way of convincing the accountants who rule Hollywood and wouldn’t know a good film if it bit them on the behind. Nobody has to explain anything complicated: the buzzwords can be put in a list in PowerPoint.