One of the films I’m really looking forward to is the new Mel Gibson flick “Apocalypto“. I think it looks incredible from what I’ve seen so far. Apparently the film has cost Gibson about $30 million to produce. But one of the huge challenges for the film is not making it good… but rather how on earth to market it.
There are a couple of big challenges for the marketing of Apocalypto:
1) It’s subtitled
2) Unlike “Passion of the Christ” there isn’t really a built in audience. Not a lot of public interest in ancient Mayan culture
3) The recent Mel Gibson drama (which, as predicted, seems to be going away)
Here’s an odd move that’s so crazy it just might work… Disney is going to market the film as “Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto.” Conventional wisdom might have suggested the marketing try to ignore Gibson’s involvement because of the controversy surrounding him… but they’re doing the opposite and going right at it. I like the move.
The other thing they’re going to try to do is market directly at the Latino audience. The folks over at Yahoo give us this:
Rice said Disney had plans to market the film to Hispanic audiences already familiar with the fall of the Mayan empire. “We think this movie plays to a wide audience and that there’s going to be a tremendous amount of interest generated from the Latino community, especially the Mexican community, because this is a story about their ancestors,” Rice said.
Latino moviegoers represent a growing portion of the moviegoing public and are more apt to attend movies on opening weekend, Newman-Carrasco said. They also see more movies per capita than other U.S. ethnic groups, she said.
This film will make a lot of money when all is said and done. I’m predicting $200 million world wide by the end of the day. We’ll have to just wait and see… but I’ll certainly be in line to watch this thing when it comes out.
