J.J. Abrams' 2009 Star Trek was surely a win for Paramount in the United States, reviving the franchise and making it palatable again to non-Trekkie viewers while also earning $257.7 million domestically. But the international release of the film was a much different picture, earning just $128 million overseas. Compare those numbers to Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which also hit that year and actually made more internationally with $434 million compared to $402 million here in the U.S.
In fact, as a new story from The Hollywood Reporter points out, Hollywood blockbusters tend to do most of their business internationally these days. Just not Star Trek. But Paramount is looking to change that with the release of Star Trek Into Darkness this summer.
According to the trade, the studio has increased the international marketing budget "in an effort to jump-start foreign grosses" for Into Darkness. "That's my No. 1 initiative," says Paramount worldwide marketing president Josh Greenstein. The studio is taking its cue from how Warner Bros. brought a renewed interest to Batman abroad with the Dark Knight series. "We were able to turn the property into an event instead of a superhero movie," says Warner Bros.' international distribution chief Veronika Kwan Vandenberg. (A similar plan is in the works for this summer's Man of Steel at Warners.)
So how do you turn a "movie" -- a very solid, clear concept -- into the much more opaque notion of an "event"? With a bunch of… well, events. That’s included special press days for international media and exhibitors, flying Abrams, star Chris Pine and producer Bryan Burk all over the world to show off sneak peeks of the film, and even lighting the sky above London with the Star Trek Delta symbol during Earth Hour last month. And perhaps most interestingly, the whole space aspect of the film is being downplayed in the marketing in favor of the Earth-based scenes.
Most painful of all for us plain old American Trekkies, the film will debut in several foreign markets a week earlier than it does here on May 17.
And case in point regarding this international approach: The below animated poster has debuted on some of the Trek international Facebook pages, while new contests for Japanese and Australian fans have hit that are meant to hype up the film's debut.
Read the full The Hollywood Reporter story here.
Talk to Senior Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottIGN, on IGN at scottcollura and on Facebook.
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