Invisible Advertising / Film

Films — Animation

• Warner Bros. didn't really know what to do with The Iron Giant; the studio kept putting off scheduling the release date several times to the point that the film's crew were worried that it would never be released. Warner eventually scheduled the opening for August 6, 1999, then gave it sparse advertising and practically no merchandising causing it to be a miserable flop in theaters; but gained a higher profile on home video and became a sleeper hit and cult classic, aided partly by the Cartoon Network marathoning the movie on Thanksgiving, thanks to head honcho Ted Turner seeing the movie during a flight and discovering he really liked it.
• Batman: Mask of the Phantasm was originally going to be a straight-to-video film. However, partway through production, Warner Bros. decided to give the film a theatrical release. The film was completed in just 8-months, but Warner Bros. executives didn't give the film any marketing to speak of, so very people knew the film was in theaters even though Batman: The Animated Series was extremely popular at the time.
• Rock and Rule had no advertising for its theatrical or home video releases. American distributor MGM acted like the movie didn't even exist. It went on to become one of the worst Box Office Bombs in animated film history as a result, making back only about $30,000 of its $8 million budget.
• The Hasbro-Sunbow Entertainment '80s trifecta of The Transformers: The Movie, My Little Pony: The Movie (1986) and G.I. Joe: The Movie all fell victim to this.
• Delgo though it became clear this was more a result of Not Screened for Critics.
• Though a juggernaut of a franchise and being very well-reviewed, the Winnie the Pooh (2011) got buried twice by Disney's lack of confidence through limited publicity and being releasing against the second part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, effectively ending the idea of Disney creating any more traditionally-animated films. It was fortunately later Vindicated by Video.
• Strange Magic: The trailer was released only two months before the release, which was in January.
• This may be why Kubo and the Two Strings flopped at the box office despite universal acclaim from critics and audiences alike. Laika's films normally receive plenty of advertising, but Kubo's ads received barely any exposure on television and online. The studio's following film, Missing Link, suffered a similar fate, and being an even bigger flop than Kubo.
• Osmosis Jones received an odd case of this in that it DID get a decent marketing budget, but Warner Bros. dumped it almost entirely onto Cartoon Network. Hence, commercial breaks on Cartoon Network were flooded with commercials and trailers for Osmosis Jones, but if you didn't watch Cartoon Network, chances are you never knew it existed. Even when it received a TV series, Ozzy & Drix, much of its audience was unaware it was a continuation of the movie - and the series in question aired on a different network from the one that had advertised the movie.
• Despite getting tons of merchandise and promotion online, Olaf's Frozen Adventure was only mentioned in one television commercial for Coco, which was rarely run. Because of this, most audiences did not know about the feature and were surprised to see it take up the first 20 minutes of the film.
• Twice Upon a Time was given an incredibly limited release, aired once on HBO and twice on Cartoon Network, then disappeared from the public entirely, despite support from George Lucas and Henry Selick.
• Cats Don't Dance suffered this, lost in the shuffle of the Turner/Warner merger.
• Relativity Media just left Free Birds to die without any form of advertisements. No merchandise, no billboards & it didn't even have at kids meal toy tie-in nor a video game based on the movie. Weinstein company did the same exact thing to Leap! 4 years prior. However, both ended up box office successes anyways.
• STX Entertainment did a large-scale promotion for their US release of Playmobil: The Movie where most theaters sold every ticket for only $5. However, despite the reduced ticket price, Playmobil still had one of the worst openings in box office history, with a major factor being the fact that the advertising for it was pretty much non-existent outside of in-theater advertising for said promotion.
• The trailer for PAW Patrol: The Movie was released two months before the film's release. In addition, the trailer's online premiere had been delayed twice before the official release. One of the original dates for the trailer's release was mentioned in this article.
• Unlike most Sony movies, Wish Dragon wasn't advertised months prior to its release, which was only announced two months prior, and the ads didn't start until a few days before the launch.
• America: The Motion Picture got no advertising aside from one trailer released three weeks before the film's release.
• My Little Pony: A New Generation had a cast trailer released in June 2021, but not a full trailer for the actual movie until August 12.
• Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas was barely advertised on its original release, and ended up flopping at the box office.
• Strange World was noted for paradoxically being a Disney Animated Canon entry opening in over 4000 theaters during a major holiday, and barely promoted at all by the company, with only a couple of trailers and posters at most and very little merchandise. The marketing was so barebones in fact, that many people didn't even know that the film existed at all until the week it came out. The blame was often pinned on the film releasing between two other productions that Disney gave more backing, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Avatar: The Way of Water.
• Studio Ghibli intentionally minimized promotion for How Do You Live? (retitled The Boy and the Heron for the North American release), eschewing trailers, promotional stills, or any other conventional forms of advertising. The only indications that the film both existed and was coming out came from press announcements and a theatrical poster, neither of which gave any indication about the film's contents. According to producer Toshio Suzuki, the lack of advertising was done as a direct contrast with Ghibli's prior promotional campaigns, stating that "Doing the same thing you've done before, over and over, you get tired of it. So we wanted to do something different." Suzuki also mentioned that Hayao Miyazaki was worried about the lack of promotion, but nonetheless trusted the decision and felt that it was ultimately the best course of action, and it paid off as well, becoming a commercial hit in Japan.
• Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken was given very little promotion ahead of release (the first trailer only debuted three months ahead of its June 30 release date), and ultimately resulted in DreamWorks Animation's lowest opening weekend to date. The film wound up on digital just 18 days after release.

Films — Live-Action

• Big Trouble was delayed due to the events of 9/11, and then given an untrumpeted release when it became clear that if they waited for 9/11 to blow over, they'd all be dead before they could release it.
• Harvey Weinstein's companies, Miramax Films and The Weinstein Company, were pretty infamous for this.
• The Boondock Saints. Justified, given that the More Dakka-filled movie was released shortly after the Columbine high school massacre.
• An early effort by Sam Raimi and The Coen Brothers, Crimewave, a sort of slapstick gangster spoof was met with disastrous results when screened for audiences and was released only in five theaters across the states. The VHS was long out of print by the time it finally received a DVD release in 2013.
• DC Extended Universe:
  • Aquaman (2018) waited five months until release before releasing the very first trailer, thanks to a combination of long post-production cycle and executive upheaval at DC Films. Director James Wan himself insisted on waiting until SDCC 2018 to release the first trailer as he wants to make it as faithful to the final movie as possible, especially given how previous trailers for DCEU movies have misled fans on the final product. The result ended up gaining positive reviews from critics and audiences, and the first film in the franchise to make over $1 billion worldwide.
  • Zack Snyder's Justice League got hit with this as Warner Bros. Studios's only efforts being merely to retweet the trailers with the heavy lifting being done by parent company AT&T, their streaming service HBO Max, Zack Snyder himself and fans on social media. Reasons speculated for this include Interservice Rivalry (AT&T dictating that new releases be shown on HBO Max at the same time as their theatrical runs) to those at DC Films who decided to move away from Snyder's vision for the film franchise after Justice League (2017) trying to ensure it doesn't come back (which gained traction after WB CEO Ann Sarnoff said shortly after its release that there were no plans to pick up on it). By comparison, WB put way more effort into promoting Godzilla vs. Kong, Mortal Kombat (2021) and Space Jam: A New Legacy. For some reason, WB also kept the "Own it now!" home video trailer unlisted on Youtube, preventing it from reaching a large viewership (though the film still sold well, word of mouth and it being a Justice League superhero ensemble film greatly helped).
  • Blue Beetle (2023) received little promotion ahead of release, with only two trailers ahead of release and relatively few TV spots. The film ended up having the second-lowest opening weekend in entire franchise.
• Donnie Darko: Not, for once, because the studio was trying to sabotage the movie, but because between the small budget and the unfortunate timing of the release of a movie in which a jet engine falling into a house is a key plot point within two months of 9/11, there was neither the resources nor the will to widely promote the movie no matter how much buzz it had gotten at Sundance.
• The 2008 feature film The Midnight Meat Train. Based on the short story by Clive Barker and directed by Japanese cult favourite Ryuhei Kitamura (Godzilla: Final Wars), the movie is a complete and utter bloodbath with the built-in typical horror movie demographic, and it didn't have a high budget. What happened? The company that was releasing it, Lionsgate, switched management while the film was nearing completion. Rather than continuing his predecessor's work and fulfilling the obligations, the new exec shunted the film into a handful of cheapo dollar theaters, without a whit of advertising. It was Kitamura's first American film, and in interviews, he had indicated that he wanted to switch to making films in America permanently, despite being quite bankable in Japan.
• Averted and played straight with Zyzzyx Road: It played briefly in a theater to get around a pay scale loophole, inadvertently getting attention as the lowest-grossing film in history. The film was released to DVD internationally later in 2006 as intended, earning over 10,000 times its box office receipts (not that high bar to jump through as the receipt was $30 — which the director personally refunded). However, it still hasn't been released domestically and hasn't made back its $2,000,000 budget by foreign sales alone.
• The Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie. The studio behind it, Gramercy Pictures, put everything into advertising the Pamela Anderson film Barb Wire, a Pamela Anderson vehicle in the superhero action genre which, to add insult to injury, didn't sell very many tickets.
• MirrorMask barely turned a head on its cinema run. Consider the visual style of that film and you'll get some idea how heavily you have to bury it for no-one to notice it. The entire cinema run was basically an afterthought, as the studio was banking from the outset on it making its real money as a cult hit on home video.
• George Lucas was afraid Twentieth Century Fox would do this to the original Star Wars film, a.k.a. A New Hope, so he secured the merchandising rights in the hopes that he could promote the movie if they didn't. 20th Century Fox happily handed them over, wondering why on Earth he wanted the worthless merchandising rights instead of more money up front. Lucas made a mint in action figures and X-wing fighter toys.
• Tom Laughlin, the director/star of Billy Jack, was able to win distribution rights back from the original company when he realized they were doing this. He then started one of the first examples of saturation advertising and made it a hit.
• The Adventures of Baron Munchausen had only 117 prints made for the entire US distribution. Gilliam sourly noted at the time that minor arthouse films got 400 prints; the culprit was a regime change at Columbia Pictures.
• 13 is the theatrical example of this. It didn't have any television commercials, instead relying on a few print ads and internet videos.
• James Gunn suffered this twice in a row.
  • Universal hardly promoted Slither despite its critical acclaim and later tried to blame the film's failure on Gunn for not making it more accessible.
  • It happened again with Super. After IFC Films spent over a million to buy the rights, they sat on it and only released a trailer four weeks before opening. Other than a few posters, there was almost no marketing on the film and it died in limited release (also some theatres won't play it due to it being unrated, as the director and studio expected an NC-17 rating).^note It eventually got an R rating for its home video release Thankfully, the movie did really well during its simultaneous Video On Demand release, where it was IFC Films' highest-grossing VOD title for a while.
• Let Me In got this due to a distributor change less than three months before release (Relativity Media bought original distributor Overture for their distribution outlet). Rather than give an ad campaign given to most wide releases, Relativity spent most of its money promoting the movie it was facing that weekend, The Social Network (which was co-financed but not distributed by them) while the studio was completely quiet about the film (it wasn't even mentioned on Relativity's website while The Social Network was). The film grossed only $12 million in the USA.
• Dimension Films, as well as owner The Weinstein Company, was notorious for doing this, films like Venom (2005), Texas Rangers (which was inexplicably shelved for over a year) and DOA: Dead or Alive were given very limited releases with virtually no advertising whatsoever.
• 20th Century Fox was rather infamous for this. Some examples include:
  • They barely marketed The Big Year (only putting out a trailer a month before opening and having very little television exposure) despite having three big names in the cast (Steve Martin, Jack Black and Owen Wilson), an established supporting cast and a director whose last two films grossed over $100 million. Also, the marketing hid the film's entire plot (three men on a year-long birdwatching journey, which was based on a non-fiction book).
  • Tigerland: Zero advertising.
  • Ravenous (1999): Very little advertising which also mismarketed it as a teen-oriented horror film.
  • Idiocracy: Zero advertising (of course, given that it was on the contractual-minimum six screens nationwide, almost any ads would have been a waste of money).
  • Even after the Disney buyout, most Fox movies that Disney had to contractually release in theaters were undersold due to Disney prioritizing its tentpole Cash Cow Franchises. Costly movies like Ad Astra and The Last Duel ended up Acclaimed Flops as a result (though in the latter case, the COVID-19 Pandemic didn't help either). There's a fair bet that the Avatar sequels won't suffer from this, however, for obvious reasons.
    • In particular, there's the last two X-Men Film Series releases, no matter if they were reliable moneymakers. Dark Phoenix already had bad buzz, but with Fox's marketing team being mostly fired in the takeover, it was so underpromoted that awareness for the much lower profile Rocketman (2019) was higher, resulting in it becoming a $133 million bomb. And The New Mutants didn't release its official trailer until less than three months before its long delayed spring 2020 release date (and even then the movie got delayed yet again to that summer as a result of the COVID-19 Pandemic closing down movie theatres and messing with movie production and keeping most audiences at home).
    • The Empty Man got even less exposure than even The New Mutants, with its trailer and poster not debuting until one week before its release.
• Intentionally invoked by Paramount for Brain Donors to sink the movie after the Zucker brothers left the studio before its release.
• This trope also affected The Way, an indie film by Emilio Estevez. It was to the point that the director's father/star Martin Sheen went on various talk shows to drum up publicity.
• Paramount did this to Not Fade Away, a drama about rock music from David Chase. Released it into a crowded Christmas field (and expanding to 500 theatres two weeks later), there was almost no marketing or publicity done for it and the studio more or less swept it under the rug while heavily promoting long on the shelf fare like Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters.
• In contrast to the lengthy but cryptic lead-in to the original Cloverfield, Paramount waited until two months before release to announce 10 Cloverfield Lane with a surprise trailer in front of 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, blindsiding film journalism completely. Tropes Are Not Bad, however, and the surprise trailer led to significant hype for the film, which became a notable box office hit.
  • Two years later, Netflix, which had purchased The Cloverfield Paradox off of Paramount, one-upped the 10 Cloverfield Lane ad campaign by launching a Super Bowl ad for Paradox that announced the film would release as soon as the game ended. This led to the title becoming a ratings hit for the streamer, terrible reviews and audience reception be damned.
• Another Christmas 2012 Paramount release that suffered for this was Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away. Paramount only got it on about 800 screens in North America, screens that were shared with other movies; it managed only two showings per day at each venue. There was a trailer and a TV spot or two but no other promotional efforts, possibly because Paramount couldn't figure out how to promote a film that, while produced by James Cameron, had no name performers in the cast (it's a compilation of Cirque live show performances linked by an Excuse Plot). As well, Paramount may have been preoccupied not only with another production they opened that particular day, Jack Reacher, but also with wringing every last drop out of DreamWorks' Rise of the Guardians before the holiday season was over, as that film — aimed at the same family audience, but a far more expensive, heavily-hyped effort — was underperforming at the box office.
• Disney partially did this with Muppets Most Wanted: The Muppets conquered social media websites by force but peculiarly abstained from doing real-life ads. As a Muppet fan pointed out, its release period rival Mr. Peabody & Sherman did the exact opposite with its marketing and proceeded to defeat underperforming Muppets at the box office, showing why you shouldn't put all your eggs in the Viral Marketing basket, especially if you're trying to reach a family audience. (That Muppets Most Wanted opened up against the Critic-Proof teen phenomenon Divergent AND that Disney had a blockbuster of their own to unleash just two weeks later really didn't help.)
• While the failure of Return to Oz is often blamed on Nightmare Fuel that didn't sit well with the target audience (and not without reason), a lesser-known factor was Michael Eisner taking over as CEO. The film, along with other projects championed by the former regime, got dumped into theaters with little advertising, save for reviews that criticized the darker aspects. While a few high-profile fans, such as Harlan Ellison, encouraged audiences to see it before it vanished, the film flopped as expected, putting an end to the directing career of Walter Murch.
• Terry Jones' version of The Wind in the Willows. In America, it played on seven screens without advertising, and the rights got dumped to Disney due to Columbia Pictures executives simply having no faith in it (the film's poor box-office in its native UK most likely was a factor).
• Tomb Raider was barely promoted (despite that being an established film reboot of the 2001 film, and like that being based on a successful game series - namely, a 2013 reinvention). Not even any information or details on the production were given. Though as expected, it debuted on opening weekend on March 16 being a financial flop; earning $22 million in second place behind Black Panther, and was a domestic bomb. This made matters worse given its studio, Warner Bros., was heavily promoting Ready Player One (released two weeks later) more than the Tomb Raider reboot.
• In an unusual case for a big-budget tentpole release, Solo, which was a Troubled Production and fired its directors shortly before photography was scheduled to wrap and was almost entirely reshot, was frequently cited for its complete lack of promotion. Scheduled for a May 25, 2018 release, it wasn't until early February, less than four months before the release date, that Lucasfilm finally put out a trailer and promotional material for the film. For reference, the trailer for the prior Star Wars film, The Last Jedi, debuted eight months before its release date. The result was the first film in the saga to be considered a financial disappointment, leading to Disney putting any further spinoffs on hold (at least for the time being).
• Space Jam: A New Legacy: The first trailer for the film was released only three months before its July 2021 release date.
• With the 1971 movie Wake in Fright, United Artists did nothing to promote the movie outside one trailer for it. To make matters worse, the film opened in America in a single theater on the east side of New York, on a Sunday night, during a blizzard.
• Despite rave reviews following its Cannes premiere, Disney did very, very little to advertise The Straight Story, and it only played in about 140 theaters and was quietly released on home video.
• Below got delayed for over eight months and was deliberately under-advertised by Dimension Films; not only did it still not have a trailer or a poster less than two weeks prior to its release, David Twohy had to create the official website himself.
• MGM invoked this trope with Poltergeist III after the tragic death of Heather O'Rourke four months before release, in order to avoid coming off as exploitative.
• Jungle Cruise had the misfortune of its first trailer being released right before the COVID-19 pandemic. After that event happened, nothing was heard about it (aside from a release date change) until May 2021, when it was announced that it would be released on Disney+ as a Premier Access title. Instead, Disney decided to focus its marketing on Black Widow (2021) and Cruella.
• Increasingly becoming the norm with films released during the COVID-19 Pandemic; in the face of frequently shifting release dates and hybrid availability in theaters and digital platforms, studios have begun to hold off on releasing even trailers until 1-3 months in advance, which is similar to the advertising timeframe for television shows. Many titles set for dual premieres on HBO Max and theaters held off until barely a month was left to go (notably Those Who Wish Me Dead and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It), while A Quiet Place Part II (which was heavily advertised prior to the pandemic - its original debut was even planned for the exact week where COVID closed theaters worldwide) didn't receive a "Final Trailer" until less than four weeks before release.
• Infinite got its first trailer less than two weeks prior to its debut on Paramount+.
• Chaos Walking (2021) got a bit of media buzz when it first went into principal production in 2017, but after it was delayed for reshoots once Lionsgate reportedly declared the original cut to be "unreleasable", the only thing most media outlets talked about was 'what went wrong'; it then got no coverage for over two years before a trailer was finally released in November 2020, by which point a lot of people had forgotten this movie even existed save for the occasional "So when is this thing coming out?" And this was only two months before its original January 2021 release date until it got shunted to March. Aside from that trailer, a handful of teasers and clips, and a few interviews with the cast and crew the same month it was released, the movie got little advertising at all.
• Anna had already suffered delays, but with director Luc Besson caught up in accusations of sexual assault, got released with very little marketing, such as press junkets or screenings for critics.
• Madame Web (2024) had just one major trailer released three months before its release (all prior Sony's Spider-Man Universe movies had at least three trailers and more than seven months between the first teaser and theatrical release), and only about two weeks before the movie hit theatres did Sony start releasing smaller ads.

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