Ever felt you've been had? You might if you've already been seduced into a cinema to watch Brian De Palma's Mission To Mars, which opened on Friday. Just consider yourself a victim of a movie industry strategy known as 'hit-and-run' - one of the cynical, risky but often effective dark arts that marketing departments employ to flog films they know to be well below par.
The strategy is simple. In the weeks before release the film is kept tightly under wraps. There are fewer press screenings than normal and these are scheduled to be near or beyond magazine deadlines. Handy screening rooms in the centre of London are eschewed in favour of obscure sites and screenings tend to be scheduled not at the office-friendly 6.30pm but at 9pm.
Then, the week before release, a huge advertising campaign will hit TV, radio and billboards before the movie opens simultaneously on thousands of screens, presented - with little or no critical context and zero word-of-mouth - as a must-see blockbuster. Attendance will peak on the Saturday night before cinemas work out that they've got a dud. And a week later, it will be gone.
Mission To Mars has already pulled off the trick in America, where it was released last month. In its first weekend it made $23.1 million, an impressive performance by any standards. By week two, as poisonous word-of-mouth spread, the take fell by a gigantic 52 per cent to $10.9m. Two weeks later its slide down the chart had transformed into a plummet with a paltry $6.4m. But that huge opening weekend meant that by the time the film slinks off the screen the studio will no doubt have recouped its investment and will possibly make a small profit.
'The idea is to make as much noise as you can, get in with a fair number of prints and then get out,' says Charles McDonald of independent publicity company McDonald & Rutter. But this can backfire dreadfully. 'If you limit press screenings it becomes obvious that there's a problem. You can make films more or less difficult to see, but unless you want to turn the whole thing into an issue - "the movie the critics hated but you'll love!" - you're always better to show it.'
There is also the question of financial risk. Pulling off a hit-and-run release requires the manufacture of a large number of prints (costly items at up to £900 a time) as well as investment in an intensive and unavoidable advertising campaign. 'The whole thing can rebound in a terrible way,' says McDonald. ' The Avengers demonstrated how you can really screw things up.' Indeed the 1998 adaptation of the cult TV series was a Waterloo for the hit-and-run release. The film, rumoured to be in trouble throughout its production, was scheduled for simultaneous worldwide release (in order to avoid Internet gossip) and the producers issued a memo declaring, much to the entertainment press's mirth, that 'the press and the public would be allowed to discover The Avengers together'. In other words there would be no press screenings.
And the result? The story effortlessly migrated from dismal reviews on page 36 to front page 'What a Flop!' news pieces. The delighted Sun went so far as to dispatch a hack dressed as a turkey to a London cinema.
So the film was never judged on its merits or lack of them but was instead held up as an example of the archetypal Hollywood disaster. In fact, it wasn't - it was just averagely poor.
'There you had a screw-up because, arguably, the bulk of the potential audience for The Avengers was not film buffs at all but simply people who had vaguely fond memories of the TV series,' says McDonald. 'But after it had been held up to ridicule there was no way they could be seen to go and see it.'
But as movie budgets continue to rise, the hit-and-run is likely to remain. 'I doubt anyone outside the industry could spot a hit-and-run release if it's done properly,' says one senior PR who has structured such campaigns. 'If it's such a big film that you're going to release it anyway, your trailer will have been in cinemas for six months, and with an action movie you can cut a fantastic trailer out of nothing.
'So your punter awareness will have been building without them having any information about it.'
Mission to Mars opened on Friday. Read Philip French's verdict in The Review section
