I don't follow the film industry as closely as I used to when I had nothing to take up my time but disc golf, poker, and movie watching, but you don't really need a good feel for the pulse of Hollywood, or even a BA in marketing for that matter, to realize that Marvel is throwing away millions of dollars on advertising for its latest feature film, Avengers: Age of Ultron.
In the days prior to the Internet, if you didn't watch television or read magazines/newspapers, it was pretty easy to avoid film advertisements. That really was about the only way to know about an upcoming release. Toy lines and other kid-friendly marketing tools were also available in stores, but that is pretty easy to miss. No, the marketing departments at film studios only had so many chances to inform its target audiences that a new, super-exciting movie was being released in the next few weeks and you wouldn't want to miss it.
Then came the World Wide Web. Pretty much every human being in the free world (minus a tiny percentile that makes a concerted effort to stay off the grid) uses computers, which leads to being on the Internet. The way things are set up nowadays, you can't visit any website without seeing some sort of pop-up advertisement or web banner. It doesn't really matter what it might be selling, they are hard to miss.
That being said, I dare anyone to tell me that in the last two months they haven't seen something promoting Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron, which was released today in theaters. The trailers, both on television and the Internet, are running non-stop. Product advertisements are everywhere right now for that movie. It is impossible to go a single day without seeing something related to the second superhero team-up film for Marvel's Cinematic Universe. But is all the press really necessary for this movie?
In 2012, Marvel's first Avengers film made $623 million domestically and raked in $1.5 billion worldwide. That ranks third on both the all-time domestic and international box office lists for highest box office draws. Comic book films are obviously doing well right now and Marvel is king among the production companies releasing those type of movies. People want to see Avengers: Age of Ultron and releasing film trailer after TV spot after Internet trailer isn't swaying anyone one way or the other. The budget for Avengers: Age of Ultron is $250 million and that doesn't include all the money they are paying to market the film. With everything I have seen released on every form of media possible, they have had to spend a minimum of another $50 million on marketing.
Personally, I feel like they could have cut back on half of that and had the exact same results in who will and won't see the film. Now, when your movies make more than a billion dollars internationally, $25 million might not seem like much, but Marvel is out to make as much money as possible and an extra $25 million is something the executives would obviously like to add that to their pocketbooks at the end of the day. Avengers: Age of Ultron has to be one of the most heavily marketed movies in the history of the industry, but I will admit I don't have any facts or figures to back that up. I am simply going off of the eyeball test.
If anything, the bombardment of advertising might actually have a negative effect as someone who might have been on the fence about seeing this movie could decide they are tired of all the advertisements or maybe they have seen so much footage it feels like they have already seen the entire movie. With a movie like Avengers: Age of Ultron going all out on your marketing budget doesn't seem like a financially fiscal thing to do, but Marvel continues to release profitable hit after profitable hit. They are basically the new PIXAR.
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