A Story of Coincidence and Chance

1: The western is dead.

2: A lot more people played Doom than ever saw Firefly.

3: DOOM actually advertised.

4: Whedon never had wide appeal and his ratings are steadily dropping with time (although Firefly's dismal ratings were actually a slight rebound for him).

Neither movie is going to make back their investment money on the basis of North American theatre sales: DOOM made more but it also cost a lot more.

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2. A lot more people played Doom than ever saw Firefly.

So people go for Brand-name recognition regardless of how bad the product is? Like I say, I so don't understand the movie-going public.

3: DOOM actually advertised.

I've seen far more ads for Serenity than I saw for Doom, but I seem to be in the minority, here.

Nonetheless, the ads I've seen for Doom make me cringe. It has "I'm a terrible film" written all over it. Are you arguing that the equation is "if I've heard of it, I must want to see it?"

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The primary market for movies is males old enough to have jobs but young enough to be single, without significant responsibilities or expenses. These people have the most money to blow and they like to spend it on movies.

They made Steven Segal a star. They made van Damme a star. They made Dolph Lundgren a star -- OK, Grace Jones probably helped withe that last one but the other two were entirely the fault of the primary demographic for films.

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caspervonb.livejournal.com

"Doom, the latest video game turned into a movie, presents us with
a cinematic first. In the film a character dies and then gets a
free life. It’s during the much vaunted “first person shooter” scene
– our hero is overtaken by an enemy and knocked down. In a truly
amazing moment of bizarre filmmaking, the first person perspective
continues as the hero’s soul leaves his body, showing us his husk.
Everything goes black, until white light flashes and then – zoom!
– the soul is back in the body, and we’re back in the “first person
shooter” mode." http://www.chud.com/index.php?type=reviews&id=4767

I think more people saw it because A)The Rock B)more commercials and
C) the commercials for firefly were pretty alienating for an audience
that had never seen the show.

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I guess I'm really getting confused by everyone's suggestion that more advertising equals more audience. It's like the quality of the movie doesn't seem to factor into it at all.

Maybe that's the way the movie industry really works, but damn if that doesn't confuse the fuck out of me.

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firecat

I wouldn't say more advertising equals more audience but I think more exposure equals more audience. Doom has huge exposure because so many people have played it. Probably a lot fewer watched Firefly.

I'm writing this after having read an article in Business Week that says the computer game industry is amount bigger than the film industry.

As for quality of the movie, I think that would figure less in the opening weekend draw than in other things like how long the movie's first run ends up being, whether it gets nominated for awards, and so forth.

As for understanding why people go to things just 'cos they've heard of them, I can't help. :)

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DOOM got more theatres to show it. The income is roughly proprotional to the number of theatres (Not quite, though).

The sales drop off rate should be telling. PR gets you one weekend but word of mouth can mean the difference between a 40% drop off rate and a 70% drop off rate (BATTLEFIELD EARTH had the latter...)

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If I am reading the numbers correctly, DOOM's sales drop-off rate is about -73%, which is actually even worse than BTATTLEFIELD EARTH's.

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caspervonb.livejournal.com

The videogame industry has been bigger than movies for a few years
now. Right on track for 28 billion USD this year.

That's a lot of exposure.

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caspervonb.livejournal.com

I think it's a matter of accessibility more than anythign else.
More people have heard of Doom and it has wider distribution.
It will therefore make more money in the theatres.

But format is very important as well. I'd be very surprised
if Doom made has much money has Serenity from DVD sales.

I imagine that Serenity will do quite well for itself in that
market.

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The most well recgonized brand on the planet is a company that sells sugared water at an absurd profit margin..

Sad but true....

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Doom has more name recognition, primarily with the young teens who comprise a gigantic chunk of the movie-going public.

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Brand name recognition rules, apparently.

Based on the responses to that I've received to this post, I'm getting depressed. What looks, to me, like an obviously bad film, gets an audience because it has a known name, and we all accept that, uncritically, because it sounds right to us. Bizarre.

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I actually have someone on my friends list who has seen it and declared that it's not anywhere near as bad as they expected. I can't recall who it was.

However, I think that you may be underestimating the recognition level. For a good many people who are in the prime moviegoing target market right now, Doom was one of the most significant brands of their time. The first verion was released in 1993, so for people who are now sixteen, they were four years old at the time. Unlike TV series, which tend to come and go, the franchise has been the number one most popular action game for more or less their entire life. Also, video games feature much more significantly in the culture of younger folk than they did for people our age, I find. Even my friends who are around 20 years old or so are more likely to dress for Hallowe'en as favourite video game characters than as characters from books or movies.

When you think about it, if they came out with a movie of something that had been a primary cultural force in your life since you were a wee kiddo, wouldn't you probably want to see it, even if it looked bad? I know a lot of people who want to see the new Herbie movie, which I think looks worse than the Doom movie, solely because they watched Herbie with their parents when they were kids (and that franchise hasn't even stayed alive this whole time).

There's also the marketing aspect, which some other people mentioned. The Doom ads, I found did play much more widely. I've seen the Doom ad maybe a dozen times and the Serenity ad once. Most people generally won't go to a movie that they've never heard of.

I think Serenity was also poorly-marketed. Neither the title of the film nor the logo are likely to catch the attention of anybody but hardcore fans of the show. If you wanted to go out and see a sci-fi action film and you had nothing to do on but the title or the title and the logo (which is how it appeared in many newspaper ads), would "Serenity," seem like the best bet? It sounds and looks like a documentary about Buddhism.

Lastly, there are a lot of people who follow actors and will see whatever they're in. Nobody in Serenity really had that pull on a widespread basis, but there are a lot of people who follow The Rock. This movie even appeals to his core fanbase (wrestling fans).

And on the cynical side, one of the biggest problems I run into when trying to pick movies for our group of friends is that 99% of the time everybody declares that they don't want to see anything that requires any thinking or emotional investment at all. It's gotten to a point where people don't even try to hide it anymore, they just come out and say, "Look, I just want to turn my brain off and see something fun and stupid. So like, some romantic comedy or a mindless action flick is about my speed." And when you consider that the crowd in question probably does enjoy higher-quality cinema significantly more than average, you can see where that's going. For a huge amount of the moviegoing public, it's all about escapism.

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I thought about this a little more while making lunch, and it occurred to me that the question is being framed wrong. You're seeing itas, "People would rather see a crappy film from a known name than a great film from an unknown name." This builds in the assumption that people viewing the trailers see Doom as an obviously crappy film and Serenity as an obviously good film. I suspect that that's assuming a lot. Do I think Doom looks awful? Yes. Do you? Yes. Do the people going out to see it? Quite possibly not. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if many of them looked at the trailer and said, "Wow, that looks awesome! I'm so psyched!"

(As an aside, the fact that I know someone on my friends list who saw it and said it was much better than they'd feared does mean that some people do see it not thinking it'll be awesome. However, there's some curiosity there, and I admit that I've pondered it myself, based on the whole, "WTF? How could that possibly be any good? And how could you make Doom into a movie? It had no plot!" factor.)

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Fair enough.

I guess I felt similarly confused about all the people going out to see the third Star Wars film (I still haven't seen it), even all of my friends who had consistently complained that the first two were soooo bad. They said, "yeah, but it's Star Wars", as if that was a meaningful explanation. The Star Wars brand name is sufficiently burned into my brain that I must give Lucas my twelve dollars, even though I know he's gonna give me another shitty movie.

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