Early Maneuverings for a Monster Hit

Audiences are going nuts over the show-stopping trailer for this spring’s big event picture--”Godzilla”--sending a clear signal to Hollywood that Sony Pictures’ newfangled version of the popular Japanese monster movie is the film to beat in 1998.

Nearly every year there’s at least one standout picture that resonates strongly with moviegoers, becomes part of the pop culture and generates stratospheric revenue.

Last summer, it was “Men in Black.” The year before that it was “Independence Day” (or “ID4,” as it became known). In years past, movies like Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” (1993), “Terminator 2” (1991) and “Batman” (1989) somehow established themselves as blockbusters before they first illuminated the silver screen or took in a dollar at the box office.

That kind of cachet doesn’t happen by chance. An increasingly overcrowded marketplace in which several movies compete for consumer dollars on the same weekend have motivated studios to start their publicity efforts far in advance of a film’s opening.

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The public’s appetite for “Godzilla” was first whetted as early as last summer--almost a year before the movie’s planned release May 20--when Sony’s TriStar Pictures division ran a teaser with “Men in Black.” It underscored the recent trend in event-movie marketing of seizing a fragmented public’s attention as early as possible.

Whereas studios used to begin showing theatrical trailers 10 weeks before the release of a big movie and launched their TV ads five or six weeks out, it’s not unusual today for trailers to run six months to a year ahead of time.

The trend raises the bar on marketing costs for big, expensive movies whose success can be crucial to a studio’s annual fortunes. The typical expenditure just for the U.S. launch of an event movie easily runs in the tens of millions.

Over the life of “Godzilla,” which has a production budget of $125 million, Sony is likely to spend well in excess of $50 million in worldwide advertising costs. The potential franchise, from the creative team behind “ID4”--Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich--dovetails with a major merchandising/licensing program and more than $150 million in corporate tie-ins from promotional partners such as Taco Bell and Duracell.

“Those of us who engage in this increasingly see how you have to stimulate the level of interest and entertainment that goes far beyond the typical marketing campaign,” says Bob Levin, Sony’s worldwide marketing chief. “These are not inexpensive ideas, so you have to feel the film has enormous upside potential and marketability.”

“You have to begin very early, because you’re trying to create such an enormity of interest, and you want to make sure that audiences look forward to the next step in the process--even if it’s 12 months away,” he said.

Levin and other movie marketers say that when they’re lucky enough to have a “Godzilla” or “Batman” or “Independence Day,” they try to position it as the movie to beat.

“It’s a combination of a really good idea and maximizing that idea in a clever way from a marketing point of view,” says Buffy Shutt, president of marketing at Universal Pictures, which released the hugely successful “Jurassic Park” and its sequel, “The Lost World.” She explains that marketing executives look for audiences “to find a movie early on and say, ‘This is my movie, I can’t wait to see it.’ ”

“The public needs to feel it’s seeing something new,” says producer Brian Grazer, whose recent box-office hits include “Liar Liar,” “Ransom” and “The Nutty Professor.” He noted that the trailer for Jan De Bont’s 1996 hit, “Twister,” for instance, was so effective in its execution that audiences felt “they had to see that movie,” or, in the case of “Men in Black,” the characters were “so unselfconsciously cool” that moviegoers wanted to be part of that.

“The filmmakers and studio landed on an idea that was an embodiment of the hip culture,” Grazer says.

Tom Sherak, senior executive vice president of Fox Filmed Entertainment, the studio that brought audiences “ID4,” says: “If you have an idea but can’t create excitement, it’s just a great idea. Once you know you have lightning in a bottle, you exploit it.” He said that once a piece of material--be it a trailer, a poster or a TV spot--is put to the public “and the mass gets it right away, then you know you have something, and you build on that.”

Fox ran an enormously effective and highly memorable 30-second TV spot for “ID4”--it showed the White House being blown up--during the Super Bowl telecast in January 1996. Sony’s Levin said that while the studios have increasingly used the Super Bowl as a launch pad for their event movies, “Independence Day” really “put that kind of advertising on the map and really set a tone for a movie.”

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Last year, Sony ran a 90-second spot during the game that highlighted its upcoming “Men in Black,” “The Devil’s Own” and “The Fifth Element.” This year, the studio will use the Super Bowl to promote its big summer release, “Zorro.”

When it came to getting its “Godzilla” message out through TV, the studio decided to go down a different path. Over a 24-hour period beginning New Year’s Eve, it ran a 30-second spot featuring Godzilla--off camera--showing up in Times Square just as the famous ball drops at midnight.

The commercial ended with an announcer saying: “Welcome to 1998. The year of Godzilla.”

Hollywood is bracing itself.