In Marketing, Universal Proves It Can Bring It On

In February, Universal Pictures marketing chief Marc Shmuger concluded his weekly marketing meeting by showing a preliminary trailer for an upcoming teen movie called “Made You Look.” To judge from the trailer, which showed countless scenes of cute high schoolers bouncing around in cheerleading skirts, the film was a forgettable comedy about the white-bread world of suburban cheerleaders.

When the lights came up, the room was silent. It was pretty obvious what everybody was thinking: That dog won’t hunt.

Finally, Universal Studios President Ron Meyer broke the ice, joking, “Well, at least we know it’s a movie about cheerleading.” Seated in the back of the room, I scribbled in my notebook: “Bad title, bad idea. Lots of luck opening that movie.”

I was dead wrong. When the movie finally arrived in late August, Universal had completely overhauled the film’s marketing campaign, turning fluff into funk. Retitled “Bring It On” and repositioned as a hip look at the rivalry between black and white cheerleaders, the movie opened No. 1 at the box office--one of the few real teen movie hits of the year.

It was a miraculous turnaround, but then again, this has been something of a miracle season for Universal Pictures. A year ago, the studio was struggling to escape a prolonged box-office slump. Today it’s a hit-making powerhouse in the middle of a record-setting winning streak worthy of the Michael Jordan-led Chicago Bulls. If Pat Riley were still in town, he’d call if a Five-Peat.

The studio has opened five straight movies at No. 1 at the box office, a feat unequaled in modern-day box-office history. The winners: “Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps,” “Bring It On,” “The Watcher,” “Meet the Parents” and “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” a blockbuster that should pass the $200-million mark before Christmas.

Being on top feels good. At last week’s marketing meeting, the room had the exuberant air of a winning locker room. Afterward, Shmuger and Universal distribution chief Nikki Rocco offered a rare inside analysis of the sophisticated image-making--and re-image-making--that goes into modern-day Hollywood marketing campaigns. They also described the accelerated pace of decision-making as studio marketers scramble to keep up with changing pop-culture tastes.

* Hit No. 1: “Nutty Professor 2.”

Release Date: July 28.

Opening weekend: $42.3 million.

To plant its flag on a key late-summer opening weekend, Universal ran a 30-second ad (going rate: $2 million) touting the film on the Super Bowl telecast in January. The strategy worked. Telephone polling found that the movie had a 25% awareness before the ad ran; 54% afterward. The subsequent “Nutty” buzz prompted Sony to move its sci-fi thriller, “Hollow Man,” back a week, giving the studio a clear weekend.

Knowing star Eddie Murphy would never spend hours re-creating the complicated makeup he wore in the film, the studio shot interview footage with him while he was making the movie, then gave it to TV outlets when the film opened, so Murphy could be seen answering their canned questions in character. Even Oprah Winfrey used the stock footage when Murphy did her show.

“It allowed the feeling that Eddie was everywhere, doing publicity and, even better, doing publicity in character,” explains Shmuger.

Still, the movie was no slam dunk. As its opening weekend approached, the film’s tracking numbers leveled off; it also became apparent that younger audiences were opting for fresher, outrageous R-rated comedies like “Scary Movie” and “Road Trip.”

Another worry: Martin Lawrence’s “Big Momma’s House,” also a film with a black comic in a cross-dressing role, beat “Nutty” to the theaters by six weeks and became a surprise hit.

So instead of relying on “Nutty’s” sequel appeal, producer Brian Grazer urged the studio tocut new trailers emphasizing the PG-13 movie’s bawdy humor.

“We bombarded people with images that made them rethink the movie,” says Shmuger. “By the time we were done it looked much fresher.”

* Hit No. 2: “Bring It On.”

Release date: Aug. 25.

Opening weekend: $17.4 million.

Studios are often ridiculed for their reliance on test marketing, but this is a movie where smart research paid off. Early on, when the movie had another interim title, “Cheer Fever,” the studio found out from a teen research firm that 59% of all teenagers considered cheerleading uncool. The studio’s new title, “Bring It On,” was a hit with kids but not initially with the filmmakers, so the studio brought them to focus groups to hear the enthusiasm firsthand. In-house research also told the studio that it had a secret weapon: the movie’s biggest draw was Blaque, a hot hip-hop group who played three of the black cheerleaders in the film.

So the studio played up the black cheerleaders in its trailers, did a BET special for the film and shot a day of additional footage with Blaque to beef up the African American end of the story line. Teens got the message: By opening day, the movie’s awareness with under-25 females was a dazzling 91%.

* Hit No. 3: “The Watcher.”

Release Date: Sept. 8.

Opening weekend: $9.1 million.

Released on one of the slowest weekends of the year, “The Watcher,” a dark thriller, had little competition. “We knew we couldn’t compete with anything with big visibility,” says Rocco. “So we looked for the weakest weekend we could find.” The studio had good reason: Keanu Reeves, the film’s biggest name, had disowned the movie after a falling out with the director.

When Universal picked up the film, it knew Reeves wouldn’t support the picture; in fact, in return for Reeves not bad-mouthing the movie, the studio agreed not to show Reeves’ likeness in its poster and only use his image in 30% of its TV spots and trailers. This led to a clever title change. Originally called “Driven,” the film became “The Watcher” to shift the focus of the movie in the audience’s mind to Reeves’ character, a serial killer who stalks his victims. It also allowed the studio to use shadowy, silhouetted images of Reeves in its trailers, which didn’t count toward the 30% recognizable image agreement.

* Hit No. 4: “Meet the Parents.”

Release Date: Oct. 6.

Opening Weekend: $28.6 million.

Rocco felt that a multi-generational comedy like “Parents” belonged on a holiday weekend. The studio’s choice: Columbus Day. The movie had played well in early test screenings, but late-summer moviegoing had been slow, so the studio felt it needed to jump-start early buzz about the film. It held hundreds of word-of-mouth screenings in addition to a round of sneak previews.

The biggest debate was over how many of the film’s best comedy moments to put in the trailer and TV spots. Some of the biggest laughs, including jokes about Ben Stiller’s last name and an exchange between Stiller and De Niro over pot smoking, were nixed by the MPAA.

Director Jay Roach wanted to hold back other moments, especially the scene where the urn with the mother’s ashes is destroyed by a champagne cork. The studio’s compromise: “We only ran the spot with the urn scene on MTV, which has a younger audience that’s more accustomed to having the jokes given away by the advertising,” explains Shmuger. After the film had been out for several weeks, the studio began incorporating the urn scene into various TV spots.

* Hit No. 5: “Dr. Seuss’ How

the Grinch Stole Christmas.”

Release Date: Nov. 17.

Opening weekend: $55.1 million.

From its very first poster last Christmas, Universal never referred to the film by its official title--it was always “The Grinch.” Using the full title, Shmuger says, would “relegate the movie to our youngest demographic. We wanted to go after both teenagers and adults, so we took the position that if you could refer to ‘Terminator 2’ as ‘T2,’ then we could call our movie ‘The Grinch.’ ”

Ten days before its teaser trailer played in theaters, the studio sent it out by satellite to TV outlets around the world, attracting an estimated audience of 220 million people. But studio focus groups discovered that the edgy trailer created a “seed of fear” with parents. So when the studio began running TV ads, it went out of its way to present the Grinch “in a likable fashion, as mischievous, but not mean,” as Shmuger put it.

The studio wanted to beat Disney’s “102 Dalmatians” to the market, so it opened the week before Thanksgiving, preferring to compete with Paramount’s “Rugrats in Paris: The Movie” and Adam Sandler’s “Little Nicky,” from New Line, which moved off the date when it saw a steamroller coming.

In fact, the movie was so far ahead of its holiday that the studio abruptly canceled its first TV ad blitz, scheduled for the weekend of Oct. 23. “It was bad enough to come out with a Christmas movie before Thanksgiving,” says Shmuger. “But we felt it was really an intrusion for us to come into people’s homes with any frequency before Halloween.”

*

Topical Humor: There are already lots of laughs in “State and Main,” David Mamet’s new satire about a movie company laying waste to a small New England town. But one scene is getting an unexpected extra chorus of hoots from preview audiences. It has the film’s hapless screenwriter, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, trying to explain to a woman he is romancing why there is a naked movie starlet in his hotel room. The screenwriter says he told the actress he couldn’t sleep with her because he’d met someone else. The woman calmly responds: “OK.” Hoffman is amazed. “You believe that?” he says. She tells him: “I do if you do.” There’s a pause. Hoffman says: “But it’s absurd.” Her response: “So is our electoral process. But we still vote.”

*

The Big Picture runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.