* A bitter rant on Miramax's shoddy marketing of The Mighty. *
Or... A basic primer on how to kill your film.
Or... "I coulda pulled a better marketing campaign outta my ass!"
1. The first misstep Miramax took was changing the title from Freak the Mighty, the result being that kids who read and loved Rodman Philbrick's bestselling book probably didn't even know that there was a movie based on it.
2. Then Miramax went and plastered random scenes from The Mighty onto that awful "hollywood.com" commercial that ran in theaters during the summer of 1998. From that commercial, nobody could figure out what the hell the movie was about.
3. Then they chose a lousy release date and strategy. The movie was originally ready for release back in December 1997. But Miramax delayed its release for so long that the similarly-themed non-stop crap-o-rama known as Simon Birch ended up beating it to the punch. Instead of waiting for a few months so that people would forget about that other Morquio's Syndrome movie, Miramax decided that a good day to do a limited release of The Mighty would be October 9th. Then they decided to put The Mighty into wide release on October 23rd, the same day as Pleasantville and Apt Pupil and just in time for Halloween (hmm, the climax of The Mighty takes place on Christmas). Why didn't Miramax just do a wide release on October 9th? Because that would have meant putting it up against— gasp!— Holy Man. Brilliant job, guys.
4. Then Miramax tried to bill the movie as a Sharon Stone movie, as a Gillian Anderson movie, and as the next Good Will Hunting. They even went so far as to omit Elden Henson— the actor who narrates the film, is in almost every scene, and plays one of the title characters— from the list of credits on the movie's official website! Oops. I guess being listed in the credits wasn't in his contract. I also guess they also weren't aware that kids know Elden Henson as Elden Ratliff from the Mighty Ducks movies. And that the Culkin name might be valuable in trying to attract a family audience. Didn't Miramax realize that they had a movie that could have launched the careers of two young stars?
5. Then Miramax decided not to run a single TV commercial, hoping that the movie would become a "word-of-mouth sensation." Of course, they didn't realize that there's no word-of-mouth if nobody knows that the friggin' movie even exists. I guess they were hoping that their target audience— children between the ages of 10 and 16— would happen to see the ads while flipping through the newspaper. Yeah, as if that's going to happen.
6. Part of Miramax's strategy was to make The Mighty not look like a "family film." As a result, they ignored comments from critics such as Gene Siskel (Siskel & Ebert)— who called it a movie that "every kid should see"— and Ella Taylor (L.A. Weekly)— who called it "a boy's adventure for everyone." Nope, they had to make it look like a "Sharon Stone movie." And they had to make sure that everybody knew that this was a different kind of "Sharon Stone movie," because this was a "Sharon Stone movie" where Sharon Stone plays a mom and doesn't take off her clothes. So... not only did Miramax succeed in keeping the movie a secret from kids, but they also managed to alienate their teenage and adult audiences, who were expecting a "Sharon Stone movie." So much for truth in advertising. Not exactly the smartest way to build word-of-mouth.
7. And then there are the newspaper ads, which were simply awful. Of course, since Miramax didn't want to spend any money on TV ads, these newspaper ads were the only exposure to the movie that most people got. Again, Miramax trying to make it look like a "Sharon Stone movie." The only problem was that they couldn't find many critics raving about Sharon's 15-minute performance. No, all they had were about a hundred reviews describing Elden Henson's and Kieran Culkin's performances as "magnificent," "remarkable," and "star-making." So Miramax decided to throw out all the reviews mentioning the kids and just print a single blurb about Sharon. They used the exact same blurb in every ad for four weeks straight; it made it look like that was the only good review of the movie they could find!
Click to see this travesty in better detail
Does this make you want to see the movie?
Didn't think so.
Just the final nail in the box office coffin, as well as robbing Elden Henson and Kieran Culkin of their chances for well-deserved Oscar nominations.
If you think I'm being harsh on Miramax, check out the rant by Joe Hallenbeck on Harry Knowles' Ain't-It-Cool-News site (asterisks added to protect sensitive eyes)...
The third best film of the year: THE MIGHTY - F*** YOU MIRAMAX!!!! F*** you very much!!! A hearty Hallenbeck f*** you for screwin' over a great little film like this. You usually "do" movies like this right, but someone in your home managed to f*** over this special lost little gem. If I ever find out who it was I'll make sure my trusty Bat will have a good talkin' to to the person or persons responsible for this unfortunate mistake.
If you're Peter Chelsom, Charles Leavitt, Rodman Philbrick, Elden Henson, Kieran Culkin, or anybody who bought a ticket for The Mighty, e-mail me at pugsley@excite.com so I can thank you for contributing to a great film.
If you're a Miramax executive or part of the marketing team, e-mail me so I can bitch to you about killing it, and so Joe Hallenbeck can come to your house with his trusty Bat.
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