Marketing doomed these movies from the jump.
Simply making a good or even great movie just isn’t enough – there are so many other factors which dictate whether a film will succeed or fail.
And chief among them is marketing. Without marketing, how will moviegoers even know a films exists? But beyond that, how a film is sold to the masses can have a massive impact on how it’s perceived in the lead up to its release, whether for better or worse.
An incredible marketing campaign can propel a mediocre, even terrible movie to box office gravy, and conversely, terrible marketing can obliterate a film’s prospects no matter how good it might be – looking at you, Edge of Tomorrow.
And in recent times, these are the 10 movies which were most blatantly damaged by their marketing, from trailers that lied about what the movie was, to those that pointlessly spoiled plot elements, and those that were just so flat-out obnoxious they actively dissuaded folk from seeing the movie altogether.
Films can overcome a lot of things to enjoy commercial success, but nothing stacks the deck against them quite like an ill-conceived, poorly thought out marketing campaign…
10. Argylle
There’s been no movie marketing campaign in recent memory more obnoxious than that of Matthew Vaughn’s Argylle, enough that it surely persuaded many to actually miss the film entirely.
For starters, just a single main trailer was released, and Universal and Apple put it in front of everything for many months, enough that by the time Argylle finally came out, vast swaths of potential customers were long-tired of hearing anything about it.
It didn’t help that the trailer was too busy hyping up how “crazy” and “wild” it was, alongside the widely-named “from the twisted mind of Matthew Vaughn” tagline.
Toss in a dodgy-looking CGI cat and the fact that the trailer made it seem like Henry Cavill would have a much larger role in the film than he actually did, and it’s little surprise why toxic word-of-mouth quickly killed its box office chances.
