Have you heard of Fred Andrews‘ Creature, featuring Mehcad Brooks, Serinda Swan and Daniel Bernhardt? Well, neither have we. This makes sense when you consider that the movie has set a new record at the box office, but not the kind that usually get heard about. It is now the fifth lowest grossing movie to be given a nationwide release… ever. It opened in 1,507 theaters this weekend, and grossed a paltry $327,000.
The other four movies there? Proud American, The Passion Recut, Transylmania, and The Virginity Hit, whatever those all are. This means that there were, on average, six people in every theater Creature was playing in. The only movie with a worse per-theater average is Proud American.
We don’t want to jump to conclusions or anything, I mean, correlation does not equal causation, but it may have something to do with the movie’s marketing campaign. From HuffPo:
It’s likely you’ve never even heard of “Creature,” and that’s probably because there were no print or television advertisements, and most of the marketing was carried out guerrilla-style, according to the New York Times, with ads on Fandango and horror film site, Bloody Disgusting…
Speaking with the Huffington Post on Monday, Sidney J. Sheinberg, the 76-year-old lead producer on the film, explained that he had every indication that this experiment in distribution would pay off. Advance word on the film from test audiences was positive, and the film’s website had received over a million clicks in the weeks leading up to its release.
“We wanted to find out can you open a picture on a profitable basis, without incurring costs that quite frankly are embarrassing,” he said. “This is a film I wanted to see us make, in the category of something we could afford to do and finance ourselves.”
Let this be a lesson to all those who would try to create a viral sensation where there is none: it’s not always going to work. Hedge your bets.
(via Blastr.)
