Originally posted by: trmiv
Originally posted by: EvilYoda
Right..."huge" marketing campaign. They started the website because they hardly had a budget...after Artisan bought the rights, they pumped a lot of money into the ad budget, sure...but if you think back to the movie's release, advertising was largely done by word of mouth and media coverage, not billboards and tv spots.
There is no possible way that movie would have been successful if the viewers didn't like it.
It was a rather large campaign, not advertising blitz like we're used to with today's major feature films, but a large bit of viral and "buzz" marketing. I remember the website, then they released a "documentary," a comic book, a fake investigation book, etc. It started with them pushing it as if it was a real tape, and it building from there.
The "buzz" advertising (website out months before the film, usenet posts, etc) they used for the film was brilliant, and worked great, but the movie itself was horrible. I'm sorry, that movie sucked, and there is nothing you could say that would make me change my mind. If it was some student film that I just watched at some dude's house, I would have been sort of impressed. Being that I paid a feature film price, and listened to months of hype before I saw it, it sucked. I went into that movie expecting it to be good, and it wasn't. When it first came out, it lived on that "Could it be real?" hype. Once the cat was out of the bag, it was just a boring moving involving three nimrods lost in the woods saying "f this" and "f that."
And yes, it is possible for a movie to be successful if a lot of people don't like it. I had two friends see it, and they liked it and told me I just had to go see it. So the next day I went and saw it with another friend. We both hated it. I'm sure that tale was repeated many times throughout the world.