Hacker Cinema
Delgo
2008 · Film · 89 min
Directed by Marc F. Adler, Jason Maurer
AdventureFantasyAnimationScience FictionFamily
In a divided land, it takes a rebellious boy and his clandestine love for a Princess of an opposing race to stop a war orchestrated by a power hungry villain.
2 negativefrom 2 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
The 2008 movie 'Delgo' is an interesting case. The independently produced movie lost it's distributor (IIRC, 20th Century Fox) and to get the movie into theaters, producers used its advertising budget on a pay-for-play distributor. The producers hoped that enough people would be curious enough by the name on the theater's marquees to see it and then word of mouth would bring in the crowds. It ended up being the lowest earning wide release (2000+ screens) movie up to that time. It was estimated that each showing averaged two people. It wasn't a very good movie, which probably is why the distributor dropped it, but plenty of bad movies have made back their budgets off of advertising induced first week ticket sales before word of mouth sunk the long tail.
Though only in a single industry and an n=1 case, we got to see what would happen if a movie went into wide release with no advertising. Would enough people see the movie poster or listing for what's playing at the theater and be curious enough to see the movie? Or would the lack of advertising doom it?
'Delgo' was released to theaters on over 2000 screens with an all-star cast in December of 2008 and virtually no marketing budget. It averaged roughly two paying customers per showing. More people saw Conan O'Brien making jokes about it on his show than saw it in the theaters. Though critically panned as derivative and several years out of date with its CGI, movies with far worse reviews have done much better. The real difference seems to be that no one knew that it existed.
That said, a new Star Wars movie with no advertising likely would still end up with plenty of ticket buyers. Existing brands can much more easily get away with taking their foot off the media buying accelerator but how long could they do it before a slow-down occurred? Seems like Marvel and DC still purchase lots of advertising for their well-known and currently popular franchises. What would happen if they stopped? Not sure if we'll ever know since they're unlikely to take that risk.
So the movie was bad, and people didn't go see it? Doesn't seem related to advertising.
Eminem released his last two albums without even announcing them. Word of mouth got them both to #1 on the charts.
If you tried that same movie experiment with something like Avengers, I bet the results would look a lot closer to Kamikaze than Delgo.
Though not an intentional test, we found out what happens when a movie gets a wide release but does not advertise. In 2008, the movie 'Delgo' was released on over 2000 screens with nearly no advertising. Because the production company could not find a distributor, they spent their ad money on renting the screens for a week, with the hope that some people would randomly see it and word of mouth would spread, leading to the theaters wanting to keep it for additional weeks. It became the lowest earning wide release movie up to that point in time. Each screening averaged two people per screening. More people saw Conan O'Brien making fun of the movie in his monologue than actually saw it in the theater.
The reviews for the movie were poor but it had lots of household names as its voice talent, including Anne Bancroft in her final film. Good or bad, advertising likely would have lead to more people seeing it than two per screening. Of course there's no way to know for sure how many more would have been enticed by the ads but we do know that going with zero advertising resulted in a huge disaster.