Overkill

Tomorrow, or sometime within this week, I will buy tickets for myself and my family to Joss Whedon's The Avengers, which opens here in the Philippines next week, on April 25, a full nine days before its release in the United States. It is my movie of the year; I am more anxious to see it than I am to see Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises, Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man, Ridley Scott's Prometheus, and just about any other movie, big or small, due out this year. I am fairly certain there are a lot of other people who feel the same way.

That said, I find myself slightly annoyed by the proliferation of footage of the film on the internet, done by Marvel itself.

Now, Disney, Marvel's parent company, has been in the business of making and selling movies for a long time and has done a pretty good job of it, so arguably it's not my place to question the wisdom of their marketing strategy, but for some reason I can't help but wonder why, having given audiences three full-length movie trailers, a tantalizing superbowl spot, and a number of TV spots with incremental increases in footage, Disney still feels it has to go the extra mile and show footage from the film. Even granting the film is 140 minutes or so long (nearly two and a half hours!) and that the sum total of the footage being shown on the internet is less than a tenth of that running time, the saturation of footage seems to suggest that Disney isn't confident enough in their product to just let what they've already shown simmer a bit in the collective consciousness. It strikes me that they aren't content to let the film sell itself at this point. Well, if nothing else, if for some macabre reason this film fails to live up to its massive expectations, no one will be able to accuse Disney of not being aggressive enough in pushing it.

James Cameron's Avatar got a great deal of pre-release mileage out of the mystery surrounding its plot, which in the end turned out to be rather hackneyed and buoyed only by the film's fantastic visuals. Christopher Nolan's Inception benefited from similar ambiguity. Both of these films were released in the internet age, and both are sterling examples of fantastic return on investment.

With their ad blitzkrieg, Disney seem to be saying that if people aren't thinking about The Avengers every waking second, they aren't thinking about it enough. I'm really not sure I agree with that, but I'm not in the business of selling movies.

Well, if nothing else I at least have the choice not to watch all of this footage, even though I couldn't help but check out some of it.

The good news is, from the little I've seen this movie looks at least as good as the trailers promise it to be. Still, if they continue to market it this way, it strikes me that no movie will ever be as good as they are hyping this one up to be.