As many of you know, WebProNews is a big supporter of user-generated content, especially when it takes an established property and makes it better. In fact, the user-generated era is producing some incredible content, as the tools of the Internet makes hosting and distribution so much easier than they’ve ever been before.
With that in mind, consider Disney’s troubles marketing their upcoming John Carter flick, which is based off of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars masterpiece. The problem is, if you listen to the word on the street is Disney hasn’t created very much buzz for the upcoming “blockbuster,” offering the public bland, generic John Carter trailers that fail to spark the imagination, as well as the desire to consume.
Well, thanks to a YouTube collective called “JohnCarterFiles,” we now have a much better example of how Disney should’ve approached this movie:
Now compare that to Disney’s:
Apparently Disney thought that focusing on the action sequences was enough to entice the crowds, and considering America’s attraction to anything that’s shiny and tech-friendly, that’s understandable. Sometimes, however, luring them in with a good story still works. Or, as ToplessRobot.com puts it:
…all the trailers have gone from introducing the character and his journey and the alien cultures of Mars have to showing nothing but action scenes that make the movie look like some kind of combination Avatar and Attack of the Clones, which is not a compliment.
I think John Carter is going to be pretty good, if not great — I have a lot of trust in director Andrew Stanton — but Disney has just marketed this thing into the ground, and now no one seems interested. They need to do something else… like release this awesome fan-assembled trailer, which uses nothing but previously released footage, but put together in a way that makes the film more unique, more powerful and a lot more interesting.
What do you think? Does the fan trailer do a better job of capturing the mood of the story better than Disney’s? If so, why hasn’t Disney hired these guys to head up future marketing efforts?
