Marketing is a very profitable business because it is a very important aspect of the film industry. That’s because without film marketers, a film can’t get to an audience after production. However, I firmly believe that the power of movie marketers will diminish as bandwidth and Internet connection costs decrease and Internet speeds increase. In addition, I believe that the future will see a boycott of traditional filmmakers as more and more people move online.

Old people remember a time when the American film industry was less predictable–directors could experiment and films were allowed to be weird and challenging. Today, film production has become a well-oiled business.

In 2007, advertising costs for major studios expensive movies about 30% of their budgets. By the end of noughties ratio was 50-50. Today the production budget is well if the total cost of the project – that is, the conditional “300-millionth movie” is actually only 100 million, and 200 go to the attention of the film and make the audience to go to the theater. We live in an amazing time when advertising has become more important than cinema itself, and this transformation has happened in just a few years.

In the new millennium, every studio has a marketing department staffed with top-notch professionals. It is marketers today drive most of the money in Hollywood: the respect for them is growing, their names are on everyone’s lips, they have become a kind of rock stars of advertising. It is believed that the era of modern blockbusters opened Star Wars and Jaws, which showed the commercial potential of such films. Beginning in the 80-ies studios are increasingly giving preference to “big forms”, and to recoup the costs of such productions, already required special techniques. After all, the more new films come out, the tighter they became in cinemas: if before the movie started modestly in theaters, could last many weeks on the screens and slowly go to the plus, the growth of competition killed this possibility – cinemas began to withdraw from the rental of low-profit films, replacing them with new arrivals “bombs”.

The exodus of viewers from cinemas, triggered by the development of home video, piracy, cable, and Internet services, has only exacerbated the competition: audiences have become capricious and picky, and in recent years many viewers have expressed their willingness to leave their home cinemas in favor of another novelty, only if they are convinced that “it must be seen on a big screen. As a consequence, today’s box office is a battle of the titans, a competition of budgets, in which the most spectacular (read – most expensive) genres prevail, and the focus is mainly on teenagers who have both free time and “extra” money, and a desire to have fun. Is it any wonder that there is a plethora of superhero movies with no blood, nudity, profanity, or other harmful elements that could prevent the film from reaching the maximum audience? For the audience to go to the movies, the film has to be expensive. And in order for it to pay off, its age rating must be as box office-friendly as possible, ideally G, that is, “for the whole family.”

Of course, the film distribution consists not only of blockbusters: dramas, and comedies and horror have their audience. Studios are willing to take a reasonable risk, making such films and supplying them with modest budgets, but the main money is invested in blockbusters, the income from which helps cover any parallel failures; it is no coincidence that such “big projects” are called “tentpoles” (from the English Tent-pole – the pole on which the tent is held up). If a comedy or a horror film fails at the box office, it can be fixed, but a high-cost “tentpole” has no right to fail – a couple of such failures in a row can simply bankrupt the studio. Therefore, marketing experts, like midwives, keep an eye on the film projects at all stages of production and are often present even at their direct “conception”: discussing the synopsis or buying a 50 thousand triment (brief paraphrase) of the next movie, which has not even written the script, the studio management often invites promoters to the table, who evaluate the marketing potential of history and estimate how easy a film will sell to the audience. The initial price is not important: if the project is put into production, millions will be invested in it, which, of course, no one is willing to risk recklessly. There is no place for risk in this business anymore.