“Roll, roll, roll in ze hay.” - Inga, Young Frankenstein

By Lisa Fary

Now that Comic-Con is over, Hollywood can go back to despising geeks and start loathing themselves for pandering to us for four days straight. 

The recent Hollywood Reporter article, “Is Hollywood Overestimating the Clout of the Geek?”,  discusses how marketing has changed in recent years to an approach courting hardcore fans and how that strategy doesn’t really work.

The Hollywood Reporter says:

The hard-core fans are so powerful, the thinking goes, that they not only should be targeted but also allowed into the process, their voices shaping marketing campaigns and even creative directions.

But what if fan reaction bears only so much on a project’s ultimate performance? And even if reaching fans can significantly move the needle, what if reaching them in the right ways is so elusive and inefficient that it’s not even worth trying?

The article later points to some more specific examples:

Pundits tout how the warm Comic-Con reception to “Iron Man” last summer served as prelude to the hot blast of boxoffice that followed. But for every movie or TV show with encouraging early indications among the fancore, there are examples of movies that caught on with the grassroots and went no further. Think “Snakes on a Plane” or “Grindhouse,” which was the toast of Comic-Con 2006 before becoming the fiasco of 2007. The Wachowskis’ footage from “Speed Racer” was cheered last year before sputtering at the boxoffice this summer.

What execs - and this article - seem to overlook is that, when it comes to geeks, marketing campaigns don’t really matter.  We can appreciate a campaign on its own without really being interested in the movie it’s promoting.

Case in point, Snakes on a Plane.

All that movie ever had going for it was a kitschy title and a viral marketing campaign. Two years ago I thought Sam Jackson calling my cell with a recorded personal plea to see the movie was clever, so I sent Sam Jackson phone calls to everyone I knew.  None of us bothered to see the movie, even on DVD.  Why?  Because it’s just Sam Jackson killing snakes on a plane, which is kind of stupid.

Speed Racer was also cheered at the Con and also bombed at the box office.  Admittedly, I did not see Speed Racer (not because I wasn’t interested; I really wanted to see it, but it was impossible to get out of the house at the time).  However, I don’t know that Speed Racer’s flopulence can be blamed on geeks.  This was a movie that got very mixed reviews, with outlets like USA Today and The NY Post panning the hell out of it, while Den of Geek and reviewers at Ain’t It Cool News raved about it.

Even if the Comic-Con footage got cheered, so what?  Geeks dig preview footage and trailers. They’re often our first look at something we love brought to life on screen.  It’s exciting.  Some of us swoon.

However, we also know that a crappy movie can be cut into an awesome trailer and remain wary until opening night.  For instance, I got shivers watching the Watchmen trailer and have watched it several times since it came online.  That trailer is doing its job by getting me excited about a movie I’ve been dreading, but I’ll continue to utter the Geek’s Prayer* every time I see it until March 2009.

As for the charge that reaching geeks in the right ways is so elusive and inefficient that it’s not worth trying, I beg to differ.  It’s not hard to reach geeks.  Right now, I’m going to reveal the secret to reaching geeks and making a ton of money from us.

Ready?  Here it is:

Make a good movie.

That’s it. Make a good movie and geeks will find it.  We will see it in the theater.  We will pester our boyfriends and girlfriends to see it with us.  We will blog about it.  We will talk to other people online about it in comment threads all over the internets.  And then, we may just go see it again.

Case in point, Iron Man.  Iron Man wasn’t successful because it had a good showing at the Con.  It wasn’t successful because of a marketing strategy.    It didn’t need cheap stunts like a placing a giant sized Iron Man in the London Eye or illegally altering quarters with Tony Stark’s image and releasing them into circulation to get people in theaters.  Iron Man was successful because it was good.  Amazing, even.

And the cherry on top of the Hollywood Reporter’s sundae of geek misunderstanding. . .

“The Dark Knight” drew a quarter of its audience on opening weekend (or about $40 million in boxoffice, the difference between a strong opening and a spectacular one) from women over 25 — not exactly the core Comic-Con audience.

Oh, for god’s sake. What? Is it sooo weird for chicks over 25 to dig Batman?  Women can’t be part of the fancore, too?  Ugh.  Pink Raygun’s work is never done.

*The Geek’s Prayer is ”Please don’t suck.”

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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.