What ever happened to good ole marketing? We used to be spoon fed advertising in every form of media, but with some true effort behind it. I’m sure you have an inside joke or memory with a close friend and it revolves around an old commercial. Mine was in the form of Go-Gurt, but we’ll get to that in a minute. That effort (and budget) was used because companies, movie studios, publishers, etc. didn’t already have your eye captured. They had to work for it. Now with every eye captured, why would they try?
Growing up in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, whenever a big summer blockbuster was set to release, the marketing rollout was truly memorable. One that is particularly ingrained in my memory was in 2002 for Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones. Everything in my world as a 5 year old immediately had Attack of the Clones in it. There were video games released, followed by a cartoon movie the following year, action figures, and even Go-Gurt tubes transformed into lightsabers. Now as a kid, am I to just eat a lightsaber? No, I’m going to duel my best friend on the staircase of his house and they’re going to explode up the walls. Attack of the Clones is actually the reason I was first kicked out of someone’s house.
Video games have been tied to theatrical releases dating back all the way to 1982, when Raiders of the Lost Ark released for the Atari 2600. Since then, major movie releases would provide their license to a game studio, who would then crank out a game based around the movie set to release that same year. It ultimately was a paid advertisement to get people excited and generate more ticket sales. Don’t get me wrong, most of these games were complete garbage with few redeeming qualities beyond being able to essentially play as the protagonist. But sometimes you get Spider-Man 2.
Spider-Man 2 was developed by the studio Treyarch, who at the time bounced between sports and movie titles. After this, they would go on to develop Call of Duty 2: Big Red One in 2005 and never look back. This game featured a completely open world based in Manhattan, and realistic web swinging in which the webs attached to the buildings. This allowed Spider-Man to have the same physics whipping around New York that you saw from Tobey Maguire in the movie. It quickly became the gold standard for super hero video games. While Sam Raimi’s film was laying the foundation with movie audiences for the MCU, Treyarch’s game was doing the same for open world action games.
Now with games having such long development cycles and large budgets, it’s easy to understand why there are simply just Odyssey skins in Fortnite or Dune skins in Call of Duty. Those games have massive audiences that won’t stop playing them, and for $20 a player can buy into the hype for the big movie coming out that month. Even though the hit rate for movie tie-in games was fairly low, I still miss seeing the games release and how the developers were going to interpret the movie by selecting a certain genre.
When I see a commercial on TV in a vertical aspect ratio in someone’s kitchen, I want to hurl myself off of my balcony. Because it tells me that these companies think they’ve won. They have access to as many eyes as humanly possible, so they throw a check at an influencer or an intern to make their next commercial at home. Now it doesn’t have to be interesting, it just has to be in front of people. Maybe I’m a sucker for a bad game and just want to be in that world of the movie for a little bit longer, but I hope we start to see movie studios take small swings with indie studios to make something fun. Maybe one day we get another Spider-Man 2.
-Evan Kuhn
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