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Though not an intentional test, we found out what happens when a movie gets a wide release but does not advertise. In 2008, the movie 'Delgo' was released on ov

Though not an intentional test, we found out what happens when a movie gets a wide release but does not advertise. In 2008, the movie 'Delgo' was released on over 2000 screens with nearly no advertising. Because the production company could not find a distributor, they spent their ad money on renting the screens for a week, with the hope that some people would randomly see it and word of mouth would spread, leading to the theaters wanting to keep it for additional weeks. It became the lowest earning wide release movie up to that point in time. Each screening averaged two people per screening. More people saw Conan O'Brien making fun of the movie in his monologue than actually saw it in the theater. The reviews for the movie were poor but it had lots of household names as its voice talent, including Anne Bancroft in her final film. Good or bad, advertising likely would have lead to more people seeing it than two per screening. Of course there's no way to know for sure how many more would have been enticed by the ads but we do know that going with zero advertising resulted in a huge disaster.

johnsoft 6y ago
So the movie was bad, and people didn't go see it? Doesn't seem related to advertising. Eminem released his last two albums without even announcing them. Word of mouth got them both to #1 on the charts. If you tried that same movie experiment with something like Avengers, I bet the results would look a lot closer to Kamikaze than Delgo.
- UpsilonAlpha 6y ago
  These are not fair comparisons. Eminem and the Avengers have already established identities. Music cannot even compare to movies due to the sheer quantity of modern musicians. There are plenty of fantastic (IMO) bands out there that release music without advertising and they get nowhere. As for movies, Avengers got to where they are today through lots and lots of advertising.
josefx 6y ago
> It became the lowest earning wide release movie up to that point in time. Each screening averaged two people per screening. On the other hand it got displaced by Oogieloves which had $40 million in marketing costs. Critics found it mostly bad and the only award it won was for films produced in Brazil. Maybe there was a reason no one wanted to spend ad money on that movie?

johnsoft 6y ago

So the movie was bad, and people didn't go see it? Doesn't seem related to advertising. Eminem released his last two albums without even announcing them. Word of mouth got them both to #1 on the charts. If you tried that same movie experiment with something like Avengers, I bet the results would look a lot closer to Kamikaze than Delgo.

UpsilonAlpha 6y ago
These are not fair comparisons. Eminem and the Avengers have already established identities. Music cannot even compare to movies due to the sheer quantity of modern musicians. There are plenty of fantastic (IMO) bands out there that release music without advertising and they get nowhere. As for movies, Avengers got to where they are today through lots and lots of advertising.

josefx 6y ago

> It became the lowest earning wide release movie up to that point in time. Each screening averaged two people per screening. On the other hand it got displaced by Oogieloves which had $40 million in marketing costs. Critics found it mostly bad and the only award it won was for films produced in Brazil. Maybe there was a reason no one wanted to spend ad money on that movie?