From gardening week to pie day: the strangest movie tie-ins

As you’re already totally aware, this month brings with it National Gardening Week: seven glorious days for us all to discuss hanging baskets without fear of social rejection. The annual holiday was launched four years ago to celebrate the splendour of grass, flowers and trowels. But this year’s festivities will be marked by something extra special. The new, garden-featuring period drama A Little Chaos has been announced as National Gardening Week’s official film which means that, well, a microsite has been launched with a competition to win tickets to a flower show. And yes, that’s about it.
The film, which stars Kate Winslet as a competitive landscape designer who falls for her boss, has had mixed reviews, but the decision to work with the Royal Horticultural Society at least plays into their key demographic: people who like gardens. Unsurprisingly, it’s the first time there has been an official film for the week-long soil celebration.
Winslet is no stranger to partnering with dubious national celebrations: her melodrama Labor Day was a key element of last year’s National Pie Day. The cross-promotion hinged on a pivotal scene where convicted killer/helpful man-about-the-house Josh Brolin teaches Winslet how to make peach pie, and (naturally) awakens her sexuality. A poster was sent out to bakeries and a Facebook competition launched for pie-lovers to enjoy a private screening.
But the film failed to bring in an audience, even of pie-eaters, with a worldwide gross of only $20m – and the decision to focus a marketing campaign on a scene that was the movie’s unintentionally hilarious low point was, said Lou Lumenick of the New York Post, an “eccentric choice”.
Disney’s recent hit Big Hero 6 happened to coincide with National Hugging Day, which meant that its creator Kevin Zaborney, AKA the Ambassador of Hugs, awarded inflatable robot Baymax the accolade of most huggable character of 2015. Previous winners have included no one – the honour was cooked up to promote the film. But, while the association might seem spurious, the specially created trailer generated 1m views.
While the national holiday tie-ins seem to include the bare minimum of activity, other partnerships work harder to offer more effective, and shareable, content. One of the most successful examples recently saw Air New Zealand join forces with Warner Bros on Hobbit-themed in-flight safety videos. Statistics show that 14% of all visitors to New Zealand are influenced by what they see at the movies, which this campaign cleverly played on. It was a hit online with more than 30m views across the three ads, and visitor figures were up 6.2% last year.
Linking an airline or tourist board to a film’s promotional campaign is a clearer choice of partner than many other case studies. After watching Skyfall, for example, it seems only natural that some audiences might want to visit its locations, so teaming up with Visit Britain makes total sense: there was a reported rise of 41.7% in visits to Glencoe, Scotland after the film’s release. But action-seekers hoping to get involved in a shootout might have been somewhat shortchanged with the spy-free scenery and locals have been fighting back against an increase in litter from disappointed 007 fans. Equally, the Yemen tourist board were forced to sadden fans of Ewan McGregor comedy Salmon Fishing in the Yemen about the lack of actual salmon fishing in the country after they were inundated with eager travellers who clearly thought the film was a documentary.
Finding the right partner for a campaign is key and it’s these carefully considered collaborations that can make a difference. Last year’s partnership between X-Men: Days of Future Past and Virgin Trains seemed like a match made by randomly picking companies out of a hat. The April Fool’s hilarity of rebranding Wolverhampton station as Wolverine and a specially refurbished train with the characters plastered all over it didn’t feel like a natural fit for the film which didn’t a) take place in England or b) feature any trains. Eurostar jumping aboard as the official travel partner of 2004’s Paris-set Phantom of the Opera was a better fit. But since when was having “official travel partner” the key to a film’s marketing campaign?
Some promotional collaborations also have another more earnest objective in mind. With the release of every Saw film, a “Give Til’ It Hurts” blood drive took place and by the time Saw IV was out, the American Red Cross became an official partner. The event was always promoted with an artfully gruesome poster and horror fans were encouraged to give blood, leading to more than 40,000 gallons being donated. In a similar, ahem, vein, last year’s Hunger Games entry saw Lionsgate working with Whole Food Market in a charitable effort that saw money donated to a global poverty charity for every branded bottle of juice.
But donating blood and money wasn’t enough for one particularly demanding campaign ...
In 2013, Zack Snyder’s city-crushing spectacle Man of Steel boasted more than 100 official brand partners. The most insidious was a deal with the National Guard, which involved a campaign to recruit “soldiers of steel” by tying the mythology of Superman to the work of the military. Snyder himself worked on specially branded ads, and there was a tie-in workout routine and online game. The objective was recruitment (would you like to destroy stuff just like Superman?) and the key demographic of 17- 24-year-olds mirrored the target audience for the superhero blockbuster.
While increased ticket sales and interest in the brand are obvious aims for these sorts of activity, often it’s as simple as getting a journalist to write about it. Before you started reading this article, were you even aware of Kate Winslet’s new film about gardening? Had you even realised that National Gardening Week was a thing? Are you craving peach pie now? Do you want a hug? Shall we all go to Glencoe together? And then join the army? Maybe we’re part of the problem.

In for a Penny: Who would make the most spine-chilling Pennywise the killer clown?

True Detective’s Cary Fukunaga seems the perfect choice to direct the first ever big-screen adaptation of Stephen King’s It. The 1990 miniseries benefited from a crackerjack-crazy turn from Tim Curry as Pennywise, the leering, sneering killer clown who haunts a small Maine town. But 25 years later, the production seems melodramatic, and some of the adult performances – not to mention the haircuts – are straight out of a Roger Corman flick.

Fukunaga’s brooding style ought to make for a far scarier movie, and there is talk that this will be a two-part film to mirror the split narrative of King’s epic 1,138-page tome. Furthermore, King himself is reported to have given the screenplay his seal of approval.

So far, so good. But Fukunaga says he is still struggling to find the right actor to play Pennywise, the main manifestation of the shape-shifting supernatural nasty. Here’s a few suggestions to help him out.

Michael Shannon

The Boardwalk Empire actor proved that he can play the powderkeg villain to a tee as Nelson Van Alden AKA George Mueller. He may lack Curry’s clownish grin, but those bulging basilisk eyes are unmatched in modern Hollywood.

Michael Shannon in Boardwalk Empire. Photograph: HBO/Everett/Rex Features

Tilda Swinton

The current fan favourite would make for some powerful stunt casting, though the Oscar-winning British actor’s androgynous look is very different from Curry’s extravagantly proportioned features. Swinton was the best thing about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and really went to town on the camp villain front with her squinting, spitting Minister Mason, a cross between Hilda Ogden and Hitler, in the excellent Snowpiercer. She looks scary in clown makeup, and has been tipped for – and played – high-profile male roles before.

Tilda Swinton as the gender-bending Orlando. Photograph: Liam Longman/Adventure Pictures Ltd

Willem Dafoe

A wide grin and intense, baleful eyes are essential to capturing Pennywise’s demonic malignancy, and Dafoe has the perfect look. His Green Goblin stands second only to Heath Ledger’s Joker in the grand pantheon of big-screen supervillains, and his sleazy, dentally challenged mobster Bobby Peru in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart was downright abhorrent.

Willem Dafoe as Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart. Photograph: Landmark Media

Kiefer Sutherland

Nearly three decades after essaying a pretty decent camp cult villain in The Lost Boys, Sutherland would make for an assured Pennywise. He has the ability to deliver the husky New York brogue that Curry pulled off to surprising effect, and his poisonous leer would be straight out of the seventh layer of Hades.

Kiefer Sutherland, second from left, in The Lost Boys. Photograph: Allstar

Nicolas Cage

Bear with me. Cage may have the furniture-chewing capacity of an army of hungry termites, but when he’s good, he’s very good indeed. And while Fukunaga’s take on Pennywise is likely to be more subtle and layered than the 1990 version, it’s still a pretty one-dimensional role. Whoever takes on the part needs to be capable of adding genuine venom to occasionally shonky dialogue (remember all that stuff about “floating in the deadlights”?) Cage has off-kilter energy in spades, as well as a willingness to push the boundaries of taste at every available opportunity. He could be a car crash in the role, but he might also prove a revelation.

Nicolas Cage in Drive Angry. Photograph: Lionsgate/Allstar

Geoffrey Rush

The Aussie Oscar winner certainly has a knack for gurning, sneering villains, with his Captain Hector Barbossa from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies occasionally surpassing even Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow for sea-dog pantomime posturing. And it’s a little-known fact that Rush trained under the late, legendary French mime actor and teacher Jacques Lecoq, so the physical side of the role should be well within his sphere of expertise.

Geoffrey Rush, centre, in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. Photograph: Rex/BuenaVista/Everett

Oscars 2015: who will win the best animated feature race?

There are those who complain that it’s too easy to score an Oscar nomination for best animated feature. They’re essentially right: current Academy rules state that at least 16 feature-length animated films must qualify for consideration in any given year for the category to yield five nominees. This year, 20 films did, meaning a full quarter of the titles in play wound up with a nomination. When you consider that 87 submissions for best foreign language film were vying for the same number of slots, or that 323 films qualified for best picture this year, the animated race looks a little soft.
Then again, try telling that to the makers of The Lego Movie. The year’s highest-grossing animated film was also among the year’s most universally acclaimed in any medium. (It cracked the Guardian’s top 10, for starters.) It had been running the table on the precursor award circuit so convincingly that most pundits regarded the Oscar as a done deal. Gasps were heard across Hollywood when, in arguably the biggest shock in the category’s 14-year history, the film failed to score a nomination. The word snub is used too often to describe simple Oscar omissions, but this one felt oddly pointed. Were irreverent directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller being penalised by the Academy’s insular animation branch for their success in the live-action sphere? Was the film’s postmodern blend of art and commerce too distastefully hip for them? Could they simply not bring themselves to vote for something called The Lego Movie? One way or another, the race has lost its pace-setter.

And no one is more delighted about that than the folks at DreamWorks Animation, who now slide by default into the frontrunner position with How to Train Your Dragon 2. In fairness, even before the Oscar nominations were revealed, signs were in place that this safe, attractively crafted, roundly well-liked sequel to the 2010 fantasy smash could be a spoiler in the race: its surprise win at the Golden Globes proved that the appeal of slick traditional storytelling is never to be underestimated with conservative voting groups. With a US gross of $177m, it hasn’t quite matched its predecessor’s success, but it’s still a vastly popular, robustly reviewed choice, while the franchise has generated enough affection that people would like to see it rewarded. The first film was unlucky to come up against Toy Story 3, to date the only sequel to win the Oscar; look for this to become the second.

A few months ago, Big Hero 6 was the big-studio contender most nervously regarded by its rivals: Disney, after all, are the reigning champions, having finally nabbed their first win (not counting Pixar films) in the category with the world-beating phenomenon, Frozen. Yet somehow, despite racking up more than $450m worldwide, the robot-superhero romp is at risk of seeming an afterthought in this race. While Frozen is still a ubiquitous pop-culture fixture 21 months after its release, Big Hero 6 simply hasn’t captured the popular imagination in the same way. (Can anyone who hasn’t seen the film really tell what it’s about?) That may not hurt it as much as you’d think: the film is still sturdy, well-received populist fare, while its canny commercial fusion of the Disney and Marvel brands will net it a lot of corporate-loyalty votes. Still, if any nominee is hindered by its makers’ past glories, it’s this one.
Voters who find the DreamWorks and Disney offerings a little too vanilla have a quirkier mainstream option in The Boxtrolls – the third feature (and third Oscar nominee) from Portland-based stop-motion studio Laika, following Coraline and ParaNorman. With its steampunk styling and flashes of historical allegory, this offbeat, elaborately imagined cautionary tale is perhaps the most divisive contender here. American trade critics trashed the film after its Venice premiere, but it swiftly found more sympathetic admirers – particularly in the UK, where its proportional box office has far outstripped its US numbers. Regard for the film’s craft is high in the animation community; if the final vote were branch-restricted, I’d like its chances more.
But it’s not, and lack of awareness across the wider Academy also puts the final two nominees at a crucial disadvantage. Still, GKIDS, a plucky New York-based distributor of foreign and independent animated films, has established itself as a formidable giant-killer at the nominations stage, regularly sneaking in ahead of glossier megabucks contenders. So it was this year: with The Lego Movie down and out, two gorgeous GKIDS delicacies made the cut. Song of the Sea, Irish animator Tomm Moore’s sumptuous reinterpretation of Celtic selkie mythology, was always a dark horse to be reckoned with: Moore’s last film, the lovely The Secret of Kells, was a shock nominee (GKIDS’ first, in fact) in the category five years ago. His latest is even better – an inventively hand-drawn, culturally rich fairytale, it deserves better than fifth place.
But if either of the arthouse Davids can make a lunge at the American Goliaths – and that’s a big if – it’s more likely to be The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, which has sentimental appeal to match its artistry. The presumed swansong of Studio Ghibli, and the first film in 14 years from 79-year-old master Isao Takahata (Grave of the Fireflies), the film offers voters a second consecutive opportunity to give the cherished Japanese animation house a suitably respectful send-off. (Hayao Miyazaki’s farewell feature The Wind Rises lost out to Frozen last year.) Critics have clustered around Takahata’s film since Cannes, while the Los Angeles Film Critics’ Association handed it their win. It’s by no means quintessential Ghibli: a melancholy adaptation of a 10th-century folk tale, rendered in stylised ink-and-watercolour strokes, it’s a world away from the florid fantasy of Spirited Away (Ghibli’s only Oscar winner to date), but scarcely less exquisite.

First trailer shows Ant-Man has a big hill to climb

Cynics might suggest that you can’t tell much about a movie from its trailer. Yet last year’s promo for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, with its irresistible Blue Swede soundtrack and smart riff on the famous The Usual Suspects lineup sequence, proved a masterful example of the form and completely transformed expectations for the barmy cosmic superhero tale. James Gunn’s nutty little confection went on to make more money than Superman reboot Man of Steel at the global box office, a spectacular feat for a film about a bunch of little-known multi-coloured space weirdos.
Now comes the debut trailer for Marvel’s Ant-Man and, if Guardians of the Galaxy needed help to turn around public perceptions, this one surely requires one of the finest trailers ever seen in the history of Hollywood. Firing the fabulous Edgar Wright as director after more than half a decade of development, only to replace him with Yes Man’s Peyton Reed, has created spectacular negative buzz. And given that context, I’m afraid our first look at Paul Rudd as the diminutive superhero simply fails to stand tall.
The Ant-Man trailer
We see Michael Douglas as Dr Hank Pym, the original Ant-Man in the comics, explaining to Rudd’s petty criminal Scott Lang that he’s about to get a second chance as the titular hero. It’s pitched as a stirring speech set up perfectly for Lang to harpoon all that portentous tension by asking if the name is set in stone. But the Guardians trailer already pulled a similar self-referential trick when Chris Pratt’s Star Lord discovered nobody had ever heard of him - and produced far more laughs.
Advertisement
The rest of the rather low-key, low-energy trailer largely sees Rudd rollicking around the screen as Ant-Man, complete with trusty insect steed and shockingly unimpressive costume, which to me looks likes something from Doctor Who. It is utterly lacking in the full-blooded, warm-hearted razzamatazz of its predecessor.
Screenwriter Adam McKay (Anchorman) has admitted he rewrote the original screenplay by Wright and Joe Cornish in just six to eight weeks with the help of Rudd. “We just shaped the whole thing, we just tried to streamline it, make it cleaner, make it a little bigger, a little more aggressive, make it funnier in places – we just basically did a rewrite,” he told Collider last year, adding: “Edgar had a really good script. But we just had a blast, and Rudd was just so much fun to write with.”
If Wright and Cornish’s screenplay was so great in the first place, why did it need rewriting? The British pair have been reduced to a story credit on the final movie, and you have to worry that the Ant-Man that finally hits the big screen is going to be a dramatically diminished version of what it might once have been. Let’s hope this is one occasion when the trailer really doesn’t tell the full story.

Can Deadpool make a superhero of Ryan Reynolds yet?

Green Lantern was a flop and the X-Men spin-off Deadpool looked dead in the water – that is until fans saw test footage of the actor as the wisecracking crimefighter, and decided that the red mask fits
Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern

Supremely ill-conceived … Ryan Reynolds in the 2011 flop Green Lantern. Photograph: Warner Bros Pictures/DC
There was a moment around four years ago when it looked like Ryan Reynolds might emerge from rom-com purgatory and find a place for himself as a wisecracking superhero, alongside the likes of Robert Downey Jr. Reynolds had won acclaim for the unorthodox 2010 indie thriller Buried, in which he was mesmerising as a civilian truck driver who is kidnapped and buried alive by Iraqi insurgents with only a torch and a mobile phone for company. Coupled with a positively received cameo as the superhero Deadpool in the otherwise disappointing X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the Canadian actor was boasting some serious buzz.
Then along came Green Lantern, a supremely ill-conceived 2011 superhero epic about the space-roaming DC comics crimefighter. Reynolds wasn’t terrible in it by any means, but the film suffered from hamfisted characterisation, lazy screenwriting and shonky CGI. With its star suddenly far from flavour of the month, 20th Century Fox’s proposed Deadpool X-Men spin-off entered studio purgatory.
The leaked Deadpool test footage
Now the movie seems to be back on, after leaked test footage of Reynolds as the masked antihero caused a huge stir online earlier this year. Variety reported yesterday that a deal is being closed for the movie to enter production, while the film’s star posted an image of Deadpool’s distinctive mask, depicted in a collage of spent bullets and cartridge cases. The caption? “Uh ... It’s Chimichanga Time”, a reference to the character’s penchant for deep-fried burritos.
Might Deadpool mark a turn in Reynolds’s fortunes? That will depend on whether Fox holds its nerve and delivers a film that lives up to the edgy verve of the test footage, which drew exactly the kind of fanboy gasps you might expect from a superhero movie featuring foul language, extreme violence and a protagonist with obvious mental-health issues. Like Kick-Ass in 2010, Deadpool looks like a fresh take on the formula, as opposed to the Tony Stark-lite in space template used byGreen Lantern. The fact that it’s impossible to recognise Reynolds’s boyish features in the footage, coupled with the freaky lack of a mouth hole in Deadpool’s mask, makes the vision all the more irresistible.
Advertisement
This also ought to be a movie that sidesteps many of the usual credibility issues that superhero movies have. Green Lantern, with its cosmic-space-alien-police-force premise, was always going to be a hard sell; but unlike, say, Batman, Deadpool’s penchant for throwing himself into situations promising almost certain death seems believable. Firstly, he boasts the superhero ability to regenerate after almost any injury, and secondly, he really is completely crazy.
The fear, of course, is that Fox will realise that this unorthodox confection really is at best a $100m movie, with a loyal hardcore fanbase but little potential for big-figure box-office returns and zero chance of getting a release in fiercely censorial China. Then begins the slow process of retooling the character and movie for a PG-13 US audience, a process that the little known first-time director Tim Miller would be powerless to resist.
But for now, let’s assume that the Deadpool who arrives in February 2016 is the one we’ve already seen furiously freewheeling across the screen like a nutty whirling dervish. It might just be the start of a Rey-naissance – and you can’t even really see the guy acting.