Movie Marketing Used to Be Fun. Now It’s Just Inescapable.

Ads are everywhere, and yet fewer viewers are aware of what’s coming out when.

Perhaps you saw the promo in which Peyton Manning yelled, “Everybody knows the password, Ghetto Pat!” over the phone to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson from One Battle After Another. Or you wondered why Tom Brady, Frank Ocean, Michael Porter Jr., and others were photographed wearing Marty Supreme sweatshirts. Or you enjoyed seeing Jack Quaid get progressively covered in more bandages and bruises over the course of a Los Angeles Clippers game this past spring. (That would have been to promote Novocaine. Remember Novocaine?) Or maybe you’re buying someone Le Creuset’s Elphaba Embossed Signature Round Dutch Oven for Christmas. Oh, and did you catch the Nightwraith from Avatar: Fire and Ash flying around during Monday Night Football? If it’s starting to feel like major movie marketing has broken containment and infiltrated every last corner of modern life, that’s probably because it has.

Is any of it … working? Wicked: For Good, Zootopia 2, and Avatar: Fire & Ash are all doing great. Among the prestige titles, One Battle After Another will probably keep earning through what promises to be its healthy Oscar run, and Marty Supreme is off to a great start. But despite the fact that we all appear to be drowning in movie marketing, fewer viewers are aware of what’s coming out and when. This September, citing the industry research firm National Research Group, the New York Times reported that only 62 new-release titles in 2024 registered higher than 50 percent awareness, almost a record low.

Movie critics sometimes feel like we have a front-row seat to this phenomenon. We often wind up talking to people who bemoan the fact that there aren’t any new good movies out. (Seriously, it’s like the first thing people usually tell me when they find out I’m a film critic.) Usually, though, as the conversation goes on, we realize these folks aren’t even aware of what movies are out. They don’t go to theaters, so they don’t see trailers. They don’t read reviews (boo). They don’t really watch TV commercials. They do occasionally watch sporting events, which is why so much marketing now ties into NFL and NBA games, the last few crumbs of broadcast monoculture remaining. 

To be clear, nobody actually seems to be happy about this state of affairs. But nobody seems to know what to do about it either. What we sometimes think of as a crisis of quality is really a crisis of awareness, which is also a crisis of discovery. Not only do we not discover things anymore, we wouldn’t know how to discover them even if we wanted to. 

Those of us over a certain age will of course remember how we used to find out about movies. We’d go to the theater and watch the trailers. We’d see a TV spot. We’d walk past a poster. Most effectively, we’d pick up a newspaper (lol), flip to the entertainment section (lmfao), peruse the movie ads and listings (the what?), and see quotes from critics (who?) and decide what looked interesting. Almost nobody does any of this stuff anymore, which is a shame, because for a while there the film industry had something truly rare: a product whose advertising people actually enjoyed being exposed to. Despite our generational cynicism about advertising and promotion, we liked the movie ads in the paper. We liked seeing the posters. We liked watching the trailers. How many businesses in history can say that?

The internet was supposed to revolutionize all this stuff, make it even cheaper and give it broader reach. But it did the opposite. It destroyed local news and local advertising. Banner ads became annoying, then invisible, then nonexistent thanks to ad blockers. Digital advertising is still all over the place, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who likes it; nowadays, if you notice a digital ad, more often than not it means something has gone terribly wrong. Compare that to the people who used to cut out movie ads from newspapers and magazines and hang them on their walls. Marketing used to be enjoyable. Nowadays, it’s merely inescapable. 

One could look at this landscape and just proclaim that the rules have changed, that this is all just the new way of doing things and it will all be fine in the end. Every release nowadays seems to need a bespoke, from-the-ground-up marketing strategy designed for it — which sounds like a good thing in some ways. Last year, Neon succeeded in turning Osgood Perkins’s Longlegs into a viral phenomenon with a unique ad campaign that barely told you anything about the movie. And while Neon couldn’t pull off something similar for the same director’s Keeper this year, Warner Bros. did adopt some semblance of this approach for Zach Cregger’s Weapons, which turned out well. Studios enlist TikTok creators and Instagram influencers and all sorts of other people in hopes of breaking through to our consciousness. Ryan Coogler explains the differences in film formats; Christopher Nolan shows us how huge an Imax film print is; Tom Cruise eats his popcorn weird; Timothée Chalamet runs around the place rapping, dancing, yelling, and otherwise being adorable/problematic. But even when these gimmicks do work, it increasingly feels like a brief reprieve, like the executioner happened to call in sick that day.

Franchise films have been so dominant for so long because they had built-in fanbases that could help promote a movie by simply talking about it. Horror was successful because it is its own ecosystem; genre fans go to the theater and see a host of trailers for other upcoming horror movies. Both those worlds have experienced some pullback recently, with Marvel movies not making the kind of money they used to and genre houses like Blumhouse releasing fewer buzzy hits. For the big movies, flooding the zone with marketing is leading to diminishing returns. Gimmicks get old, and the familiar gets ignored. “Reaching a wide audience is the hardest it’s ever been,” veteran marketing executive Terry Press told the Times. “There’s no place on broadcast to reach them, other than sports, and digital is just a giant maw, a cacophony of noise.” And after a while, people tend to either tune out cacophony or run away from it.

With so many big movies underperforming this year, Hollywood is starting to realize this situation is unsustainable. You can’t reinvent the wheel every time you have a new film coming out, especially at a time when so many companies are laying off staff left and right. And big movies desperately muscling each other out to increasingly diminishing returns in a shrinking attention economy doesn’t sound like a situation with a lot of upside. It feels more like dinosaurs tripping over each other as they try to flee the asteroid blast.