There is a familiar joy of sinking into your seat with a fresh, overpriced pail of popcorn and a giant soda, ready to be immersed in a movie you’ve been eager to see for a while. Then it is suddenly disrupted when that movie starts and the lead character…starts singing.
The highly anticipated films “Wonka,” “Mean Girls” and “The Color Purple” all shocked theatergoers with the fact that they were musicals. Even beyond musicals, “Civil War” has erupted mixed reactions from an atypical marketing rollout. It is a strange phenomenon that has been noticed by audiences everywhere, increasingly frequently in the past several years. But, you wouldn’t know that from any marketing materials strategically designed to veil the genre from the masses.
The bygone era where musicals were everyone’s cup of tea, the Golden Era of the Hollywood musical, is long gone. Musicals by today’s standards are one of the most polarizing genres, seeing a steady decline in popularity in the latter half of the twentieth century. In an IMDB study created in 2024, in the 1930′s the musical genre made up about 10% of all films released whereas in the past two decades that number sits at below 1%.
With this touch-and-go genre, it seems incredibly risky to trick audiences into watching when there is a high probability that these songs will fall on deaf ears.
Notably, this has happened before.
When Tim Burton’s “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” was distributed in 2007, it was billed as a horror film rather than its musical origins. With Johnny Depp at the helm and Helena Bonham Carter at his side, audiences flocked to the theater expecting a gothic thriller like the blood-splattered trailer indicated. When the first round of moviegoers realized that the dialogue was delivered by a ballad, the backlash was swift. Complaints were made to the Advertising Standards Authority, citing misleading ads. Like “Mean Girls,” this was based on an already popular Broadway musical with a following, but that was not obvious to the general public.
There is a long history in Hollywood of movies that market themselves differently than the experience of actually watching them.
This year, “Civil War” was marketed by A24 using iconic American institutions under siege, including visuals of tanks encroaching on various West Coast locations like Echo Park Lake, none of which appeared in the final product. It was marketed as an action horror, but the experience of watching it was that it was a contemplative and somber drama more than anything else.
But it can be difficult to convey the complexities of a genre-bending film in a trailer that is also aimed to avoid spoilers.
Amy, an unnamed project manager for a film marketing agency, worked on some of the “Mean Girls” print marketing materials. She spoke to me about the behind-the-scenes discussions around the new release and provided some context about the competing priorities.
“There were iterations of that which were much more obvious [that it was a musical],” she said. “[The marketing materials] start so detailed, beautiful, creative, very niche and then by the end of the campaign, it’s always generalized and formulaic.”
With studio film budgets running from $36 million to $125 million, studios have to prioritize box office metrics above everything else. “It’s increasingly common these days. It’s jarring for a viewer to go to a movie that was sold to them one way then getting something completely different, but from a business perspective, they know that [musicals] aren’t as wide of a sell. Studios will tell us based on the script to start off to the races, try everything and anything with no restrictions. But as we get closer, they start pulling back as more executives and test audiences get involved,” she said.
Amy suggested that they are willing to take more backlash.
“[For studios], any press is good press. At least people are talking about it and [the backlash] doesn’t feel significant enough to deter people from watching. It’s a subset of the internet and entertainment news cycles so quickly, so the backlash is superseded by the box office stats.”
For “Mean Girls,” Amy also explained that it was created as a piece of content expected to go straight to streaming before Paramount pivoted and decided to pump money into a theatrical release. It was a gamble, but they recognized that they could capitalize on the nostalgia factor, as well as the fans of the Broadway musical version and get some commercial success. In the end, it is exactly what they did.
Despite receiving mixed reviews, the “Mean Girls” musical which cost only $36 million to make, raked in over $100 million worldwide, establishing it as a commercial hit. Paramount shared data about the opening weekend numbers which acknowledged that 16% of audience members left the theater after realizing the genre. Marc Weinstock, Paramount’s president of global marketing and distribution, seemed unbothered by this percentage when speaking to Variety.
“We didn’t want to run out and say it’s a musical because people tend to treat musicals differently. This movie is a broad comedy with music. Yes, it could be considered a musical but it appeals to a larger audience. You can see in [trailers for] “Wonka” and “The Color Purple,” they don’t say ‘musical’ either. We have a musical note on the title, so there are hints to it without being overbearing,” Weinstock told Variety.
Ted, an anonymous entertainment marketer, worked on marketing materials for studios such as A24, Netflix and Neon. He thought it was a ridiculous move for a musical not to be marketed as one, but acknowledges how it can be a successful strategy.
“[Netflix was] very adamant about discluding as much of that as possible because musicals just don’t make as much money and when it comes to marketing, according to testing and whatnot, audiences are turned off by musicals”
They aren’t wrong. “What sucks is that information is actually backed by a lot of data on their end with previous projects they have mentioned…the audience tested significantly lower and were less interested if there was dancing and singing,” he explained.
However, he asserted that studios take audience response very seriously. He spoke about a movie the company had worked on for the last year, which had lots of hype around it based on the director’s previous Oscar win. When it finally premiered at a film festival, it got panned.
“[The studio] had a whole strategy that the demographic who would love this movie would be the artsy, indie, arthouse, niche, Letterboxd [crowd], then those people reviewed it and they were like ‘this sh— is shallow.’” He continued, “So, they rethought the campaign and said, ‘If this movie wasn’t deep or weird or shocking enough for the arthouse indie film community, then maybe we need to reposition this as a more commercial four-quad movie,’ and so that’s what they ended up doing and it worked.” The theatrical release, targeted to the wider audience, was released and that audience loved it.
There are other, seemingly more effective tactics that studios have been using for movies that might benefit the musical genre. Scott Mendelson for Puck News wrote about Paramount’s marketing strategy for “Bob Marley: One Love.” The studio made it work by “leveraging outside-the-box marketing ideas similar, perhaps to “M3GAN” dolls doing TikTok-friendly dances, folks flashing scary “Smile” grins on the baseball jumbotron or even those sexually suggestive “Dune: Part Two” popcorn buckets. For “One Love,” there were several so-called grassroots-type marketing swings, including street painting, marketing-specific graffiti, viral communal events at professional soccer games and quite a few orchestrated singalongs like the global event that took place in June 2021.”
Keri Moore, the co-president of marketing at Lionsgate, spoke at the Wrap’s Women’s Summit about the unique tactics the studio has taken to promote their major franchise, the “Saw” movies. Over the years, they have drummed up tons of conversation around their bizarre and risky marketing campaigns, including mailing bags of fake limbs to invite the press to screenings and blood drives. During the recent SAG-AFTRA strikes, Moore said they had to return to some of their more experiential marketing efforts to get the word out since they couldn’t rely on actors to do press for the new release.
In the end, the job of the studio heads is to make money, which means that the marketing team is responsible for getting people into the theater. The longevity of a movie’s success certainly depends on reaching the right audience and having a quality film in the first place, but the priority is always to avoid a flop, where a project fails to see a return on investment.
We will likely continue to see experimental campaigns deployed across social media platforms, in traditional print materials and trailers, on billboards and in press junkets as the media landscape continues to evolve.
The best-case scenario is that the film delivers such a celebrated, exceptional film that we forget what expectation had brought us to the theater in the first place.