It must be a little bit awkward to advertise for the Hunger Games, since pretty much the whole reason Collins created the series was to lambaste the advertising industry. Apparently, that’s stopped the franchise from literally nothing, as their latest French Vanilla marketing campaign has demonstrated.
A series of posters, released earlier today on Wired, show the rebels in all black attire and full-feathered wings. While the posters intend to make the warriors look “dark yet powerful,” I guarantee you I saw something similar last month in the Macy’s formalwear department. There’s Cressida (Natalie Dormer), Gale (Liam Hemsworth), and Messala (Evan Ross), but absolutely none of Jennifer Lawrence (90% of the reason for seeing these movies in the first place).
Frankly, I’m a little underwhelmed by the photos, and I kinda/sorta feel like I’ve seen scarier images on a Pokemon card. Earlier this year, The Hunger Games graffitied their own Capitol billboards with “Mockingjay lives” tags. Then recently, they released a bizarro President Snow mock speech which I found a little: bizarro. Beware, Lionsgate warns us, the REVOLUTION/MARKETING campaign is afoot.
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part I will be officially released on November 21st, and I’m curious to see how it’ll turn out. The last installment is the darkest of the three-part series; the least conventionally entertaining but in some ways, the most mature. It’s fascinating to me that Lionsgate has been able to turn a book that’s about child murder into a hugely successful family-friendly franchise, now with a theme park in the works. Mockingjay features PTSD, alcoholism, abuse, genocide. What will these quirky-dirky-dissociated marketers think of next?