If you’re going to market your movie to me, have fun with it.
That’s really all I ask. I think the key to great movie marketing is that you have to figure out what movie you’ve made, and then crack the way to present that film to the public. Don’t lie about what movie you’ve made. Don’t hide the movie you’ve made. Don’t shroud the thing in mystery so completely that no one knows what the movie is. And for god’s sake, don’t ruin it as you try to sell it to me.
So far, I think Fox has done a fairly masterful job with the actual materials they’ve released from “Prometheus.” Their one sheets are interesting. The trailer that evokes the original 1979 “Alien” trailer without ever explicitly saying “Alien” anywhere on it is effective. They’re trying.
And today, there’s a very cool new puzzle piece that they’ve dropped in the form of a fake TED talk. Luke Scott directed the piece, which was conceived and designed by Ridley Scott and Damon Lindelof. You’d barely know that from the actual TED page, though, which plays it all very straight-faced.
Here’s what they have to say about their speaker, who look an awful lot like Guy Pearce:
Sir Peter Weyland was born in Mumbai, India at the turn of the Millennium. The progeny of two brilliant parents; His mother, an Oxford Educated Professor of Comparative Mythology, his father, a self-taught software Engineer, it was clear from an early age that Sir Peter”s capabilities would only be eclipsed by his ambition to realize them. By the age of fourteen, he had already registered a dozen patents in a wide range of fields from biotech to robotics, but it would be his dynamic break-throughs in generating synthetic atmosphere above the polar ice cap that gained him worldwide recognition and spawned an empire.
In less than a decade, Weyland Corporation became a worldwide leader in emerging technologies and launched the first privatized industrial mission to leave the planet Earth. “There are other worlds than this one,” Sir Peter boldly declared, “And if there is no air to breathe, we will simply have to make it.”
Now, as I understand it, Pearce isn’t playing Weyland in the film, but another character named “Stannison.” Based on the content of Weyland’s speech and his assertion that these humanoid robotic systems would look “exactly like us,” it might be a safe bet to think that we’ll see Pearce play an android who is designed from the template of Weyland himself.
You should check out the official TED page, which is a lot of fun, and of course, I’m as excited as I can be at this point about “Prometheus” itself, which is right around the corner, and which should be one of the more unusual of this year’s contenders for summer blockbuster status.
“Prometheus” arrives in theaters June 8, 2012.