But as powerful as it is, hype can’t always be relied upon to secure or maintain a film’s popularity. Twilight got off to a very good start back in 2008, and continued into a good second run with New Moon in 2009. With the advent of hashtag use as we know it today, Twilight became the set of films that, like their central protagonists, just wouldn’t die. But nothing was going to save it in the end from the laughable dialogue and painfully protracted action sequences that made up the majority of content in the next three films. This might be reading a little too much into it, but let’s just take a moment here to remember that before the films were made, the collection of books on which they are based was referred to merely as the Twilight series, not as the more weary sounding Twilight saga. Slowly but surely, audiences changed their minds about Twilight. By the time the second half of Breaking Dawn was released, all but the most diehard of fans made sure to be washing their hair that night.
Man of Steel also suffered through its pre-release anticipation, having to perform the cinematic equivalent of a U-turn, with audiences everywhere watching in horror as over a year’s worth of hope and excitement was dashed to pieces on the screen in front of them. Repeatedly. For two and a half hours. There are possibly very few other examples of how embarrassing it can be when good hype goes bad. And don’t even get me started on the neck snap scene.
On the topic of negative press though, there are of course those cases where hype does the opposite of everything discussed above and encourages in popular opinion the vibe that something isn’t terribly good when actually it may have had a fair bit to offer. The most obvious recent example of this is The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Whereas official reviews of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty generally ranged from favourable to very good, it appears on Rotten Tomatoes at 50% splat. It’s not forgotten here that Rotten Tomatoes is representative of a lot of views; clearly there were many who were distinctly underwhelmed by the film that Twentieth Century Fox hoped would be thought of as ‘the new Forrest Gump’.
It is true that Walter Mitty has its faults – most of which unfortunately appear within the first fifteen minutes – but given a chance it actually unfolds into something that many audiences have found to be really quite lovely. As well as reinforcing the point made above about pre-emptive hyping only causing films to fail before they’ve even started (we can almost see the marketing department at Fox just aiming the gun directly at their own foot here), Walter Mitty also suggests that it is just as unfair to approach a film expecting it to be bad as it is expecting it to be great.
