"Star Wars" and "Batman" have returned to cinemas with a vengeance, and now the producers of the latest version of "King Kong" are hoping that a new generation of summer moviegoers will want to see the giant gorilla in the digital age. Competition is fierce, where one opening weekend can either make or break a potential blockbuster, and so the marketing of big-budget films has become an art form unto itself.
Trailer production houses today compete with other houses for the right to have their trailers used to promote major films in theaters, on TV and the Internet. According to reports, the latest marketing attention-getter will be a "King Kong" trailer produced in HD that will air simultaneously on June 27 at 7:59 p.m. EDT on the various networks of NBC Universal.
As a really obvious example of "corporate synergy," the movie is produced by Universal and the 2.5-minute trailer will air on Bravo, CNBC, MSNBC, NBC, Sci Fi, Universal HD, USA Network, Telemundo and Mun2. Perhaps the symbolic precedent of the HD-related marketing strategy will stand out more than the trailer itself, since only about 4 million homes (out of 110 million) are capable of actually viewing broadcast content in HD, according to March 2005 figures from In-Stat.
