10 Crazy Tricks Directors Tried To Pull On Audiences

Released at the tail end of last year to rave reviews, Bi Gan’s uncompromisingly art house movie Long Day’s Journey Into Night is not an easy watch. Well over two hours long, one hour of which is taken up with an audacious, patience-testing single-take dream sequence, the film was made for movie and art buffs by movie and art buffs.

So how on earth did it manage to debut with a haul of $38million in its native China, beating box office hit Venom into second place?

By trickery, it turns out: Gan marketed his movie as a date movie. Released on New Year’s Eve, the idea was that the film’s star-crossed lovers would kiss at the climax at precisely midnight, allowing couple in the audience to join them in a ‘cross-year’ kiss of their own.

Much of the audience who fell for this not-altogether-ethical marketing gimmick lived outside of China’s major urban centres and were fairly easy to manipulate like this. They were not impressed: many walked out or fell asleep early on, and three-quarters of the audience left comments online slating the movie and claiming they’d been tricked and would never have spent money on the film had they known what it was really like.

Even Gan himself admitted that mainstream audiences were unlikely to enjoy his movie or to pay to see it. No, not without you tricking them into going, no.