10 Reasons Huge Movies Keep Flopping

If nothing else can be blamed, there's usually one answer - poor marketing.

Marketing is, for better or worse, an extremely important part of guiding a movie to commercial success, and great marketing has helped many terrible movies print money, while awful marketing has done the opposite for genuinely great films.

2023 has certainly been no different, and outside of the organic "Barbenheimer" viral campaign, 2023 hasn't offered much in the way of particularly memorable or compelling movie marketing.

In an era where audiences need movies to stand out in order to be drawn to them, a bog-standard trailer drop just isn't going to do it.

Even Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, which leveraged itself on Tom Cruise's focal motorcycle stunt, couldn't match the marketing pep of predecessor Fallout, as well as the prevailing consensus that the motorcycle stunt was more-or-less given away for free in the trailers.

Selling sequels in increasingly long-in-the-tooth franchises is especially challenging, like Fast X, which simply looked like "just another Fast movie" in all of its trailers and promotional materials.

As such, it takes some seriously creative, clever marketing to maintain the audience's attention in this day and age.