10 Recent Movies Ruined By Their Marketing
3. Origin
Ava DuVernay's new drama Origin was certainly one hell of a tough movie to market, enough that distributor Neon basically decided to play coy with the film's real subject matter in its trailers.
In reality, Origin is based on the life of author Isabel Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and the thesis of her 2020 novel Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which posits that the oppression of Black people in the United States is motivated less by racism than caste.
Granted, it's a tricky, heady concept to sell to audiences, but even so, the trailers largely elided the film's intellectual thrust in favour of selling it as a Grief Movie in which Wilkerson suffers through the sudden death of her husband (Jon Bernthal), while invoking a ton of confusing, out-of-context imagery relating to the film's real focus.
Given that Origin was never going to be a breakout box office hit, why even bother misleading audiences about what it really is? It would've been smarter to focus on appealing to the arthouse/cineaste crowd by genuinely reflecting the movie's content.
It's ultimately little surprise that Origin didn't even gross $5 million worldwide against a $38 million budget, an outcome which prompted DuVernay to not-so-subtly criticise Neon for their bungled promotion of a film widely expected to receive Oscar nominations - which, it didn't.