10 Signs An Upcoming Film Is Going To Bomb HARD
4. "From The Producers Of..."
How a movie is marketed will tell you a lot about what the studio thinks of it, and whether they believe they've got a hit on their hands or not.
And nothing quite diminishes audience enthusiasm like marketing which relies on the oldest of advertising spiel chestnuts - "from the producers of..."
When the marketing can't even defer to a director or screenwriter but has to invoke the name of someone on the more business-y side of things, you know they're reaching with all their might to get you excited.
Most recently, horror film Antebellum aggressively touted itself as "from the producers of Get Out and Us," and though the film was admittedly released in the middle of a pandemic, it nevertheless tanked at the box office amid hostile reviews from critics.
It's nothing more than a desperate attempt to create a tacit link between a prior acclaimed movie and a new project, and rarely has any real bearing on the new release's overall quality.
At least it's slightly less meaningless than "from the studio that brought you...," which is when you really know a project is truly hopeless.