12 Years A Slave was released in the UK on 10th January 2014. Exactly one week before, all major TV networks - BBC, ITV and Channel 4 - as well as many newspapers, ran stories about the movie. These weren't cultural pieces, however, but actual news coverage that treated the release of one of hundreds of movies this year as something monumental. And while 12 Years A Slave was a pretty great movie, it's not like every other great release gets such intense simultaneous coverage. So why were there all these stories? Was Steve McQueen's slave-drama doing anything new? Nope, we'd seen these themes explored in Roots and, when you really think about it, Django Unchained. Was it a pre-Oscar hopeful? Well, yes, but no more than the likes of American Hustle which was still in the running and didn't get fanfare on release. The real reason why there was all this coverage was because Fox, the distributor behind the film, had, for lack of a better word, made them report on it. They'd made a press release that highlighted the film's controversially uncontroversial themes and on a slow news day let the reporters do the rest. 12 Years A Slave, it doesn't really need to be said, is not a bad film. But the sort of trick played with it can be used for other films to make them feel important.
