5 Examples Of Movie Marketing That Shamelessly Embellished What "Starring" Means
1. Italian Posters For 12 Years A Slave Celebrate White People
Naturally if you're responsible for advertising a film that features an extremely popular actor you'd want to make sure his or her face and name are prominently displayed on all advertising. That seems to be the lesson of this entire article. However, if the actor does not appear in the movie until the final third or in an extremely villainous role and it is a film about very sensitive subject matter, you probably would reconsider that usual approach.
That is, unless you are BIM Distribuzione, the Italian distributor for the American historical drama 12 Years a Slave about a free African American who is kidnapped and sold into slavery. Despite being a film that obviously focuses on characters played by black actors, BIM created two character posters to promote the film: one that features Michael Fassbender, who plays a cruel slave master, and Brad Pitt, who plays a heroic character but appears in only a few scenes late in the film. Both posters feature the actors' faces ridiculously taking up nearly the entirety of the poster and being framed in sunlight as they float above a meadow of cotton.
As for the slave characters, including actual star Chiwetel Ejiofor? He's there, but his entire body is smaller than Pitt or Fassbender's heads. It also leaves a bad taste in one's mouth considering that a film about the horrors of slavery is being promoted by images of a white actor who barely appears in the movie and the white actor who portrays the most vicious slave owner in the entire movie. The overall tone of the poster is completely wrong as well, suggesting a much happier story than one about human beings facing kidnapping, torture, and every other type of mental and physical abuse imaginable.
Summit Entertainment, the company which produced the film, agreed to pull the posters after significant outcry, calling them "unauthorized." But in order for these to get into theaters someone had to sign off on it as a good idea... including possibly Brad Pitt's people, since Pitt not only starred in the film but produced it. In other words, this wasn't the same case as a Chinese theater hilariously using a bootleg poster for Thor: The Dark World that makes it look like the film is about a romance between Thor and Loki, these were the actual posters that someone thought would effectively sell a slavery movie to Italians. The distributor ended up having to apologize and recall the posters because of public outcry that made headlines worldwide, so one could argue that it ended up being a very successful marketing campaign after all!
Know of any other examples? Share them down in the comments.