Theory 5: Poor Marketing
Finally, there's the way the movie was marketed to the public - and when it was released. Historically, September is a lousy month by any measure in the world of film; ticket sales are always at their lowest. Add to that an overall downturn in cinema attendance this year - some say by as much as a 30% dip from last year in the US - and you're looking at possibly the worst release window in a long time. Principal photography finished on Dredd almost two years ago; what followed was a lengthy post-production period that, by some accounts, marked an especially difficult phase for the film. This undoubtedly held the release back, maybe to its detriment. Unfortunate comparisons to the similarly plotted Indonesian flick The Raid would have been groundless - and it would have got in there before Nolan's final Batman instalment hit the screens, and it would have preceded the spectacle of The Avengers. Scheduling aside, there's the matter of the strangely unengaging trailer. Tantalising as it was to existing fans, it left everyone else underwhelmed - although later variants and TV spots improved on this start. And although some vaguely interesting pre-launch posters appeared, the final movie poster was horribly similar to Ben Affleck's Daredevil dud - further enhancing the films also-ran status, before it was even out of the gate. Instead of focusing on its comic book roots, maybe a campaign embracing the grindhouse vibe of the piece would have worked better, playing up the exploitation elements. An impactful poster encapsulating both the lurid comic vibe and the violence in one hit could have worked in much the same way it did for Hobo with a Shotgun, where that image brilliantly telegraphed an era that harked back to VHS. The very 80s action films that informed and inspired Dredd - Escape from New York, Assault on Precinct 13, Die Hard - all had names that said what they did, and used the confines of the scenario almost as a character in itself. Think how the tower block in Die Hard is the central image for that poster, not Bruce Willis - would Dredd have been better pitched for the concept, rather than the character? In fact, why call it Dredd at all? That surely suggested a sequel to the Stallone movie to all but devoted fans. There were token attempts at viral marketing: a graffiti teaser poster, a lifeless pastiche of the Drudge Report website (www.dreddreport.com see what they did there?) and even a booth to create your own slo-mo sequence (try searching slow mo booth on youtube). At a reputed $10-15 million additional marketing spend on Dredd, is this the best they could do? Click "next" to read the final part, "The End of Dredd - And Violent Movies?"...