Godzilla 2014 Update: Lack Of Marketing, Trailer, Upsetting Godzilla Fans

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godzilla2014_poster2 This Godzilla 2014 update finds restless natives among Godzilla fans, the vast majority expecting some kind of trailer or new photo to quench their considerable thirst for more information and content on the first American Godzilla movie since that disasterous 1998 version. More specifically, they want to see a Godzilla Trailer.

To date there has not been a single Godzilla Trailer released for full, public consumption, and arguably Warner Bros and Legendary Pictures are behind where they should be in the marketing of a big-budget movie like this one.

Consider that for a movie like Prometheus, the latest in Ridley Scott’s installment of Alien movies, a viral video was produced and distributed originally just after Comic Con 2011 and way before its release, and then again in early 2012, and featured Guy Pierce in the guise of a young Peter Weyland, giving a briliant Ted 2023 talk and pointing toward an exciting future – we just didn’t know exactly what that future was, and didn’t know until just before Prometheus was released in the Summer of 2012.

Or consider how Godzilla 2014 itself was trounced by the combined buzz power of Catching Fire and Spider Man 2 at Comic Con 2013. As the Godzilla Panel was talking up the movie in Hall H at 11 AM Saturday morning, this blogger was standing in line outside, and took open note that Catching Fire, and not Godzilla, was a Twitter Top Trend.

Why?

Because Lionsgate’s social media team is better than Warner Bros, and the latter is largely responsible for Godzilla’s marketing effort. Lionsgate released its trailer at Comic Con, but then allowed the media, large and small, to post it all over the place, and fans to tweet about it. The result? A Twitter Trend position that lasted through that Saturday and into Sunday.

Meanwhile, the Godzilla clip, well-received, was only seen by fans like this man:

Trouble is, what he saw was kept to within the Hall H viewers, who dutifully kept their smartphones from recording even a few seconds of the new Godzilla and his monster friends.

So, we were treated to about 75 positive tweets which died down as that Saturday progressed, and were swarmed-under by Catching Fire.

The only saving Godzilla grace, other than the panel itself, was The Godzilla Encounter, a cool Disney-style walk-through entertainment experience that was easily one of the best presentations at Comic Con – ever:

And Warner Bros has nothing to do with it, other than telling Comic Con fans to visit The Legendary Booth to get tickets for it.

Who To Blame At Warner Bros

The questions remains: who should Godzilla fans vent their anger at with respect to the poor Godzllla marketing to date? You have to start with Sue Kroll, Warner Bros. President Of Worldwide Marketing and International Distribution. Notice on her extensive bio, that Kroll mentions 2013 movies like Pacific Rim, but says nothing about Godzilla. That proves Godzilla isn’t even on Warner Bros. marketing screen right now. You’d think someone like Dennis Higgins would give her a spur in the saddle.

Dennis Higgins is VP, Domestic Publicity and the man best known as more of a gate-keeper than promoter. Higgins has it easy in that many of the projects he has worked on have known stars, so he doesn’t have the experience of using social media or modern publicity techniques to generate massive levels of buzz from scratch. That’s the kind of skill needed in today’s Catching Fire World, where other studios will pull out all of the stops to get their film product in your face.

Godzilla producers share Godzilla fans frustration with Warner Bros, and everyone has looked for someone to put a fire under the collective ass of the over-bureaucratic studio.

Maybe this is the start of a movement?

What can you do? Tweet the hell out of this blog post, that’s what you can do!

Stay tuned.

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