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Marketing Movies: An
Introduction to the
Special Issue
Steven R. Pritzker
Guest Editor
Marketing movies is a high-risk, high-reward enterprise. In a competitive, often
overcrowded market, opening on the wrong weekend or failing to motivate the
target audience means a film costing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars
and years of effortcan be dead in the water in two days. Marketing experts have
put sophisticated strategies into play including focus groups, surveys, and testing
of commercials and trailers. Also part of the marketing mix are release pat-
terns, which may range from wide release openings for big films to the more
limited and sequential release of small but well reviewed films.
Still, making and marketing movies remains much more an art than a science.
Sometimes all the right elementsbankable leads, director, and screenwriter
with great track records, a cant miss premiseend up in a disaster. On
other occasions, scripts that were rejected by virtually every studio in town end
up winning Academy Awards.
Obviously, there is something in the process that remains an elusive tanta-
lizing mystery. Thats why I was delighted when Ron Cohen invited me to edit
this special issue of Psychology & Marketing based on a symposium given at
the American Psychological Association in Boston. This seminar included papers
by creativity researchers who are intrigued with movies.
Many of you may not be familiar with the Creativity Studies research field.
This rapidly growing area of psychology examines the creative individual,
process, product, and environment (Mooney, 1963). The field is founded on the
importance of creativity as an essential core competency for all of us, as delin-
eated by many of the founders of modern psychological thought including Freud,
Jung, Rogers, Maslow, and May.
One of the objectives of creativity researchers is to provide fresh insights into
the many unconscious assumptions and personal myths surrounding the topic.
Psychology & Marketing, Vol. 26(5): 397399 (May 2009)
Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com)
2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/mar.20279
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Psychology & Marketing DOI: 10.1002/mar
This work has the potential to help filmmakers and marketing people understand
more about the subtleties of their work by helping them look with fresh eyes at
systems that may unintentionally inhibit creative success by encouraging
repetition of what has been successful in the past. In fact, my interest in creativity
research originally stemmed from my experience in watching a culture of imi-
tation and play it safe mentality in Hollywood. I was in the entertainment
industry for many years as a television writerproducer, so I was able to witness
first hand the need for executives to justify every choice to their bosses in order
to survive. However, the television industry changed dramatically when HBO
started breaking the cookie-cutter mold with shows that broke new ground, like
The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. These ongoing dramas deepened under-
standing of complex characters and widened the potential for television. Cable
shows soon followed suit while networks, for the most part, slipped further
behind, losing audiences who migrated to higher-quality choices.
The movie industry, meanwhile, remains locked in a world that consists for
the most part of genres and sequels driven by marketable commodities like
comic books. When I met professionals in the business and mentioned creativity
research, many seemed to think other people may need to learn more about cre-
ativity, but not them. Some executives assumed they were already creative
enough because they were in a business that is intrinsically creative.
However, times have changed and the enormous challenges facing all of us mean
we need to find new ways of doing things. Many more people get that being more
informed about the creative process may help them improve the quality of both their
professional and personal lives. We are finding in our work in creativity studies at
Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center in San Francisco that carefully
examining the research and thoughtfully applying it to personal choices has made
dramatic differences to students ranging from writers and artists to therapists,
teachers, coaches, consultants, and business executives.
1
The goal of this special issue of Psychology & Marketing is twofold: (1) to pro-
vide a window into an area of marketing to which relatively few people are
privy; and (2) to enlighten interested readers about the possibilities for their own
growth in marketing movies. It begins with an article by Dean Simonton that
reviews the literature involved in the area of cinematic success. In that arti-
cle, you may find some surprise predictors of successand failure.
Brooks Ferguson, a seasoned motion picture executive who is currently at
Sony, wrote the next article. She had the initiative to examine a word rarely
heard in discussions in the motion picture worldintegrity. Her status inside
the industry gave her access to industry development executives and screen-
writers. Brooks has some interesting and important reports and insights into the
way personal values can influence the quality of films.
Douglas Beckwith puts a different twist on the subject of values by examin-
ing the behavior of protagonists in 93 Academy Awardwinning films and box
office blockbusters released between 1996 and 2005. Do you think it is a slam
dunk that award-winning movie protagonists have deeper values than the heroes
and heroines in box office hits? You will just have to read this article to see if
your assumptions are correct.
Finally, Jonathan Plucker, James Kaufman, Jason Temple, and Meihua Qian
examine whether professional critics, novice Internet critics, and students share
1
As a graduate school, virtually everybody who is in our program is a working professional.
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MARKETING MOVIES: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE
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the same opinions about movies. As the critical world becomes more democra-
tized, the choices regarding the best source to consult regarding movies become
more diverse. Whose opinion do you value morea favorite newspaper or TV
critic, Rotten Tomatoes, or the recommendation of a friend? Do you mix and
match? It is vital for marketers to understand how the Internet influences the
power of critical opinion.
As somebody who loves movies, my hope is that this special issue is just the
beginning of a dialogue between creativity researchers and studio executives and
producers. In a field where so much is at stake and so little is known, any
research that expands knowledge and enhances options can hopefully yield
more effective marketing campaignsand higher-quality movies to market.
REFERENCE
Mooney, R. L. (1963). A conceptual model for integrating four approaches to the identi-
fication of creative talent. In C. W. Taylor & F. Barron (Eds.), Scientific creativity: Its
recognition and development (pp. 331340). New York: John Wiley & Sons.
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