Wow, I beta'd AO. Interesting the way MMOGs and advertising are doing this little tango. p.s. - you'd be surprised how many more women play MMOGs nowadays, and the average player age is higher than most people think.

[ edited by zeitgeist on 2005-09-08 18:30 ]

zeitgeist | September 08, 19:58 CET

The raison d'etre being that the movie is aimed at a young male audience

*sigh* Time to repeat my mantra: "they really don't get it, do they?" Turn off those that would have probably liked it and aim at those who will end up disappointed.

Trienco | September 08, 22:13 CET

Any target audience of Serenity is fair game. If they get extra people into the cinema, it's all good. This is very, very much a film which could fly under the radar -- and I really mean that. If they get shit loads of teenage boys into the cinema oogling over the women and explosions - with are both there and pretty - that's great.

I'd love Serenity to be targeted as intelligent Sci-fi, but the reality is that'd restrict the audience figures. Sell it to everybody, and let the word spread. It's a film which is designed to appeal to everybody in terms of plot, structure and visually.

gossi | September 08, 22:18 CET

I'm with Trienco in the "sigh" department...I'm 50 years old...my wife is 40...a couple of dear female friends are in their mid-40s...all of us will enthusiastically go and see this movie...but if we hadn't seen the DVDs or knew about the nature of Joss's work, not one of us would in a million years go to see any movie that was described as being "aimed at a young male audience." Makes it sound like "Judge Dredd" or something...and I really hope and pray I never hear "Serenity" described as a "popcorn movie."

Chris inVirginia | September 08, 22:30 CET

Just as a sidenote, and yes, this outs me as a bigger geek than ever, but I've run 'guilds' within MMOGs several times over the past six years. I just want to reiterate the surprising diversity in the playerbase. The youngest player we had in our guilds (of between thirty and ninety players) was a sixteen year old girl who was hell on wheels as a strategist, the oldest was a sixty-seven year old woman who was incredibly fun and funny. Our median age was actually above thirty (65/35 overall split male/female I would say), and a large number of folks playing were couples playing together - people from thirty or more countries after all was said and done! Anyway, enough on this geekiness for now ;)

[ edited by zeitgeist on 2005-09-08 20:33 ]

zeitgeist | September 08, 22:32 CET

In unrelated news, UIP International are about to roll out an interesting online promotional thing for the movie... I've never really seen anything like it before.

Anybody else get the idea they're trying all sorts of marketing things out here?

gossi | September 08, 22:47 CET

Yeah, I'm getting that impression. If it gets more butts in seats for the BDM, I'm all for it.

zeitgeist | September 08, 22:48 CET

This is a brand new marketing move for UIP. As such, I don't see how being in at the forefront of a big shiny new advertising push could be bad for our BDM. The more exposure the better at this point in the game.

[ edited by blutortu on 2005-09-09 01:18 ]

blutortu | September 09, 03:16 CET

Any target audience of Serenity is fair game.

Pretty much my problem. They have a rare scifi thingy that appeals to more then the usual crowd, actually rates higher with females at imdb than males and does especially well with the 25-45 crowd. But with basically ALL demographics being viable targets I don't see the point in exclusively going for the young males, especially with marketing that is likely to put other audiences off.

In this case I would expect the saving grace is that these games are played by more non-young males than they think. But the poster, even if it's nice as an artwork looks like Buffy in Space or a post apocaliptic Fakk 3. It screams corny and mindless action B-movie to a lot of people I asked, so I'm kind of worried that aiming at "young males" will lose more people from other groups than it convinces "young males" to see it.

Trienco | September 09, 11:38 CET