Trump and the Chipmunks share a strategy

Rob Long

A big-time Hollywood producer once told me that the hardest part of making a picture – harder than lining up the money and assembling the cast, harder than late-night shoots and expensive weather delays – are the days just after the film is released.

The tension, he told me, is excruciating. By that time, the movie is out on its own, to rise or fall depending on the audience’s enthusiasm. The print advertisements have been designed and paid for – so, too, the billboards and posters – and the television commercials have been edited and uploaded.

There’s nothing left to do, as my producer friend put it, “but have a slow-motion panic attack until the box office numbers come in”.

It helps, of course, to have made a decent picture in the first place. But that, as moviegoers and moviemakers alike will tell you, isn’t always what brings people into the cinema.

Last week, for instance, while most of the world’s population was lining up for the new Star Wars movie, another movie did pretty well, too.

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip was released into the cinemas directly into the teeth of the $1 billion juggernaut called Star Wars – and it did pretty well, too. The kids’ picture is a continuation of the series about three chipmunks and their adventures, and it’s a pointless exercise to call the movies “good” or “bad”. They’re movies about rodents in jumpers who talk in squeaky voices. They aren’t good or bad. They just are.

And for some reason, despite the blanketing media coverage of Star Wars, the movie about chipmunks did pretty well. The marketing strategy for the movie seems to have been something along the lines of, “let’s not spend any money and see what happens”, which could only have caused the producers of the project a series of minor strokes.

Producers are always complaining about the marketing budgets of their films – marketing, advertising and promotion are the sole responsibility of the studio – but in the case of the Chipmunks film, they’d have ample reason to raise a fuss. The movie just suddenly appeared in cinemas with little or no advance word.

Advertising is expensive. The general rule in the movie business is, if you’re not willing to spend at least $25 million on advertising and promotion, you’re probably not going to have a hit.

But when the studio executives screen a movie for the first time, they have to make a complicated calculation: is the movie promising enough to gamble a big advertising budget on?

Or is it a case of throwing money away on a lacklustre picture that’s never really going to go anywhere? Note, here, that no one is asking if the film is “good” or “bad” – that, as any moviegoer will tell you, rarely seems to factor into movie studio decisions of any kind.

What they’re trying to divine is roughly what the producers are also fretting over: will anybody hear about this movie and then be inspired to drive over to the cinema, park, hand over cold cash, and sit through the thing?  The studio behind the Chipmunks project made a slightly different – and it turns out, canny – decision.