Playing to the core
Brian Lowry cautions against taking Comic-Con buzz too seriously:
Surrounded by ardent fans, it’s easy to get sucked into Comic-Con’s vortex of enthusiasm, forgetting that even with 120,000 people descending on the convention center, that’s still a very, very self-selected group.
The same thing happens at Sundance: films that get a rapturous response in Park City often underwhelm at lower altitudes. Everything plays better to a hungry crowd, particularly one that has trekked a long way just to see what you’ve got.
But that’s not a reason to avoid either festival. If you can’t play to the base, you’re unlikely to push beyond it, either. A movie like Iron Man wants its geek bona fides before pushing further towards the mainstream. Where it gets trickier is a show like Pushing Daisies. Winning a small, ardent fan base can be self-limiting, particularly if it sets you off as a niche program out of the gate.
None of my projects are directly featured this year, though Jordan Mechner will be on a panel about his Prince of Persia graphic novel — a prequel to the movie — and Tim Burton will inevitably get questions about our next two movies.
Articles
July 15th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Comic-Con is indeed a great place to build buzz for a relevant film or TV property, particularly anything having to do with superheroes, sci-fi or fantasy. I think the avoiding being tagged as niche out of the gate involves having a good overall marketing approach (i.e. not limiting it to that small base by not restricting the campaign to niche events, even early on).
But Comic-Con is also about comics, which provide not only excellent source material for writing adapted screenplays, but also opportunities for writers. Getting hired on as a staffer at Marvel or DC is no easier than becoming a Hollywood screenwriter, but it’s cheaper and easier to make an independent comic than a feature film. As a writer, all you need to do is make friends with a lot of illustrators until you find one that’s interested in collaborating on a project with you.
And, for those who post in the comments here lamenting the decline of independent media: there are lots of great independent comics available for Comic-Con attendees to support, and therefore help build the resurgence of independent media.
July 15th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
May I just take this moment to voice my enthusiasm as a very ardent member of the niche fanbase that makes up the devoted watchers of “Pushing Daisies?”
The coverage about Comic-Con that’s driving me batty is the fanboys vs. Twilight tweens. Has anyone ever considered a girl might go to Comic-Con without worshiping sparkly vampires?
July 15th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
AVATAR
July 16th, 2009 at 4:52 am
What I found interesting about Comic-Con the last time I went (in 2006) is that if you go just for the comic book stuff and not the movie/TV stuff, it’s not the crowded zoo that Comic-Con is normally perceived as being. Every panel featuring a comic writer I wanted to see was very civilized: I just walked in and easily found a seat. It’s when you want to go to the IRON MAN 2 panel that you have to wait on line for 2 hours. (When I went the biggie was SNAKES ON A PLANE; I knew people carving out huge sections of their day just to wait on line for that panel.)
It’s also fascinating to see how many levels of Comic-Con there were. When I was there, I had to find a quiet place to make a business call, so I was just wandering around the Convention Center, and I found what must have been the live-action-role-playing section: lots of people in armor having sword-fighting tournaments in one of the back areas of the center. I’m sure some people go to Comic-Con just for that.
July 16th, 2009 at 6:01 am
Yeah, Comic-Con is more insular than most people think. I’ve gone twice now for a job I had, and I had to explain to my friends what it was. And my friends are Star Wars and Lord of the Rings fans who used to play Magic: The Gathering, so conventional wisdom would suggest that they’re the type who would know.
July 16th, 2009 at 8:42 am
So this is waaay off topic but I’ve gotta ask.
I use netnewswire (on mac) to read the RSS feeds and I have not gotten an update since July 10th. Is it just me or are the feeds broken?
Again, sorry for the off-topic comment.
July 16th, 2009 at 8:56 am
@ Jonathan – I use NetNewsWire on OSX as well and it’s been updating fine. This post hasn’t come through yet, but ‘Now that’s a gun fight’ did. DId you ‘refresh all’? Perhaps the program got sleepy and decided to daydream rather than update.
July 16th, 2009 at 9:34 am
Watchmen is a prime example of a movie that plays very well for a Comi-Con crowd but for regular people they’re just left thinking wtf…
July 16th, 2009 at 10:43 am
Playing the role of a fan-geek, I would be interested in learning from Tim Burton the status of the “Dark Shadows” movie. That movie project has so much potential on so many levels. Interesting enough, Warner Bros. made no mention of said movie project when it discussed last week in Variety its tentpole movies through 2012. In addition, the only WB potential tentpoles mentioned were “Jonny Quest” and New Line’s video adaptation of “Gears of War”. I would like to believe Warner Bros. is very high on the “Dark Shadows” movie but its silence to date is deafening.
July 16th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
But in the Internet age, there’s always a good chance that “a small, ardent [niche] fan base” can help to virally spread the word on something that may not have normally popularized beyond the niche. Too bad we can’t measure how much the buzz on that Iron Man flying clip might have helped to swell its opening weekend numbers (con attendees blogged about it, then non-attendees checked it out on YouTube, they tell two friends, etc etc etc).
Or something like the Dr. Horrible episodes — those seem incredibly niche-y, but were so well-loved and well-sung by a few early adopters that pretty soon almost everyone had seen them (or you felt left out if you didn’t, which made you download them even if you didn’t originally care).
July 16th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
“con” = convention “biz” (as in showbiz) = business
business convention = business convention = boring
Hence forth,
Princess Leia bikini contest for those without real purpose in the biz-con. As well, the porn industry likely includes people who are there to get-off on counting the money more than -or in place of- how that money is made.
July 17th, 2009 at 8:51 am
John – Have you read Crossing the Chasm: marketing and selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers – Geoffrey Moore?
I feel like the technology adoption curve applies to much of life and business, including film and television. The geeks are the innovators/early adopters and the gap between them and the “early majority” is an important one.
It’s a bit of a clunky read, but short, and filled with great ideas.
July 18th, 2009 at 9:01 am
The bigger the con gets the more I appreciate Artists’ Alley.
July 19th, 2009 at 9:39 am
It does look like something is wrong with the RSS feed for articles. Right now, http://johnaugust.com/feed is returning the HTML for the front page, not an actual RSS feed. http://feeds.feedburner.com/johnaugust is doing the same thing.
July 19th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Jim –
Feed is working fine for me, including deleting and re-adding it. What setup are you using?
Those URLs actually do send you back to the home page; I think that’s what FeedBurner does by default.
July 19th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
From what I have heard Comic-Con is a great place to engage the sci-fi core fans (for television anyway). There is nothing better than getting the most involved people in a demographic excited about something so they can hit the on-line forms and write about it on their blogs. Word of mouth is the strongest marketing you can get.
July 19th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
I use Google Reader and haven’t received any updates since the 10th. Deleting and re-adding doesn’t populate any entries.
July 20th, 2009 at 10:06 am
Feed isn’t working for me on the iPhone either. I had the FeedBurner URL bookmarked; now I changed it to the johnaugust.com/feed address, but I get an error message either way.
July 20th, 2009 at 10:16 am
John,
I’ve been having feed-wonky experiences, since last weekend.
I got the update (using Feedly) to the “Scene challenge ahead” post, then nothing. Today, I got updates for “Now that’s a gunfight”, “June figures for The Variant”, and “Playing to the core”.
I’d been checking your site anyway, so I was aware that Feedly wasn’t getting your updates. Oddly, even refreshing the feed did nothing. Those posts didn’t exist (as far as Feedly was concerned), until today.
Since someone else had an RSS problem, I figured I should let you know.
July 20th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Feeds are again working. Thanks John!
July 20th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Man, I love this website. Better than any book on screenwriting I’ve ever read (okay, half-read, I tend to put them down).
As far as this point, I think it would be kinda tough to avoid falling into the “Pushing Daisies trap” mentioned above. I think there is probably a lot outside the writer’s control in that regard. It’s hard to tell, from the inside, if the premise, concept or direction of a piece of work is even capable of expanding outside the niche audience without becoming something that it really is not. It’s hard to tell if what you have is a “Firefly” which an extremely devoted small audience or a “Harry Potter” that begins small and suddenly explodes.
I’m not sure if there is anything a creative team or author might do other than acknowledge they aren’t reaching the mainstream mass audience, but imagine a lot of the successful stories really are more about timing and circumstances rather than anything the writer did in response to the audience he captured.
Someone mentioned Watchmen above, and they’re right, Watchmen is a great example of the big fish in a little pond effect of fandom today, but at the same time, taking into account the deplorable Alan Moore adaptations LXG, From Hell and (in my opinion) V for Vendetta, it may simply be that the material just is not going to work for the wider audience.
July 20th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
I’ll chime in, again, to say that Feedly updated with your new post. So whatever was happening, last week, seems to be corrected.