Australian Odeon

 

Quick quiz – what do Avatar, Home Alone and Castaway all have in common? Absolutely nothing one might say, but they were actually all released by 20th Century Fox (I never said the answer was interesting). The Dark Knight, The Hangover and The Blind Side were all released by Warner Brothers; Transformers, Beverly Hills Cop and Ghost were all released by Paramount. With Kevin Bacon having appeared in none of those movies, making connections between them seems impossible.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After The Jazz Singer ushered in the era of sound (and made black face OK forever…it did right?) studios began to settle into their own niches. MGM made musicals, Universal made monster movies and RKO made whatever RKO made...Citizen Kane-y type stuff.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This was an era when publicizing the studio making the movie made more sense because seeing the MGM logo meant you were probably going to get a musical. Nowadays, seeing the MGM logo means you are also going to see about 2 other logos, a la the Hobbit trilogy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The only real reason to use the studio tagline is to hope that an audience's goodwill towards a particular movie might carry over to the movie being advertised. But in Hollywood, 'goodwill' translates as '$$$$$,' so all the tagline tells you is that the studio that made a profitable picture has produced another one they hope will also be profitable.

 

Insightful.

 

The stupidity of the 'studio' tagline becomes apparent when you take two films whose only connection is the studio which produced them. For instance, there were no posters or trailers for Jurassic World that mentioned it was from the same studio that brought you Fifty Shades of Grey, because linking a kids dinosaur adventure movie with middle-aged woman's sex fantasy movie would make no sense (not unlike the plot of Jurassic World).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, it just gets sad when the tagline utterly fails to achieve the intended purpose. Lookin' at you Fantastic Four reboot trying to align itself with X-Men;

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Wastell