"average audience member"?

Companies advertise what they would like certain age groups to be into and present it to them, that they SHOULD be into it.

When I went to the Midnight Release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 someone was dressed up as a Jedi and had a lightsaber. That made my night.

Do the best job of creating a good movie with an interesting story, characters and effects and the audience will find you.

Which is absolutely ridiculous.

Nothing like clone mentality. I'm sure the apocalypse would happen if people...*gasp*...decided for themselves what they liked or disliked rather than being sheeple and letting other people/the media/etc. tell them what they "should" like or dislike.

Yeah but only certain items are promoted.

Or at least some more than others. The corporate machine etc!

A lot of people do! Example American Idol, Beiber etc!

Huh? They advertise what their research indicates will sell to particular groups, it has nothing to do with what the companies think those age groups SHOULD be into. Advertising is 100% about making money and appealing to your consumer.

Advertising is based on research, as is product development.

We'll agree to disagree!

Yeah, this is a great point! Star Wars on face value looks like a sci-fi series when the real fans know differently. To your average salesman, ad exec etc . . . they would target boys 5 to 99. However, over the years we have learned that SW appeals to girls and women as well because it's mythology and not sci-fi.

I think it's safe to say SW defies all generalizations and "conventional wisdom."

I would say when people refer to the average audience member they mean the majority who view these films who have little knowledge of the material beyond the films that already exist. They are not engaged in the EU nor do they build entire theories on interviews from Lucas that has a content change every few years. The term is pretty subjective though.

Basically I apply Kurt Cobain's (and other's) philosophy on corporate music vs alternative/rock, to marketing in general. Where the safe and sweet option is promoted over that with substance. The uppermost being placed into the public's conciousness, through constant advertising etc.

LOL, indeed.

It may even be content designed as retaliation to troll the geeky SW fanatics that are always trolling him ("George, you are a bastard for altering the OT!" "The PT sucks, you should have done better!" ).

When they say "average audience member," do they mean simply the moviegoer that sees movies that "look cool," but don't really care about the in-depth details of the SW story, backstory, EU and all that (Unlike us dedicated Star Wars fans)???

That's the way I interpret this. I in fact know several people that are like that-they would go and see these movies cos they look cool, or cos they like sci-fi and whatnot, but they wouldn't have a clue what the Tantive IV was, or what a Sith holocron is for...

Are Twilight fans average moviegoers? Or people who watch Transformers?

It's hard to say really, if those are average moviegoers then why did the same audience not see John Carter?

Because the marketing campaign sucked. I saw it when it came out, and it was really really fun. Shame that Disney didn't know what to do with that one.

But word of mouth would have seen attendance rise if it appealed to the same audience as see movies like Transformers or Avatar, it has many of the same ingredients.

It did not though, clearly even they thought it sucked.

Well it came out at a really bad time too. The Hunger Games was that month as well.

John Carter actually did good numbers world-wide (70 million in the US, about 280 million worldwide), and the majority of the audience liked it (61% on Rotten Tomatoes). That kind of gross, coupled with DVD/Bluray sales would have been a huge take for most movies. The problem was that it takes way more of a gross to cover the movie theatre's take and the cost of such an expensive production (thus it was still a loss).

I do think it was the marketing fail; I don't think it was a bad movie. It was not a great one though; I'd be terribly disappointed if Episode 7 wasn't better than that.

Ha! Please tell me you had a snappy come-back. The irony of it all is just too good to have let it go, lol.

John carter was a good film. They just couldn't figure out how to market it AT ALL. JCM and a face. That gets me to go see....what is that film even called? I see no movies in theaters with the letters JCM as their initials!
What does "John Carter" mean? Is this another historical film? A romance? Etc.

Best thing about John Carter was that everything the negative reviews trashed it on is what I loved about it.

Yes, sir! Disney's biggest mistake was sticking true to the book John Carter of Mars. When I heard the title John Carter it was so pedestrian it made me think of the Dr. on ER played by Noah Wiley. Disney should have renamed the main character to something more catchy like Flash Gordon and renamed the film entirely. Course it didn't help that it looked like He-man or Conan in space . . .

They should have changed the title again, I think. the book is Princess of Mars, the called it John Carter of Mars, then realized he wasn't "of mars" until the end, so called it John Carter, but kept the JCM logo on the posters.....

We will see the DVD sales. Can any movie that is in theaters opposed to already on DVD be saved during that short amount of time while it is in theaters?

This thread reeks of elitism, low self esteem & misunderstanding. Not saying any names lol, but it looks really bad.