Standout Movies Remake Of Japanese Monster Movie ‘Godzilla’ Moves Into Position As Film To Beat In ‘98

Audiences are going nuts over the show-stopping trailer for next summer’s big event picture - “Godzilla” - sending a clear signal to Hollywood that Sony Pictures’ newfangled version of the popular Japanese monster movie is the film to beat in 1998.

Nearly every year there’s at least one standout picture that resonates strongly with moviegoers, becomes part of the pop culture and generates stratospheric revenues. Last summer, it was “Men in Black.” The year before it was “Independence Day.” In years past, movies such as Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” (1993), “Terminator 2” (1991) and “Batman” (1989) somehow established themselves as blockbusters before their first projection on the silver screen or taking in dollar one at the box office.

Having a movie with that kind of cache doesn’t happen by chance. An increasingly overcrowded marketplace in which multiple films often compete for consumer dollars on the same weekend have motivated studios to push up the publicity and advertising on movies far in advance of the opening.

The public’s appetite for “Godzilla” was first whetted as far back as last summer - a year before the movie’s planned release on May 20, 1998 - when Sony’s TriStar Pictures ran a teaser trailer on the front of “Men in Black.” This underscores the recent trend in event-movie marketing of seizing a fragmented public’s attention as early as possible.

Where studios used to begin showing theatrical trailers 10 weeks before the release of a movie and launch their TV ads five or six weeks out, it’s not unusual today for trailers to run six months to a year in advance of an event movie.

The trend raises the bar on marketing costs for big, expensive movies whose success can be crucial to a studio’s annual fortunes. The typical expenditure just for the U.S. launch of an event movie easily runs in the tens of millions.

Over the life of “Godzilla,” which has a production budget of $125 million, it is estimated Sony will spend well in excess of $50 million in worldwide advertising costs. The potential franchise, from the creative team behind “Independence Day” - Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich - dovetails with a major merchandising/licensing program and more than $150 million in corporate tie-ins from promotional partners such as Taco Bell and Duracell.

“Those of us who engage in this increasingly see how you have to stimulate the level of interest and entertainment that goes far beyond the typical marketing campaign,” says Bob Levin, Sony’s worldwide marketing chief. “These are not inexpensive ideas, so you have to feel the film has enormous upside potential and marketability” that the creative elements of a particular movie “are exciting enough to motivate a big segment of the audience to go see a film sight unseen,” he added.

“You have to begin very early, because you’re trying to create such an enormity of interest and you want to make sure that audiences look forward to the next step in the process - even if it’s 12 months away,” Levin said.

Levin and other movie marketers say that when they’re lucky enough to have a “Godzilla” or “Batman” or “Independence Day” they try to position it as the movie to beat.

“It’s a combination of a really good idea and maximizing that idea in a clever way from a marketing point of view,” says Buffy Shutt, president of marketing at Universal Pictures, which released the hugely successful “Jurassic Park” and its recent sequel, “The Lost World.” She explains that marketing executives look for audiences “to find a movie early on and say, ‘This is my movie, I can’t wait to see it.”’

Shutt suggests that such movies are based on ideas that “are bigger than the advertising - they transcend the marketing - and are strong enough to support all this way-early hype.”

“The public needs to feel it’s seeing something new,” says producer Brian Grazer, whose recent box-office hits include “Liar, Liar,” “Ransom” and “The Nutty Professor.” He pointed out how the trailer for Jan De Bont’s 1996 hit “Twister,” for instance, was so effective in its execution that audiences felt “they had to see that movie,” or in the case of “Men in Black,” the characters were “so unself-consciously cool” that moviegoers wanted to be part of that.

“The filmmakers and studio landed on an idea that was an embodiment of the hip culture,” Grazer said.