Steven Soderbergh is a filmmaker known for taking risks with his projects. Rather than cash big checks working for the massive studios making tentpole films, Soderbergh has always been the guy who changes it up almost each time out. Sometimes that means taking brief “retirement” periods between films to focus on other media, like TV series (“The Knick”) or app hybrids (“Mosaic”). In 2017, Soderbergh came out of “retirement” to direct “Logan Lucky,” which is a sort of backwoods “Ocean’s Eleven.” And well, it didn’t do so hot.
“Logan Lucky” is the first film to be distributed by Soderbergh’s own distribution company, Fingerprint Releasing, and because he was in control of the films creation as well as its release, he took a firm grip on its marketing. His idea was to try and circumvent the usual money that’s wasted by big studios, who take a carpet bomb approach to advertising, rather than zeroing in on their target demographic. Ultimately, Soderberg’s plan didn’t work out so well for the film’s box office which wound up with $47 million worldwide.
“We spent, at my request, a hugely disproportionate amount of money in social media in the digital space as opposed to television. In retrospect, I think that was a mistake … I think the potential audience for ‘Logan Lucky’ doesn’t really hang out in that space, and probably would have been better reached through a certain kind of television. I think that audience also believes, if they don’t see a lot of TV ads for the movie, the movie is not real,” said Soderbergh in an interview with Recode.
So, while Soderbergh isn’t going to blame the quirky film on not reaching a mass audience, he seems to think that it was down to the marketing. If you want to go back to August, when the film was released, it does stand to reason that there was more of an emphasis on digital marketing versus traditional. Does more money spent on TV spots equal more box office? With a film like “Logan Lucky,” who knows?
For those who aren’t big film aficionados, a movie where heartthrobs Channing Tatum and Adam Driver doing their best redneck impressions, and Daniel Craig doing whatever he was doing in the film, maybe means that “Logan Lucky” was never destined to be a box office darling. Or perhaps, as Soderbergh hypothesizes, Joe Public doesn’t think a film exists unless he sees it advertised during “The Big Bang Theory.”
Steven Soderbergn demonstrated by making the film the same problem he and Hollywood have in general, which is either tone deafness or unwillingness to listen. After a year in which an election was held hostage by the plight of coal miners begging to be taken seriously, he makes a comedy mocking them and their financial plight! It was one of the poorest decisions of his career and the likely audience for the move didn’t care a lot for hearing coastal critics casually using the word “hillbilly” as if it were not only a pejorative, but one to which they felt entitled to use. There was no marketing that could have saved a film that wasn’t going to attract the coffee house crowd while it alienated the very target market by targeting them with degradation and insults. Newsflash to Hollywood, add rural people to the list that includes people of color, women, and LGBT among others that you have no grasp on portraying.
Have we seen the same film? Insults? Where?
@Leyla
I think you’ve just made his point more resoundingly than he could have.
Please spare me the self pity! Audiences are more than just a category of people! There was a problem with marketing, not with the film itself.
I don’t fully agree with David but he does have a point that we forget Trump was elected by real people and those real people have an feelings, opinions, and intellectual capabilities. Instead of acting like Trump is the end of times (which he may be) maybe we should question why he was chosen to be our president. Obtaining the truth in the divide of the people’s minds and hearts in our nation is way more scary than a single moran who is our elected president.
Thanks for demonstrating that the tone deafness is selective, not incidental. Who of us said we’re coal miners? These people are going through an impossible financial struggle. They don’t deserve to be portrayed as stupid and barely functional.
Maybe if they would have been upfront about who actually wrote the film, people wouldn’t have boycotted it. With the suspicion that Soderbergh himself wrote the film adopting a female pen-name (i.e. white male writer pretending to be a “first-time” female writer to gain publicity and create “buzz”), this pissed a lot of people off who care about inclusivity and diversity in Hollywood. That was a much bigger mistake than spending most of your ad money on social media.