Avengers Assemble?: Disney’s Clinic On How Not to Market

Marvel movies used to be events. ‘Avengers: Endgame’ set an impossibly high bar for any film that came out after it, leaving Marvel and Disney with an all but unachievable task. The films have been a teeter-totter of good and bad. The shows haven’t had the impact that they should have, or that Marvel and Disney would have liked them to. There have been standouts like ‘Hawkeye,’ ‘Daredevil: Born Again,’ and ‘Werewolf By Night,’ but there have been shows that have not done their job as far as pushing the narrative of the universe forward. Here’s looking at you, ‘Secret Invasion.’

With ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ officially a year out, Marvel has been looking to get some of the mojo from their earlier outings. They are hoping for an event and over the summer they began the almost year and a half long hype train with a row of chairs, slowly revealing who would be in the new film. People were hooked. Social media was on fire, talking about whose name would be revealed next. Partnered with the reveal that THE Robert Downey Jr was returning to the universe as one of the biggest of big bads, hype was at a fever pitch.

So how’d they manage to mess that up so bad in a matter of a week?

The Internet Age

Simply put, the internet. Marvel was at the one-yard line, ready to hook everyone for a year-long promotional hype train, and it never left the station. The company’s plan to release a different trailer each week ahead of ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ was immediately upended by the first trailer getting leaked days before the film’s release. Making matters worse, it fell short of expectations when it was officially released. There was no substance. Another character announcement that was kind of confusing if you’ve stayed up to date with what’s happening in the universe currently.

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The real issue lies in how this particular burst of marketing is being released to the audience. Theaters have had access to the trailer for at least a week, increasing the chance that someone would leak the trailer out to the public before Thursday, when ‘Avatar’ premiered. My theater employs a lot of the students I teach. Many of them would not have considered the consequences and would have likely leaked the trailer to their friends. Disney and Marvel clearly didn’t think about that either when developing their marketing plan.

This is the reality that Disney and Marvel find themselves in now. The trailer leaked, creating a level of confusion around where the film was headed that can only be described as the cluster to end all clusters. In the past, Marvel has released the trailer online of its own accord. The decision to push this in front of ‘Avatar’ feels more like the mouse is driving the car than Marvel itself. The confusion and bad taste that this has given fans is not the level of hype you want for a movie that, for all intents and purposes, should cruise passed the billion-dollar mark.

It’s Not Not About Making Money

Of course, an internet leak isn’t a death sentence, regardless of the level of confusion caused by the leak. In fact, they could be effective marketing tools when done correctly. This, unfortunately, is not the case, nor the only hurdle that the ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ trailer has to overcome. The blatant effort to drum up ticket sales for ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ has not gone unnoticed by fans.

To see each of the promised trailers, one must go to no less than 4 showings of the same movie, potentially a fifth if rumors turn out to be true. At a time when the cost of just about everything is astronomical and rising, Disney is asking people to pay for the same movie no less than 4 times. It’s come off as greedy even by Disney standards, and kinda comes off like they don’t believe in ‘Avatar,’ but they want it to make a billion dollars so they can say that it did. The company is banking on people liking ‘Avatar’ enough to see the film four times, or at least that people would be willing to pay the ticket price solely for trailers. It’s an unnecessarily tone deaf move.

Of course, there were other projects that Marvel and Disney could have promoted that are much further along in the process. ‘Spiderman: Brand New Day’ and ‘Wonderman’ have seen very little, if any, marketing. Yes, the ‘Avengers’ films are the big events fans look forward to, but putting the brakes on this marketing until later in the year would have allowed these other projects to shine before their big days. It also wouldn’t have felt forced, and less like Disney wants fans’ money over putting out a quality product. Fans want to be rewarded for their dedication, their time, and their money.

The silence from Disney and Marvel thus far has been deafening. They seem deadset on seeing this marketing and promotional plan all the way through even as fans are loudly voicing their disdain online. The marketing campaign has been a massive self own of incredible proportions. It has eroded some of the confidence that Marvel and Disney have enjoyed for years. While the film is still a year out and things can change, there definitely needs to be some form of change in the very near future before Disney and Marvel find a way to waste years of storybuilding and fan confidence.

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