It's never too early to start planning your weekend, or for the studios to start jockeying for your entertainment dollars, and some movie Web sites are following theatrical trailers into public view months and even years before the corresponding films' planned release. TriStar's Godzilla.com is already trying to whip up a frenzy for next summer's reptilian event movie, and sites for April's Lost in Space and 1999's Star Wars prequel have been online for many weeks.
"Last Fourth of July we kind of owned the summer," says Godzilla producer Dean Devlin, who, with director Roland Emmerich, abducted America's multiplexes with last year's Independence Day. The early Godzilla trailer, and its accompanying Web site, he says, were released "to remind people" about his team in the year between movies.
The site itself, launched last week, is less an attempt to plug the film than to "make the ultimate Godzilla Web site" for longtime fans of the 40-year-old lizard. One of the site's touted early features will be a searchable database of Godzilla lore. Explicit Web promotion for the new movie won't start until next year.
Indeed, the one thing the films have in common is that they each represent an existing franchise, with pre-existing fans both on the Web and off. As Lucasfilm interactive director Marc Hedlund says of the first Star Wars prequel, "It's not your typical summer blockbuster, it's something that has a lot of resonance for a long time."
The Lost in Space project has such an established base of Web fans, in fact, that New Line has been so far unable to secure the lostinspace.com URL. New Line's head of interactive marketing, Gordon Paddison, says that the company is in negotiations to secure the address, adding that a good site for such a franchise "gives the fans some way to be involved in the property." In the meantime, New Line is appropriating the "Danger, Will Robinson" robot cry for the site's URL.
For his part, Hedlund hesitates even to call the prequel pages an early posting, preferring to view them as part of the studio's Web presence for the entire series. "We see this as Star Wars fans being involved over a 20-year period, not a two-year period," he asserts.
With the perennial demand for Star Wars info, Hedlund believes there is little danger of burning out fans' enthusiasm by going up to soon. What is more important, he says, is releasing production information in a way that doesn't "spoil the magic" of the watching the film. Therefore, as far as details of the story and other tidbits go, there is "a lot of it we're not going to tell."
But as speculation has arisen about aspects of the production, the site has become a kind of official information clearing-house, featuring, for instance, announcements about actors still in negotiations for parts. "We want to tell people what's going on," Hedlund says. "We don't want to say it's a finished deal." But rather than issuing an official denial that Charlton Heston would be on board, for instance, the site quotes Yoda as calling him inappropriate. "We try to have fun with it," says Hedlund.
Don't look for anything so gossipy on the Godzilla site. Although the original Godzilla site briefly featured a "rumor page" to address all the conjecture surrounding the project, the production company "finally got so many rumors we couldn't keep up with it." Therefore, while production press releases will be posted immediately to the new site, no similar rumor-quelling will appear on Godzilla.com.
Besides, says Devlin, there is always the danger of showing how the magician does his tricks. "We want to debut Godzilla in the movie," he says. As such, you'll never see the entire lizard on the site or in any trailers. The most that will appear is the occasional random body-part, like the foot and tail featured in the current preview. That sequence - though planned as a standalone ad - might end up becoming a scene in the finished film.
To prevent oversaturation, the trailer will be off the Web site in a few days and out of theaters by August. Devlin says the site itself is innocuous on that count. On the Internet, he explains, fans have to seek it out, so "nothing is in your face."
Once they reach the site, though, it's worth exerting the effort to give fans something that's "not just 'here's a movie, buy a ticket,'" Devlin says. Giving enthusiasts something special on the Web is smart, he notes, especially for a sci-fi picture, where the audience demographic so closely matches that of Internet users. Devlin credits, for example, the pioneering use of Internet promotion for the unexpected success of his 1994 Stargate. "When you convince sci-fi fans you've done something cool," he asserts, "you get them in huge numbers."
