The New York Times has a strong story on the marketing strategy behind the impending release of Live Free or Die Hard, the fourth installment in the long-running Die Hard series, starring Bruce Willis:
Tom Rothman, a co-chairman of Fox, said the studio consciously took advantage of the summertime action-movie gap in its decision to release its fourth Die Hard on June 27, five days after Universal’s Evan Almighty and a week before Transformers, from Paramount and DreamWorks. A surfeit of fantasy and computer-generated visual effects has left a hunger in the audience for real things, Mr. Rothman added. Over the next few weeks Fox will tease that perceived appetite with a marketing campaign that promotes John McClane with the words: No mask. No cape. No problem.
Of course, the studios invariably “jockey for position” with respect to release date and genre, but this campaign marks a rarer case of more directly positioning a film against its competition. Nicely done.
Disclaimer: I often do work for 20th Century Fox, but I wasn’t involved in this particular promotion.
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