Reader Question: What does “pre-awareness title” mean?
Open forum question via comments from Mike:
Scott,
Recently received this in a response to a query:
“My focus is on pre-awareness titles that can be a tent pole film for a major studio.”
At the risk of sounding/looking naive, what in the world does ‘…pre-awareness titles…’ mean?
Mike, with this one line, you’ve been granted direct access into the current Hwood mindset re movies: Now more than ever when a studio considers a possible property acquisition, they want a sure thing. That’s basically driven by two factors:
* Corporate overlords’ mandate for increased profitability (combination of cutting costs and increasing revenues).
* Fierce competition on all fronts, not just other movies or TV, but social networks, videogames, the Web, texting, and any other form of ‘entertainment’.
These factors are well known to producers, agents, and managers. So when you read a query response with the phrase ‘pre-awareness title,’ what they are doubtless referring to is what I’ve been calling ‘pre-branded brands.’ I’ve posted a lot about this on GITS:
Brands are the new stars
Warner Bros. + Lego = Movie
Now it’s Erector Set: 3D Movie (No Kidding)
The dominance of the “frequent moviegoer”
Meet the new action heroes: Lincoln, Da Vinci, Dickens, and Queen Victoria
Why the fixation with pre-awareness titles / pre-branded brands?
* Because consumers will already know a preexisting brand, it makes the studio’s job easier to get consumers’ attention when marketing the movie
* If preexisting title is a nostalgia brand for Gen X (e.g., Transformers) or Baby Boomers (e.g, Battleship), that widens the target audience beyond adolescent and young adult males
* Automatic merchandising tie-in to preexisting brand offers expanded revenue stream
In other words, a pre-awareness title can feel more like a sure thing than an untested original screenplay.
Now let’s consider the other part of your query response: “tent pole film.” Tent pole derives from the circus, one of the poles that supports a tent. Therefore a tent pole film is a big movie a studio relies on to provide a significant percentage of their slate’s anticipated revenue. Hwood’s current assumption is that when a big tent pole movie is successful, it results in ginormous profits, witness Avatar which has generated an astounding $2.7B in worldwide box office.
Of course, if a $100–200M tent pole movie bombs, that’s when heads roll. Which brings us back to pre-awareness titles / pre-branded brands because at the end of the day, it’s not just about green-lighting projects which can break through a noisy consumer marketplace, and not just about providing a nostalgic connection to older demo groups, and not just about built-in merchandising opportunities. It’s also about studio execs covering their ass. If Battleship: The Movie, Candyland: The Movie, or Viewmaster 3D: The Movie flops, then a studio exec can at least say, “Hey, don’t blame me! The product has huge pre-awareness!”
In the face of this current mania for pre-branded brands, what’s a screenwriter to do? Short of securing the film rights to Play Dough, Slinky, or Pet Rocks, you can continue to do what you’ve been doing: Trying your best to write a great script. Even though spec script sales are soft so far in 2010, the fact is studios are still in the market for great stories, pre-branded or not.
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