Variety has posted an interesting article looking at the marketing and release of Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones. The film was pushed back to December from it’s original release date in March 2009, which was supposed to give Peter Jackson time to finish and improve the visual effects. It would also mean the film would be released in time for the awards season we are currently in now.

Paramount thought the film would appeal to adults, and could potentially be Oscar bait. After all, the film tells the story of a raped and murdered 14-year-old girl who watches over her family as they mourn and try to find her killer.

However, after test screenings Paramount found that adults weren’t responding to the film, then when The Lovely Bones was given a limited release in December it performed poorly. This caused Paramount to re-think how they marketed the film.

In early November, Jackson called Paramount vice chair Rob Moore to say he’d seen 20th Century Fox’s “Avatar,” and that “Avatar” was going to suck up all the oxygen at the box office once it opened Dec. 18. Jackson suggested that they not open the film nationwide on Dec. 11, but just go out in a few theaters.

How wrong they were. Instead, it was younger women and teenagers–the “Twilight” crowd–who were the most enthusiastic. Moore arranged for a test screening with this audience in Kansas City on Nov. 19. Ken Kamins, Jackson’s longtime manager and exec producer of “Lovely Bones,” was at the screening. “The results were tremendous. That night was when the campaign began to change,” he said.

If that’s when the change began, the film’s disappointing opening on Dec. 11 made it abundantly clear adults were no longer the target demo. Yet it was the film’s spiritual themes, and the father-daughter relationship, that younger females responded in particular to, Moore said. Paramount cut ads playing these up, and began airing spots on female-skewing channels, including Lifetime and Lifetime Movie Network (LMN). Studio also quickly attached a trailer of “Lovely Bones” to “New Moon.”

Paramount was able to do an about-face and completely revamp the marketing campaign and go after young femmes. The studio abandoned plans for an awards campaign, and decided to wait until after Christmas to begin advertising in earnest.

It worked. “Lovely Bones” stunned box office observers in coming in No. 3 for the four-day weekend, grossing an estimated $20.5 million from 2,563 theaters for a total cume of $21 million. Of the audience, a full 72% were female, while 40% were under the age of 20.

I haven’t seen The Lovely Bones and it’s not really on my ‘to see’ list, but I think it’s great how Paramount completely changed their marketing campaign and produced results. I doubt Peter Jackson, who’s films such as Lord of the Rings and King Kong mainly appeal to male fanboys, thought he would be making a film aimed at the Twilight crowd.

Read similar posts to How The Lovely Bones went after the Twilight audience at Filmonic

Thunder strikes a 5th time in first place for Avatar. According to BoxOfficeMojo the James Cameron sci-fi epic managed to pull a 5th consecutive first place in the US this past weekend with $41.3  million (Sunday numbers are estimates) having the smallest drop (17.9%) in the top 10. The last movie that managed five weekends in first place was M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense in August 1999. That’s more then 10 years ago according to my limited mathematical knowledge.

So far Avatar has grossed $491.7 million in the US, passing Star Wars: A New Hope ($460.9) for 3rd place on the all time chart on Saturday. Next up is The Dark Knight ($533.3) by the end of this week. After that it’s smooth sailing for this blue iceberg to sink the unsinkable ship, Titanic ($600.7).

Worldwide things are looking even better for the Na’vi (and Fox) with a total of $1.6 billion after just one month.

In second place at the US box office we have a new entry, The Book of Eli starring Denzel Washington and directed by the Hughes Brothers (From Hell) with $31.6 million, this being the closest a movie has got so far to beating Avatar. This is also the second biggest opening in Denzel’s career (American Gangster made $43.5).

In third place we have The Lovely Bones expanding from 3 to 2563 theaters for a better then expected $17 million.  After bad reviews, a mediocre limited run ($0.4) and a general lack of attention from any awards ceremony many thought this Peter Jackson directed movie will bomb, but it seems Paramount somehow managed to turn this around by marketing the movie mainly for a young female audience in the past weeks. It’s still a long way from profitability with a production budget standing at $100 million but you have to start somewhere.

Rounding up the top 5 are the Alvin and the Chipmunks 2 and Sherlock Holmes with 11.5 and 9.8 respectively. The Squeakquel now stands at $192.5 million while Sherlock is a bit slower at $180 million and still on track to just pass the $200 million mark before the end of its run.

The US Top 10 looks like this:

Read similar posts to Avatar strikes again at Filmonic

I love it when The Hollywood Reporter make these roundtable videos. Quentin Tarantino, Peter Jackson, James Cameron, Jason Reitman, Lee Daniels and Kathryn Bigelow (Cameron’s ex-wife) all sat together and had a discussion about movies and the movie business. Watch below:

Are you an insider or an outsider?

What’s the toughest scene to film?

What would you do instead of directing?

Read similar posts to Quentin Tarantino borrows some of Peter Jackson’s water at Filmonic

You would have thought The Lovely Bones, which tells the story of a raped and murdered 14-year-old girl named Susie who watches over her family as they mourn and try to find her killer, would have the ‘violence’ and ‘suffering’ boxes well and truly ticked. However, according to Reuters early test screening showed that people were not satisfied, and wanted more.

Possible spoilers:

Jackson told Reuters he was taken aback to find that in early screenings audiences “were simply not satisfied” with a scene of one character’s death. “They wanted far more violence,” Jackson said, so the “Lord of the Rings” director went back to the editing room to “basically add more violence and suffering.”

Yet, with a higher level of violence, it may have earned an “R” rating, meaning it would be seen mostly by adults. So, when shooting one death scene of a man falling to his death, Jackson chose to simply have him disappear off the edge of a cliff and not show the gruesome details of his fall. “We got a lot of people telling us that they were disappointed with this death scene, as they wanted him to see (the character) in agony and suffer a lot more,” he said. “They just weren’t satisfied.”

Jackson said he and his filmmakers were perplexed because they had already shot much of the movie. They had to go back to the editing room and use digital effects to add shots where (the character) bounces against the cliff on the way down. “We had to create a whole suffering death scene just to give people the satisfaction they needed,” he said.

So if you see The Lovely Bones next January (or February if you’re in the UK) and you witness a character bouncing off a cliff, you’ll know it’s because some people (with possible mental conditions) wanted it.

Read similar posts to Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones needed “more violence and suffering” at Filmonic

Yahoo! got themselves a new poster for Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones. The film tells the story of a young girl, Susie Salmon, who has been murdered and watches over her family – and her killer – from heaven.

The Lovely Bones will be released on January 15th in the US and January 29th in the UK. We would have already seen The Lovely Bones by now if Paramount didn’t push it back. The studio thinks the film is Oscar bait, which I think it might be. It is Peter Jackson afterall.

Here’s the trailer:

Read similar posts to New poster for The Lovely Bones at Filmonic

The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson recently spoke to Stuff.co.nz about his upcoming projects, one of which is The Lovely Bones which we would have already seen by now if Paramount didn’t push it back to December. The studio think the film, which centers on a young girl who has been murdered and watches over her family – and her killer – from heaven, is Oscar bait.

“When we showed them the cut late last year, they decided to delay the release until December to plop it into the “awards season”, which is a nice vote of confidence in the movie,” Jackson said. The delay meant he had more time to work on the final cut and spend more time on visual effects. He wished he had had the same luxury with his last film, King Kong. “I wish we had this time on King Kong, which we badly wanted to reduce by 20 minutes, but we ran out of time before figuring out how to do it,” he said.

He also spoke about The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn and The Hobbit which will both be released in December 2011. I know Jackson has a thing for December release dates (Lord of the Rings trilogy, King Kong, The Lovely Bones) but having two of his films competing against each other isn’t a good idea.

Jackson said while Steven Spielberg directed the first Tintin film in Los Angeles, he was helping “beef up” some of the chase scenes and was working on post production at Weta Digital in Wellington.

Jackson said he would start work as the director of the second Tintin film about a year from now. He and Spielberg were also still open to co-directing the third Tintin film, he said.

Jackson is an executive producer and co-writer of The Hobbit. He said shooting was scheduled to begin in March next year. Despite rumours, the two-part film, directed by Mexican film-maker Guillermo del Toro, would not be 3D.

Peter Jackson will have a busy year next year and I can imagine he will be hopping between The Hobbit and Tintin sets. We knew The Hobbit would start filming sometime next year, so it’s good to know they have a month in sight. Guillermo del Toro and the gang have around 8 months to decide who in Middle Earth will play Bilbo Baggins and the rest of the characters.

Read similar posts to Peter Jackson talks Lovely Bones, Tintin and The Hobbit at Filmonic