The Principle
Studios treat the press tour as marketing, something separate from the film. Audiences don’t. For them, the interviews, the junket clips, the red-carpet remarks and the social media posts are all part of the same package. Before anybody buys a ticket, they’ve already formed an impression of the film from the people selling it.
That impression can help or hurt. A cast having fun together, visibly proud of what they made, makes people want to join in. A star who seems to hold part of the audience in contempt makes that part of the audience feel unwelcome, and people don’t pay to go where they’re not wanted.
That this keeps happening is dumb, because it’s so easy to avoid. A press tour costs a studio next to nothing compared with the film itself, and a campaign that sends a movie into theaters already wounded because somebody decided the junket was the place to pick a fight with the people buying tickets is plain sabotage.
The effect isn’t symmetrical, either. Good press brings in a few extra viewers, and a little goodwill. Press that makes people feel insulted drives them away, and they stay away for a long time.
For Writers
Audiences judge a film partly through the people promoting it. The press tour shapes expectations before anybody has seen a frame.
Writers have the same relationship with their readers. How you talk about your book, and about the people you hope will read it, becomes part of how they read it. An author who sneers at a group of readers shouldn’t be surprised when those readers go elsewhere.
Speak about your work with pride and your readers with respect. You can hold strong views and still make every reader feel welcome at the door of your book. Plenty of writers with firm opinions manage it, and their readers trust them more for it.
Captain Marvel
The clearest modern example is Captain Marvel. In June 2018, months before the film’s release, Brie Larson gave a speech at a women-in-film awards event about the lack of diversity among film critics. The line that spread everywhere was her remark that she didn’t want to hear what a forty-year-old white dude had to say about what didn’t work for him about A Wrinkle in Time.
Her underlying point, that the critics’ pool was overwhelmingly white and male, was a fair one, and she wasn’t talking about Captain Marvel at all. But that’s not how it landed. The line was clipped, shared and repeated, and a large chunk of the MCU’s core audience, which included a great many men over forty, heard it as a star telling them their opinion wasn’t wanted.
Other remarks during the promotion, framing the film mainly as an important political statement, reinforced the impression. For a lot of people who’d simply come for a superhero movie, the message seemed to be that they weren’t the audience.
It Made a Billion. So What?
Captain Marvel made more than a billion dollars worldwide, and defenders of the film point to that as proof the press tour didn’t matter. I don’t buy it. The film came out in March 2019, between Infinity War and Endgame, when half the world was desperate to know how Captain Marvel would fit into the finale.
It was required viewing for the biggest event in film history. Almost anything would have made a fortune in that slot.
The bigger test came later, when the character had to stand on her own, with no Endgame on the horizon to prop her up.
The Marvels
That test was The Marvels, in 2023, and it was a disaster. It became the lowest-grossing film in the MCU’s history, earning around two hundred million dollars worldwide on a budget that was far larger, and trade reports estimated losses well over two hundred million.
Plenty of things went wrong with The Marvels: superhero fatigue, a strike that kept the cast from promoting it, a messy production and a script that needed more work. But the goodwill that should have carried a sequel to a billion-dollar film simply wasn’t there. A lot of people had made up their minds about Captain Marvel years earlier, and nothing in 2023 changed them.
I think that’s the saddest part of the Marvels story. Whatever its problems, a sequel to a billion-dollar film should have had a cushion of goodwill under it, and the crew who spent years on the effects and the sets paid for remarks they had nothing to do with. That’s the long tail of a bad press tour. It doesn’t only hurt the film being promoted. It follows the character and the performer into everything that comes next.
Not a Political Point
Which side of politics a star is on doesn’t matter. The principle works in every direction.
Roseanne Barr’s tweet in 2018 got her hit revival canceled within hours. Mel Gibson’s recorded rants damaged his career for a decade. Olivia Wilde’s press tour for Don’t Worry Darling, dogged by widely reported tension with her cast, overshadowed the film so completely that people remember the gossip better than the movie.
What matters is whether a large part of the paying audience feels attacked, dismissed or embarrassed by the people selling them the film. Stars are entitled to their views. They’re not entitled to an audience’s money while treating that audience with contempt.
The Slap
Will Smith’s case shows how conduct outside a press tour can do the same damage. After he walked on stage and slapped Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars, his next film, the slavery drama Emancipation, had its release handled cautiously and arrived to a muted reception. Whatever its merits, many people couldn’t watch Smith without thinking of that night.
It shows that audiences don’t separate the art from the artist as neatly as critics sometimes do. For most people, the face on the poster is the film, and whatever that face did last week comes into the cinema with them.
Why Studios Miss It
Studios keep underestimating this, and the reasons are easy to see.
Publicists grew up in an age when journalists filtered interviews and far fewer people saw them. Now every remark is clipped, captioned and shared to millions within hours, stripped of context. A line that might have been a throwaway in a 1995 magazine becomes, in 2018, the only thing many people know about a film.
Studios also listen more closely to critics and industry insiders than to ordinary ticket buyers, and those groups often react very differently to the same remarks. And when a film underperforms after a rough press tour, it’s easier and more comfortable to blame the audience, calling them bigots or trolls, than to admit the campaign alienated them. That blame, of course, alienates them further, and it turns a single bad campaign into a grudge that lasts for years.
The blame is the worst of it. Calling paying customers bigots because they stayed home is a strange way to sell anything, and I can’t think of another business that would try it twice.
For Writers
Studios often blame audiences when a film underperforms after a difficult press campaign. The blame drives away even more of the audience.
When a book doesn’t find its readers, it’s tempting to decide the readers are wrong. Sometimes they are. More often, something in the book, its pitch or its promotion didn’t reach them, and blaming them guarantees they won’t come back.
Treat a disappointing response as information. Ask what the audience heard, what they expected and what, exactly, put them off. You can’t fix a problem you’ve decided belongs to somebody else. The writers who last are the ones who listen, adjust and keep the door open.
The Review War
The anger around Captain Marvel spilled onto review sites before the film was even released. Rotten Tomatoes changed its rules in February 2019, removing the ability to post audience comments before a film came out, after a flood of negative pre-release posts about the film. Most critics liked it. Many ordinary viewers, judging by the arguments that raged online, had already decided not to.
You can read that episode two ways. One is that trolls tried to sink a film led by a woman. The other is that a real, sizeable audience had been told it wasn’t welcome and was saying so, loudly and badly. Both were true at once, and studios only ever acknowledged the first.
Old Hollywood Knew
The old studio system understood this instinctively. Studios controlled their stars’ public images down to the last photograph, trained them to charm reporters and buried anything that might offend the paying public. It was manipulative and often cruel, and nobody should want it back. But it rested on a simple truth: the public bought the star as much as the film.
Modern stars have far more freedom to speak their minds, and that’s a good thing. Freedom comes with the old truth still attached. The public still buys the star, and a star who insults the public still pays for it, along with everybody who worked on the film.
The Counter-Case
The opposite is true too. Deadpool and Wolverine had among the most enjoyable press tours in years. Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman were visibly having fun, teasing each other, thanking the fans and treating the audience like friends who were in on the joke. The film became one of the biggest R-rated hits ever made, and nobody had to be told they weren’t welcome.
The cast of The Fantastic Four: First Steps also promoted their film with warmth and enthusiasm for the characters and the comics. That doesn’t make a film good, but it makes people want to give it a chance, and a chance is all a press tour can buy.
What Performers Owe
Nobody’s saying stars have to stay silent about what they believe. They can speak freely in their own interviews, on their own platforms, in their own time. What they owe a film, and the hundreds of people who made it, isn’t to use its promotion to insult the people it’s being sold to.
When a star takes a job as the face of a film, the press tour comes with it. Every crew member, every effects artist and every junior employee whose next job depends on the film’s success is relying on that star to bring people in. That’s part of the work, as much as learning the lines or turning up on set.
Craft Note
Craft Note
The Press Tour argument comes down to a simple idea: the audience experiences everything connected to a work as part of the work. A film, or a book, arrives wrapped in the words of the people who made it.
Every public word about your work is part of its first impression. Readers remember how you made them feel long before they open the first page. Before you talk publicly about your book, ask how every reader you hope to reach will hear what you’re about to say.
The Audience Is Listening
The press tour is part of the work, and I wish more studios believed it. Captain Marvel made a billion dollars riding the road to Endgame, and its sequel became the lowest-grossing film in Marvel’s history, in part because a big slice of the audience had been told, years earlier, that its opinion wasn’t wanted. I’d much rather see a campaign like Reynolds and Jackman’s, two stars having fun and treating the audience like friends, because that’s the kind of tour that makes me want to buy a ticket.
