Fox's Sella offers 'Knight and Day' mea culpa (TBP)

By Nancy Tartaglione

In Hollywood, when a movie fails to open, the blame game begins in earnest. So writes Patrick Goldstein in The Los Angeles Times. On Monday, following the rocky opening for the Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz-starrer "Knight and Day," which barely topped $20 million for the three-day weekend, Tony Sella, Fox's co-president of marketing, took full responsibility for the film's poor showing. He was especially vocal, and unusually candid, writes Goldstein, when it came to the issue of the Cruise Factor.

"Blame me, don't blame Tom Cruise," he told Goldstein. "We did lots of focus groups for this film, and no one ever said there was a star problem. Never. Tom Cruise was not the issue. I take full responsibility. And if the movie ends up going to $100 million, I want full responsibility too."

Indeed, many in the media thought the problem started with Cruise. But Sella's critics say that audiences were confused by the studio's initial trailer for the film, which ran on the front of "Avatar."

Audience interest tracking for the film became available several weeks ago at very low numbers - and despite efforts by Fox to reconfigure the film's marketing message - the numbers never recovered.

Goldstein also says that those close to the film contend the movie's title was off-putting to younger moviegoers. They were also surprised to see Fox running posters and outdoor advertising that didn't have any images of Cruise and Diaz.

Sella told Goldstein that the silhouette-style representations of the film's stars weren't meant to hide the actors from view: "I was doing an homage to Saul Bass. It was a way for us to signal that this was a different, adult kind of movie. The whole campaign was designed to evoke a film like 'North by Northwest.' It wasn't in any way us trying to hide anyone, simply to make the film look unique, so you didn't just look at the billboards as if they were designed to say, 'The Two Stars Go Here.' "

Sella acknowledged that the film's initial trailer didn't get its message across properly. But, he told Goldstein, Fox wasn't asleep at the switch when the lousy tracking numbers began showing up. "We knew there was an audience disconnect, and we reacted and tried to adjust the spots accordingly…You didn't have to be a rocket scientist to know that when you got your trailer out in front of the biggest movie of all time and you still didn't have the tracking numbers you should have, it wasn't an awareness problem. It was a problem with our message.

"The minute the tracking came out, we went into Def Con 5, because the tracking never lies - if the numbers aren't there, you know you need to do something. We reacted almost daily in a way to make the campaign better, with different ideas and different spots. Whether we reacted effectively or not is another question, but we did our best, because we always believed in the movie."

Once the audience registered its confusion with his campaign Sella told Goldstein he found himself simplifying the message, which created a new set of problems. "Once we decided to change the message to be as literal as we could be - to help moviegoers understand the film - then people started to say, 'Oh, I've seen that movie before. It's 'Mr and Mrs Smith' or it's 'True Lies.' And that was exactly what we'd tried not to do, to make the movie feel like something you'd seen before."

Although an argument can certainly be made that summertime rarely sees adult moviegoers drive the box office, Sella told Goldstein, "If you're over 40, this movie was a rock star - the whole concept, the Nick and Nora of it all. It's a grown up film. That was the whole theory behind selling the film, that it was a cool, adult movie, hence the poster and the graphics behind it. We wouldn't have called it 'Knight and Day' if we weren't going for an adult audience. I guess that if I'm guilty of anything, it's that I always believed an adult movie could work, even in the summer."

*Personally, I'll note that I was looking forward to seeing this film (which is not yet out in the major European territories where I'm based), but I've just arrived in the Hamptons for vacation and looking over what's playing at my local cinemas, I'd have to drive quite a ways to see it. Then again, I'm 41...