In the fictional world of 2012, as depicted in the upcoming blockbuster I Am Legend, starring Will Smith.
I've been waiting for this flick to arrive for a while, and I'm glad to see it getting the same rollout as most any Big Willie blockbuster. HT to ZenKimchi for letting me know about the international marketing campaign, which uses specialized posters depicting post-apocolyptic landscapes of locales around the world very effectively to raise interest.
The last Will Smith film to depict the destruction of major cultural object was Independence Day, but we've come a long way since 1996. It's a global film market (for example, Japan is the world's #2 largest movie market outside of the US, which made a huge difference in how the film Pearl Harbor became pap), and marketing a film depicting a global event with the local effects of it seems like a brilliant move.
[A poster I saw in front of the Shinchon Artreon.]
[The American version of the same poster.]
Now, you get the feeling that everyone's more a part of the story. [HT to Movie Poster Addict for the other American international posters here.]
One thing that is true for me, as an American watching American action/disaster films is that the emotional ante has always been based on the fictional desctruction of sacred objects that American holds dear, e.g. the White House, Empire State Building, etc. In Independence Day, watching the aliens blow the Capitol Building apart like a matchstick house was "thrill" in the true sense of the term, in that this was unimaginable at the same time it was so realistically depicted on the screen.
[Taipei.]
Were I not American, I would find the scene shocking, since these buildings are symbols for the world as well, since they are so familiar, like watching the Eiffel Tower buy it in Deep Impact. You just go "wow."
[Paris.]
But I also like the fact that there are buildings, in the local versions, that are obviously significant, but as an average American, I wouldn't know much about. Hence, my American friends might scratch their heads at the Taiwanese poster, or the Korean one. And they might just end up going online and finding more about the campaign and the banners. Very cool.
[Tokyo.]
But Americans have always enjoyed a home-field advantage when it comes to the thrill of aliens blowing "our" stuff up and getting pissed about it such that you really, really want to see them buy it in a bad way in the end. The White House is indeed a symbol and "ours" when it comes to aliens invading, but for Americans, it is obviously more specificially "ours" than it is for other people.
[Sydney.]
That's why I like the way the marketers up the ante for the international audience by making it "hit home" in the marketing campaign, forcing Koreans, say, to localize the mayhem by looking at the 63 Building in ruins with the signs of failed attempts at controlling the disease. Now, a Korean person can more vividly imagine how that might go down, where they might flee, which highway one might take to beat the masses trying to escape, where a safe haven might be, etc.
Thanks again to Movie Poster Addict, where you can see even more banners than the ones I've managed to bogart and put up here.
