The well known Tony Award winning Broadway Musical Jersey Boys was adapted to a screenplay in the beginning of this year. Directed by Clint Eastwood and adapted by the same writers responsible for the Broadway version, the movie had high expectations to make the same impact as the musical has made. " By casting the original Broadway and tour actors, Eastwood preserved the musical and presented it as itself... not with the gimmicks and glamour that Hollywood often flaunts, but rather the beauty and rawness of the Theatre".
Broadway fans may agree that the casting of the Broadway actors made the movie more raw and channeled the characters better; but in a marketing stand point that was the last thing the film should have done. With incorporating the cast with only these type of actors, it limited the audience demographic and made it difficult to publicize. With no big actors that could now tweet and use other social media accounts to tell their followers to get excited for the movie, this movie was mainly reached out to Theatre fans. The big marketing was left to the production company, Warner Bros. Unfortunately, Warner Bros. did not make big efforts to launch a big platform for the film. " Yet for some strange reason, there've been few TV trailers, hardly any talk show appearances, and generally, a complete lack of efforts to make the public aware that the movie exists".
The sad thing is that this movie could have been extremely successful. As the thirteenth longest-running show on Broadway, there could have been so many things done differently. It is truly a production responsibility ( casting-wise and marketing-wise ).
Besides the bad publicity which caused the movie a lot of its income, the 134 minute production did earn $47,034,272 in the U.S. If it could be redone, it would be probable that a lot of the choices that Clint Eastwood as a director and these Broadway writers and their whole entire team would be different to save their movie.
I really loved how you analyzed the possibility of success that this movie could've had. They definitely should have promoted the film more, because this movie adaptation could have appealed to a large demographic and could've been quite successful, as you mentioned.
ReplyDelete