A24 Biggest Box Office Hit Had One Major PR Trick That Ruins It All For Fans

Summary:

• Alex Garland ’s Civil War has been an unexpectedly immense success for everyone involved since the movie was released a couple of days ago.
• However, one marketing trick that the team has recently tried out is steaming the whole cinema community up.
• The movie’s team has seemingly come up with a promotional asset that was later on confirmed to be something that the cinema has been fighting for years.

Despite the whole controversy caused by the film’s recent step for a bigger promotion, the whole fuss seems to also work out for Civil War’s run in theaters.

Alex Garland’s Civil War never entered the list of the most anticipated films of this year, but, to everyone’s surprise, blew the entire box office up. Celebrating its status as A24's highest-grossing film ever, Civil War has become a whole new critical and commercial phenomenon ever since its release earlier in April.

While the movie ended up with no harsh criticism towards its idea, there seems to be another element which is causing a lot of fuss — and these allegations are quite serious.

Around a week ago the movie’s official account on Instagram received a lot of backlash when the team posted AI-generated promotional posters captioning them as “America the beautiful”.

The posters indeed look impressively flamboyant and diverse depicting the United States’ most notable locations shattered by the war.

However good the unreal pictures would be, some things don’t look right or just plainly out of place there.

The first poster in the post shows several soldiers in some place that looks a lot like Los Angeles for some reason pointing their guns at a giant swan that many users believe was supposed to be a paddleboat.

Another poster that presumably depicts a wreckage in Miami has a car with three doors in it.

The picture with warships navigating down Chicago captures the city’s notable Marina Towers buildings on the opposite sides of the river while in real life they’re on the same side.

Apart from Instagram, the AI-generated posters showing the scenes that actually never were a part of the film also appeared in their physical form to promote Civil War in several locations.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, a source close to the film’s crew was quick to react to the whole mess saying that the posters were indeed created by AI, but they tend to reinforce the movie’s general “what if” idea expanding the story far beyond Civil War’s actual plot.

Despite a clearly explained point, such arguments didn’t convince anyone — quite the contrary, they made the whole mess even messier. Some users even pointed to the cinema community’s negative attitude towards the whole AI idea — a problem that was completely ignored by Civil War’s marketing campaign.

Whether the movie’s PR team indeed planned to use AI as an ally or not, bad PR is still PR — and it seems like the whole buzz around the posters works for the film’s promotion even better than the posters themselves.

Civil War is still having its run in theaters.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter