Pancake City

I don’t think it’s possible to know whether a movie will be good by an ad in a newspaper. But I do think it’s possible to know whether it will be bad by that ad.

Case study: Superhero Movie, a spoof on superhero movies starring Leslie Nielsen.

Sounds promising, yes? The superhero genre is a rich vein to mine, and Leslie Nielsen is a funny guy. But I fear the movie is absolutely horrible, based solely on an ad for it that I saw in The Washington Post.

The idea is that you can get an accurate sense of a movie’s quality based on the reviewer quotes in the ad. You size up factors like quality of source (Roger Ebert vs. web site), relative font size of reviewer (beware the nigh-unreadable source), and the quote itself (boilerplate vs. specific, number of puns in quote, which sometimes indicates a shill, and so on).

Based on the ad for this movie, I am going to guess its Rotten Tomato rating will be one of the lowest ever on the site, 12%.I haven’t seen an ad so desperately try to mask its lack of critical acclaim since “Evan Almighty”, the “Bruce Almighty” sequel Steve Carrell made after he saw Will Ferrell and thought, “Hey, I want to throw my career down the shitter for lots of money too!” (Step away from the light, Steve. It’s too late for Will, but there’s still hope for you.)

Let’s start with the ad’s most damning part: quote sources.  There is a hierarchy of movie review sources. The top contains well-known names (e.g Roger Ebert), major newspapers, or a major network morning show. Second tier has your respected but less popular outlets, like The Village Voice and Philadelphia Inquirer.

Well below is the third tier, disc jockeys. Be warned of a movie ad that quotes a disc jockey. These people are wired with caffeine and desperate for national exposure, even if it’s their name in a 6 pt. font on a ad for a movie so bad that its only purpose for existence is to prove that God is unable to shed tears. Marketers do their best to get an affiliate of a network so they can attribute the quote to “CBS RADIO” (Jack “The Morning Wolf” Johnson, WXCP) Sneaky marketers.

One of the great unanswered mysteries of the universe is how in the world can a movie be so bad that not even a disc jockey will attach their made-up name to it? It is here we reach the bottom of the barrel: the total whore. There are some people in the world who rave about every single movie made. All of them. They are well-known in the industry for this, and are brought out when all other options have been exhausted. I am guessing these people are willing to become total whores solely so for the thrill of seeing their name in print and being invited to screenings.

All three of the quotes are from no-name web sites. Two are from the same web site, “JewReview.net“, which isn’t even a movie web site. I don’t have the original ad any more and I can’t read the name of the second web site.

And does, “Funnier than Batman and Spider-Man combined” even make sense? Really, funnier than Batman? Funnier than that movie where the kid loses both of his parents, becomes traumatized after watching them murdered, and after a grueling period of self-exploration and training finally takes the mantle of his former fear and combats the dark, violent underworld along with his own demons as a vigilante? That Batman?

Also, not to keep harping on the same point, but while some people may have laughed at Spider-Man 3 because it was so bad, I don’t think Sony Pictures intended for it to be a comedy.

There are other factors one can look at when analyzing a movie ad, along as other information to consider (”This movie was not screened for critics”=stinker). But you can throw them all out the door when a movie ad uses quotes from no-name web sites, two from the same web site to boot.  I haven’t checked Superhero Movie’s Rotten Tomatoes score, but I’m guessing it will get one of the worst, 12%.