According to director M. Night Shyamalan, marketing played a serious role in the negative reactions to his 2004 film, The Village. A movie featuring a star-studded cast, including Joaquin Phoenix (Joker), Sigourney Weaver (Avatar), and Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network), the story revolves around a village seemingly trying to keep its people safe from monsters in the woods. While it had an interesting message, unfortunately, The Village received mixed responses after its release.
The ending of The Village drew considerable controversy after revealing that there were no monsters in the woods at all. Instead, the movie becomes a psychological horror with village elders lying about the presence of the creatures to prevent people from leaving. In an interview with Yahoo Entertainment, Shyamalan revealed that he thinks marketing ruined audience expectations for the movie. Check out his quote below:
“I’ve thought about this a ton, about my relationship to marketing, my relationship to the audiences, and how each of the movies affect each other, the brothers and sisters. There’s a sugar content metric, and there’s a savory content metric. So in the savory category, the balance of the taste of the piece, that one resonated for a long, long time, even until today, it keeps on resonating and resonating. That balance was right. In the sugar content metric, which maybe is, ‘Was it scary? Was it this?’ That’s a different metric where maybe they were like, ‘Hey, I wanted it to be just a straight genre piece.’
"If I had to say it in the broadest of terms, I changed genres on you. And that was OK when you weren’t coming with the adrenaline on opening morning of, ‘I’m coming to see the scariest thing I've ever seen’ and then feeling, ‘Wow, I saw a really great drama at the end of the day.’ … Or if you came in and saw Signs as a movie about faith [and] you weren’t coming in going, ‘The number one thing is, I want to get scared out of my seat.’ It’s what your expectations are. And I guess when marketing comes, too. So we’ve been very careful in the last five or six movies to make sure that we are selling the movie that I made.”
How Marketing Has Impacted Knock At The Cabin
As Shyamalan now views marketing as a part of his storytelling techniques, he has begun shaping marketing campaigns around the themes of his movies. While Knock at the Cabin, an adaptation of The Cabin at the End of the World, has faced controversy for leaving the author off of Knock at the Cabin's posters and trailers, the marketing has served the movie well. Every aspect of the story is hinted at and the genre and tension are properly communicated through the trailer, unlike the marketing for The Village.
How Shyamalan Twist Expectations Have Affected His Movies
Yet Shyamalan's movies are known for one thing: twist endings. Ever since the legendary twist ending of The Sixth Sense, the director has cultivated a reputation for surprising audiences with shocking narratives that change expectations, and The Village is no different. To some extent, a twist ending for Shyamalan is now the idea of not featuring twists at all.
While The Village would have benefited from audiences expecting no twist at all, it is easy to watch the movie knowing that Shyamalan has a habit that can be difficult to break. Even if marketing hadn't presented the wrong type of movie, the twist still could have turned off audiences as it is fairly easy to predict that one is coming at one point or another. While not all Shyamalan movies have twists, The Village and Knock at the Cabin both suffer from expectations for Shyamalan's twists.
Source: Yahoo Entertainment