Wonka and Mean Girls are musicals that were launched in December 2023 and January 2024, respectively. These pictures had a huge production, Wonka being inspired by the book and movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Mean Girls by Tina Fey‘s Broadway Musical with the same name.
The choice of actors was also massive, such as the awarded Timotheé Chalamet and Broadway star Reneé Rapp.
Even though both movies were expecting a warm reception from the public, most people still did not know they were musicals, considering they were not advertised that way but…why? Why weren’t they advertised as musicals?
Nowadays, people tend to create, spread and believe stereotypes regarding musicals, especially live-action ones, such as the motion-pictures we are referring to. Even though these individuals claim that these types of movies are boring and lame, audiences keep showing up and putting them on Hollywood’s top shelf. Although, one could say that the industry is tricking the audience by concealing the fact that both movies are musicals.
It’s no accident that the movies’ marketing lacks dance and song performances, they do that to draw different types of people, including the ones that are hostile towards these kinds of pictures. The professionals responsible for this think that if they promote musicals as actual musicals, potential moviegoers would be scared away automatically.
This phenomenon has not only happened with these two movies, it is actually a pretty common strategy. The picture The Color Purple, launched in February 2024, is also a famous example of that. The marketing approach was to hide the fact that it had actors singing as a crucial part of it as well as the two previous movies we talked about.
Even though it seems that Hollywood dislikes advertising musicals as musicals, there are examples of motion-pictures that were openly promoted as one, such as Lalaland, Frozen and The Greatest Showman, which seemed to show a change of strategy. However, with the flop of one or two other musical movies, they apparently gave up that idea.
The approach that Hollywood seems to follow nowadays is bumming out some musicals’ fans. These admirers think that the fact that they are trying to sell these movies mostly to men by hiding the fact that they have people singing in them is a way of demoting this type of cinematic genre. The certainty that Hollywood has a lot of famous and lucrative musical movies just makes the legion of fans more revolted.
With that being said, we can understand that Hollywood feels this need to not advertise their musical movies as what they actually are because of society’s ideas and stereotypes about them, with the risk of people being scared away without even seeing what the picture has to offer.
So, should these movies be promoted the proper way? Or is it Hollywood smart by not doing so?
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The article above was edited by Fernanda Miki Tsukase.
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