cinema HYPE

by: Joanna Grillo

Writer-director Matthew Vaughn has a new movie coming out this Friday, Kick-Ass. That’s a lot of pressure to be, well, “kick-ass” right in the title, luckily for Vaughn and Lions Gate productions it looks to be pretty awesome. The movie, though about super heroes isn’t just for nerds.

What’s interesting about the PR is that a lot of the ad’s have been shown to specific markets. This past week on E!’s The Soup they had their weekly segment "clip of the week" sponsored by Kick-ass. The soup’s audience is young, into pop-culture and generally looking for what Joel says is the next train wreck shoe to watch, so when he says something is good, its gotta be.

There have also been cross promotions with the NHL, they don’t seem like your typical “graphic novel” fans but it works-mostly. The ad was for the best saves of the year and has the movies super hero’s saving people spliced in. It makes sense and it takes what otherwise might seem like a dorky subject and makes it a little more tough and cool. Still, hockey isn’t as main stream as say baseball or basket ball so it kind of makes you wonder how this whole thing came about.

MTV is also on the Kick-Ass bandwagon, dedicating their site, splashpage.mtv.com to kick-ass for the week. The site has posts and clips all about the film. MTV news has been doing reports on the film as well as its stars. This, demographically, makes a bit more sense then the NHL promos.

There is still a common theme to these otherwise uncommon promotions though. If you keep the ads to specific groups I think it keeps the movie looking like something cool, less main stream though it clearly is. What more could a super hero wanna be want than to be cool and in-the-know.