Mark Johnson talks Prince Caspian’s Promotion Problems
May 25th, 2009 by Paul Martin | Source: L.A. TimesProducer Mark Johnson has spoken about how they were putting the promotion together for Prince Caspian and what thoughts they had for how to capture a wider audience for the film than the first had.
When Mark Johnson was producing “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” released in 2005, he and Walt Disney Pictures were careful to hew to a PG rating. ”We were always concerned that we didn’t want to make it too young, and were worried in our campaign about exposing some of the talking animals. We thought an older audience might say it’s just for little kids,” Johnson said.
He found the problem reversed for last year’s film sequel, “Prince Caspian.” ”The second was accused of being too old. What happened [is that] it was less about the Narnian creatures than human creatures,” Johnson said.
The second film grossed $420 million at the global box office, while the first raked in $745 million.
Related Posts
Tags: Mark Johnson, Narnia, Prince Caspian, Producer, Promotion, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
This entry was posted on Monday, May 25th, 2009 at 11:10 am and is filed under Prince Caspian Movie News, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Movie News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Loading ...
I totally agree that Prince Caspian was for a slightly older generating. In fact here in Australia it received a higher rateing than LWW. My mother would not allow the younger kids see PC
It also didn’t have as obvious of Christian undertones as the first film so you didn’t have the churches flocking to take their youth groups to see it. However, I still think it was the release date more than anything that hurt, PC, and thankfully that shouldn’t be a problem with the next film.
I agree with Luke about the church, I took 200 students to see the LWW. The marketing behind the PC was in short; awful. With all of the spiritual undertones of PC being taken out and the lack of quality I can see why it didn’t make as much money. The Narnia movies will always be a poor mans version of the lord of the rings which simply kills me beyond belief.
Lets face it, the reason PC did poorly was because disney got stupid. They should have cast caspian younger. They should have stayed closer to the story. They should have left out the scenes that were not in the book. And, there was almost no advertising on TV. I hope the new studio learns from this and doesn’t make the same mistake with Dawn treader.