'Monsters vs. Aliens' Super Bowl Gamble

Tuesday

06Jan2009

'Monsters vs. Aliens' Super Bowl Gamble

Tuesday, January 6, 2009 at 7:34AM

Over the weekend, it was announced that Monsters vs. Aliens would run the first-ever 3-D Super Bowl commercial. Of course, to watch it, you need to wear the glasses or it'll just be blurry. You might imagine that's costing DreamWorks a pretty penny, and you'd be right.

Jeffrey Katzenberg told Variety that the entire ad campain, including the 150 million pairs of glasses (go environment!) that will be given away at nearly 30,000 retail outlets, will cost his company "tens of millions of dollars," adding that it's "perhaps the biggest media-advertising event in history."

However, biggest doesn't always mean best. In fact, it doesn't occur frequently enough to even be the rule. And because I'm not sure the tens of millions in Super Bowl marketing will mean tens of millions in receipts for a film that's coming out two months later, you have to wonder instead why DreamWorks isn't saving money and hitting another sizable audience by advertising in the Academy Awards. Perhaps that's the next step.

Commercials in this year's Super Bowl will cost $3 million per 30-second increment. In this case, DreamWorks has purchased a 90-second ad, so there's one of those tens of millions Katzenberg was talking about.

The Super Bowl is Sunday, February 1st, and Monsters vs. Aliens will be in theaters on March 27th.

Colin Boyd |

Permalink | in

3D,

Animation,

Commercials,

DreamWorks,

Monsters vs. Aliens |

Print Article |

Email Article |

Reader Comments

There are no comments for this journal entry. To create a new comment, use the form below.

Post a New Comment

Enter your information below to add a new comment.

My response is on my own website »

Author:

Author Email (optional):

Author URL (optional):

Post:

↓ | ↑

Some HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>