LogFAQs > #974889440

Lil_Bit83 posted...

Well yeah. It seems strange to review a movie you haven't seen. And some genres are meant to appeal to specific groups more then others. It's like complaining that they're trying to appeal to the kindergarten set with a Bluey film and people are chiming in about how much the kiddies loved it.

This kind of reminds of years ago, when I was in NYC hanging out in Washington Square Park, and someone came up to me with a portable DVD player asking if I was willing to do a survey on movie trailers for market research. I said sure, and they showed me the trailer for the first Spongebob Squarepants movie.

I was like "Yeah, I don't think I'm the target audience for this, can I get a different trailer?", and they were like "No, it's random to avoid bias so I have to give you the one it gives me". So then I said "Okay, but you're going to get like zero useful feedback from me because I'm 27 and have absolutely no interest in Spongebob", but they replied with "I don't care, I'm getting paid minimum wage and just want to hit my quota." So I wound up filling out a feedback form with a lot of "I have no interest in this movie" and "This trailer didn't make me more interested in seeing this movie" type answers. Which probably gave the people doing the survey inaccurate assumptions about whether or not the trailer was any good. I'm sure if they'd show it to actual kids, they might have gotten a more positive response.

Which has always left me a bit dubious about Hollywood market research in general, because there's always a part of me that wonders what sort of audience they're bringing in to watch these movies in pre-release. If your focus group is completely random, you're going to get a lot of useless or even outright harmful feedback compared to if you actually tried to find people who were already interested in the subject matter.