The folks behind the Emoji movie appeared to have it all figured out. The way to avoid being damaged by a negative review on Rotten Tomatoes was to eliminate early screenings so that reviews wouldn’t go up on time to damage attendance. When reviews did go up the movie got a 6% score suggesting it was really bad and that folks probably wouldn’t be seeing it this weekend. So great, the executives managing the marketing of the movie could get a bunch of folks to pay money to see a movie they didn’t like. Good for them?
Now marketing typically doesn’t have a ton to do with the creation of the movie so they did do their jobs, but it likely is hard to feel good about ripping off a bunch of parents who just wanted to take their kids to a nice movie. If you’ve taken children to a movie it is bad enough without the movie also sucking.
If you know the movie is bad, why not send it back and make it better? (In this case it is animated so it isn’t like you must wait for weather or get new on-location permissions and voices can be re-taped at any audio studio).
So why did they release a movie they knew would suck rather than fix it?
Fear Of Bad News
One of the problems with any project is that the people running it tend to dodge bad news. They are faced with deadlines and know that if they delay the project it will get more expensive and folks will hold them accountable so indications of problems tend to be swept under the carpet rather than explored, vetted, and eliminated.
In a movie, you have a script that can be reviewed, you have storyboards that can be reviewed, you have phases in filming, or animating in this case, where the parts of the film that are supposed to be funny can be tested to see if they are funny. In addition, you have long periods in pre and post production where near finished product can be reviewed. While this is sometimes done, it doesn’t appear to be effective at stopping bad movies from making it to theaters.
Granted focus groups, if you want the project to be confidential, can be problematic but you could assemble a pool of people that work for you who only do internal reviews. You’d qualify them by testing them against existing movies to see if their responses were in line with their demographic and you’d keep them away from the creation process so you didn’t contaminate them.
Now some movies do use focus groups, the Dark Tower which is currently being widely panned by reviewers (17% on Rotten Tomatoes) is apparently one of them. But these reviews tend to take place so late in the process that the fixes that are made to improve the movie may make it worse, and may have in this case.
