Geeks may be overrated in Hollywood

By Steven Zeitchik

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - Everywhere you go these days, Hollywood is heralding the hard-core fan.

Michael Bay's producing partner, Brad Fuller, told a Comic-Con audience in San Diego last weekend that filmmakers were "terrified" about how the franchise's superfans might feel about their upcoming "Friday the 13th" reboot.

Paramount was nervous enough about geek reaction to its "Star Trek" prequel that it didn't even show footage at Comic-Con out of concern that it wasn't yet ready for discerning eyes.

Reaching the most devoted segments of entertainment consumers months or even years before a film or series debuts was once a luxury; now it's a priority. The hard-core fans are so powerful, the thinking goes, that they not only should be targeted but also allowed into the process, their voices shaping marketing campaigns and even creative directions.

But what if fan reaction bears only so much on a project's ultimate performance? And even if reaching fans can significantly move the needle, what if reaching them in the right ways is so elusive and inefficient that it's not even worth trying?

"I think some studios go to something like Comic-Con mainly because they're afraid that if they don't go, and their movies don't work, someone above them will say, 'Why didn't you go to Comic-Con?"' says one producer who's had movies with large fan campaigns.

Studios also have had a tough time figuring out what the prize is even if their campaigns are clearly laid out and completely successful.

"Our marketing strategy with fall release 'Choke' is to get all the Chuck Palahniuk fans in," says Fox Searchlight publicity chief Michelle Hooper, referring to the author of the book on which the movie is based. "The problem is there's no real way to measure how big that base is."

Marketing to the grassroots wasn't always this important. For years there were two tiers of marketing, usually arranged in a clear hierarchy. There were the traditional elements -- media, trailers, promos, teasers, sampling, reviews, television appearances and all the things studios have always done -- aimed at parts or all of the general public. Then there was the more niche art of appealing to the hard-core -- the well-placed insider reference, the early footage, the surprise guest appearance at fan gatherings. Where most marketing went broad, the second type trafficked in details; where mass-media marketing tried to stoke enthusiasm, this kind assumed it and cultivated it.

Most important, it spoke mainly to the people already inclined to like a product. (For all these common traits, it should be noted that the group referred to as the hard-core fan is hardly a monolith: The thirtysomething men that turned up for the "Office" panel last weekend were a far cry from the screaming teenage girls at the "Twilight" event.)

But a few years ago, some time after TV producers started quietly checking out catty TV blog TelevisionWithoutPity.com and some time before Comic-Con became the calendar's biggest corporate marketing destination, a funny thing happened: The second approach became primary.

On its face, this shouldn't be the case. A brand's cult following isn't a very large number, and it's also a group already inclined to like and spend money on a product, which by most marketing logic is exactly the group you should spend the fewest resources on.

The thinking, though, grew out of a crucial tastemaker argument -- the idea that the movie and television business functions as a series of concentric circles, with the tastes of a relatively small group on the inside radiating to the larger -- and more lucrative -- circles outside it.

But a few years of experience have yielded enough anecdotes and data to suggest that the nerd-herd strategy might not matter as much as the hype has suggested.

For starters, the science of these tastemakers is a soft one; there's just no simple way of knowing when and how it might work.