How important is film marketing in attracting audiences?

Film marketing is a very important aspect of attracting audiences to films. Aside from actors, many people find movies through various different marketing campaigns created by the production companies. The success or failure of the marketing campaigns of films will have a large influence on the success of the film overall, impacting the box office success of the film. These marketing campaigns include things such as trailers, posters, contests and many other ways to reach out to potential viewers before releasing the movie. 
The trailer(s) of a film is vital for focusing the intended audience’s initial attention towards the film. Trailers use various enigma codes embedded within the video clips to grasp the attention towards certain aspects of the film, yet giving away small details of the film to draw them in even more. As there are many other trailers, each one uses various different designs in order to seem unique, selling the film to audiences before they have even seen the movie itself. 
Media advertising is another way by which companies market their films as it reaches wider audiences across more platforms, whether it be advertising the movie posters on billboards or sharing interviews on social media. In the modern day, marketing films using the internet is a widely used strategy; the marketing campaign for the third movie in the Taken franchise, Taken 3 used the internet to market the film. To market this film, 20th Century Fox created a YouTube video of the star actor Liam Neeson in character asking viewers to follow a link which then takes you to the movies LinkedIn page where they could enter a competition by following the page. This strategy is successful in marketing the film as it uses a variety of popular platforms to promote the movie, as well as giving something to the fans. 
The US Blockbuster Inside Out also used media advertising to attract audiences in many effective ways. Prior to releasing the movie, the production companies teamed up with companies such as Sky TV and Animal Planet, releasing advertisements promoting the movie as well as showing clips that are not a part of the movie. These advertisements were shown on many platforms, from advertising on the TV to on pages of the internet- attracting a wider audience to watch the film. Another way in which this movie was marketed was through real-time weather reports. To help market the film, characters from the movie were featured in weather advertisements in Singapore, using the different emotions to portray the weather. 
However, some strategies to promote films are not as important as others due to the negative outcomes of them, such as word of mouth often creates a bad stigma for a movie. One example of this is from the movie Taken 3 as word of mouth created a bad stigma for the movie- with many reviews openly stating that the film had lost its originality. Many fans of the previous two movies speculated the outcome of the third, asking whether or not the same ‘family member gets taken, main character rescues them’ plotline would appear in the third movie. With these questions and reviews, this movie was not as successful as it could have been due to many fans being put off of the third movie. This can also be found from Item 1, showing how word of mouth affected the film in negative ways. 
In conclusion, film marketing is very important in attracting audiences as it gives them an idea as to what to expect from the movie, as well as keeping them intrigued as to how good the movie will be overall.