Wolverine Publicity/Film

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Wolverine Publicity in Film include:

  • The cover of the Blu-Ray three-disc Diamond Edition of Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs features the Queen in the front and center, in her hag form, with Snow White relegated to the bottom of the picture.
  • The Smurfs and the Magic Flute was originally a Johan and Peewit film, but when The Smurfs became really popular the title was changed to make it look like they were the stars, even though the film really focused much more on Johan and Peewit.
  • The American DVD cover of Infernal Affairs shows Kelly Chen posing with a gun. At no point in the movie does she have a gun, or even an action scene. The two main characters get much less space on the cover. On the other hand, this might just be a case of Sex Sells. The Chinese DVDs rightly put Andy Lau and Tony Leung up front, but since fewer Americans know who any of them are, they decided to sex things up a bit.
  • At at least one video store, in the French film section, there is a sub-section called "Films in which Audrey Tautou has less screen time than the box art would suggest." There's also a "Non-Satanic Malevolent Children" section in Horror, but that's neither here nor there.
  • "Bruceploitation" refers to the wave of Bruce Lee imitators, and Lee-style martial arts movies, that followed the superstar's death. Actors adopted stage names like Bruce Li, Bruce Lei, and Dragon Lee in an attempt to cash in on Lee Mania. Jackie Chan recalled how his early movie posters would say "the next BRUCE LEE, Jackie Chan," with Lee's name much larger than his own.
  • The undisputed king of Wolverine Publicity in the Star Wars universe has to be Darth Vader - this trope could have well been called "Vader Publicity". Even when the main focus of Lucasfilm's marketing is a series that doesn't involve Vader as a Sith Lord, such as the first two prequels or Star Wars: The Clone Wars, one can be absolutely sure to see zillions of different products featuring Vader in the current merchandising line. Often, original trilogy characters are included in the line, or the line itself becomes partly original trilogy-focused, for the sake of including Vader merchandise. One can also expect a cameo or two from the Sith Lord in some form in the media itself (such as a vision to his former self Anakin in Star Wars: Clone Wars), or at least a new character that happens to be a blatant Expy (such as Darth Malak in Knights of the Old Republic).
  • The DVD release of Mazes and Monsters has on the cover a dragon, a castle and a maze. None of these things appear in the movie. The title refers to a roleplaying game (a reference to Dungeons and Dragons) played by the characters. Furthermore, while Tom Hanks is in the movie, the picture of him on the cover is from when he was much older and well established. Furthermore, despite how much the breakdown of his character drives the plot, he was actually a supporting character and given rather low billing compared to the other cast members (the movie seems to treat Jay Jay as the main character).
  • Dazed and Confused was promoted with posters prominently featuring Milla Jovovich simply because she was, at the time, the most famous person in the cast. She only has one line in the movie, is not a focus character in the ensemble action, and only pops up a handful of times. She's also on the cover of the DVD cases (excluding the Criterion Collection edition) since those reuse one of the movie's promotional posters.
  • Deep In The Valley has Kim Kardashian on the front cover. She appears in the actual movie for all of ten seconds and her character does nothing other than let the heroes into a night club.
  • The DVD cover for Frankenstein Island features only John Carradine's name at the top, and his face is on all of the different DVD covers. In the movie he plays the ghost of Dr. Frankenstein, and his screentime is less than five minutes combined.
  • The DVD cover for Showtime's 2005 musical parody Reefer Madness features Neve Campbell, both with her picture displayed in the foreground and her name at top-center- yet her character is in two scenes in the whole movie, once for the length of a musical number and the other for literally the three seconds it took to say her line, and like John Carradine above, has less than 5 minutes total screen time.
  • In Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow, you could be forgiven for thinking that Angelina Jolie's character was the main character, being the focus of basically every commercial and having a spot on the cover. Turns out that her character gets around 10 minutes of screentime.
  • The Hungarian movie Sacra Corona featured Franco Nero on the cover. He appears in the role of Gerard Sagredo in the opening scene, where he's promptly killed. He makes a second appearance as a ghost towards the end of the film.
  • Although Steven Seagal is featured prominently in the promotional material for the film Executive Decision, his character meets an untimely death barely a quarter of the way through the movie.
  • The American DVD for The Twins Effect (retitled Vampire Effect) places Jackie Chan prominently on the cover. His appearance only amounts to a cameo.
  • The White Witch, Big Bad of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has made a cameo in both Prince Caspian when her three worshipers tries to force Caspian to ressurect her and Voyage of the Dawn Treader as a form taken by the Mist of Evil movies, despite being completely absent from the respective books.
  • Advertising for The Avengers puts the spotlight on Iron Man, whose movies became the highest grossing in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, at the time.
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