Shhh….Collider’s Matt Goldberg Has Kind Words for Legend of Tarzan

ERBDOM

Shhhh…… I don’t want him to hear me mentioning this for fear it may scare him away.  But Collider’s  Matt Goldberg, who famously said of the second trailer for Legend of Tarzan: “this new trailer screams “Pan of 2016? actually had some nice things to say today about the David Yates collaboration with Alexander Skarsgard and Margot Robbie:

I’m hoping that Legend of Tarzan is a bit of old-fashioned, rollicking fun. The character can be put to good use, and this is an interesting spin that takes matters away from an origin story and into a new mold where Tarzan is wrestling with his old ways versus his new, gentrified lifestyle as John Clayton III. Also, we’re not getting a Planet of the Apes movie this year, so I’ll settle for killer apes where I can find them.

Maybe that’s not a 100% turnaround from prior negativity, but just like he’ll take killer apes where he can find them, I’ll take a kind word for LOT from a former famous naysayer whenever I can get it.

Make no mistake . . . .The  Legend of Tarzan marketing campaign has a tremendous amount of heavy lifting to do if it is to even make it to “sleeper hit” level.  The deck is stacked against it in almost every way — old, nearly forgotten property, crowded summer slate, worst weekend possible in terms of competition. And WB’s strategy thus far has seemed to be very laid back, so much so that I’m pretty sure that when we get the first tracking numbers,  none of us are going to be dancing in the street.   But the good news is that — just as we’re seeing with Goldberg —   some of the initial hostility that greeted the rollout has melted away.

The most impactful single thing that has helped LOT along is a first trailer that caugh people by surprise and clearly has found some love on YouTube, where both the first and second LOT trailers are outdistancing Independence Day Resurgence — 23M to 21.5M for the first trailer, and second trailer, 7.2M to 6.6M?  And mind you —  IDR popped for a Superbowl Ad that cost more than all the LOT ad placements to date combined.   Yet still, underdog LOT is ahead in terms of trailer views on the studios’ respective home channels.  That’s something.  And LOT is WAY ahead of The BFG’s trailers — 7.6M for the first and 3.9 for the second.  And that’s with a Cannes premiere in the rearview mirror for that one.

Anyway  — trailer views tell us something, but not everything.  LOT is trailing IDR in Twitter mentions but leading The BFG, and overall social media has IDR slightly in front. But IDR, coming out a week before LOT, is being touted as a 100m opener, which means a $50m++ second weekend (the weekend it goes up against LOT and the BFG).   And no one is seriously predicting that just because LOT is whuppin’ up on IDR in the trailer views department, that it’s going to perform on the same level.  That would be an incautious leap.

But those ‘better -then-IDR’  trailer figures do say something.   They say that LOT is most assuredly NOT looking like Pan, or Heart of the Sea, or Lone Ranger, or John Carter, or any of the tank jobs that people six months back were invoking.  Check their trailer views and you’ll see what I’m talking about. LOT smokes them all by a factor of 3x to 4x.

So …. a little respect, please.

And that’s what Mr. Goldberg has given it.

Thank you, sir.

Now if WB will just throttle the promotion up a little . . . .