So, as huge comic book adaptations to the big screen do, The Avengers is generating a lot of excitement and will kick off the summer movie season come May 4 (except apparently everywhere else in the world, that gets to see it early). Marvel and Walt Disney Pictures are doing something pretty cool with The Avengers leading into the release: using WeVideo, fans can go to YouTube and cut their own trailers with music from the movie. So far, a little over a hundred of these have been made. It’s a unique way to engage an audience and build excitement for a major film.
Marvel’s The Avengers Remix On YouTube
Here’s the lovely Cobie Smulders, who plays Maria Hill in the film, introducing us to the Avengers Remix:
This is sort of your chance to become a trailer editor, and cutting trailers is ridiculously fun. Here’s one of the many fan-created trailers, using Soundgarden’s “Live to Rise”:
I love this idea. This puts an active participation of the movie into the fans’ hands. If you’re a big fan of a movie like The Avengers, you’re just counting the days until the midnight screening. But this puts an activity into your hands, and Marvel is supplying a whole bunch of money images for you to cut together and generate excitement.
This is a large-scale call-to-action, with creativity in mind. This is a really smart move, even if the movie was already destined to make hordes of cash anyway. Building extra buzz and making people aware, “This movie is imminent” can never be a bad thing.
Now, if I had one thing I would have added to this, is to make it a contest of some sort. As it is, you have a bunch of people making videos and they pat themselves on the back for cutting a trailer, but there’s not extra incentive for others to watch every video that’s on the page. It would have been nice to put this to a vote, and the winner gets to go to a premiere or gets a bunch of swag or something.
Still, this is a good idea and you should check it out.
