If you somehow managed to exist within the American mediascape and miss the ads for Jennifer's Body, count yourself lucky. Nearly all of them featured Megan Fox (and her title-inspiring body) in a sexy pose, as if we were about to watch a teen sex comedy where boys slaver after the unapproachable cheerleader. Tease campaigns about the movie emphasized that there would be a sexy lesbian kiss between Fox and Amanda Seyfried, the film's nerdy, point-of-view character. In short, the ad campaigns were aimed at straight young men, who are the core audience for most movies starring Megan Fox.

But the problem is that Jennifer's Body is not an ejaculatory explosion movie like Transformers 2. It is a horror movie, which means its built-in audience is already predominantly female (stats show that horror movie-goers are often over 60 percent women). Megan Fox is also not the main character; and she's not the boy hero's plucky sidekick (there are no boy heroes in this movie). Instead, she's the toothy, gory, puke-soaked object of repulsion and disgust. In short, she is the monster.

And she's a very specific kind of monster, too. She embodies one of the scariest demons who haunts girls' dreams: The popular, pretty girl who pretends to be your friend while secretly trying to steal your boyfriend, your pride, and your life. Written and directed by women, Jennifer's Body is a film made in a women's genre about women's problems. It's a movie about why women want to stab Megan Fox in the tit with scissors.

Marketing Jennifer's Body like it was another version of The Hangover or American Pie, with sexy ladies and dick jokes, meant it was doomed to fail. Women saw posters that emphasized Megan Fox as slick sex object, and thought: I hate that chick - why would I want to see a movie about her? And men who saw the movie said: What the fuck? I thought this was going to be tits and lesbian kissing, and instead it's about dysfunctional teen girl relationships? Why do I want to see Amanda Seyfried talking about her feelings for 90 minutes?

Reviews of the film seem to bear this interpretation out. Women and Hollywood's Melissa Silverstein points to a quick survey that Screen Rant did of critical responses to the film:

There were many more reviews by men (77) than women (26). The majority of these were culled from the Rotten Tomatoes site . . . Here's the breakdown: Male movie reviewers: 39% liked it, 61% disliked it; Female movie reviewers: 54% liked it, 46% disliked it.

Director Karyn Kusama told MTV.com:

I don't know if selling the film as a straight horror film and selling it primarily to boys is really going to do any of us any favors, frankly.

And indeed it didn't. Marketing attracted primarily men to the movie (including male reviewers), and a majority disliked it. Fewer women saw it, but of those who did, a majority (including myself) liked it.

I think it's clear that misguided marketing was a huge factor in what destroyed Jennifer's Body. As I said, the movie isn't Criterion Collection material, but it's a damn good genre picture. It's better than most other horror movies out there, with an original premise and a smart, fresh take on a very old monster story. If the marketing droids at Fox had just been smart enough to realize that the movie was aimed at women - not unlike most horror movies - they might have had a cult hit on their hands.

This kind of marketing reminds me of Max Barry's novel Jennifer Government, where shoe companies arrange for public shootings to promote their sneakers as authentically gangsta. Obviously smoking Salvia isn't the same thing as shooting somebody - the drug is harmless, though it does deliver brief, intense hallucinations. But there is something creepy about the way this video tries to use "real life underground culture" to promote a movie which is about drugs. The dumb part, or rather the overarchingly dumb part, is that Salvia is nothing like the drug in Reckoning Day, which you can see described in the trailer below as like super speed or something.

So basically this is viral video marketing fail for two reasons: 1. It's creepy to film people taking drugs to market a movie; and 2. The drugs they are taking are unrelated to the movie.

Still, it makes you wonder about the future of viral marketing. Vids of teen girls cutting themselves to market New Moon? Sounds so authentic!

via UTalk Marketing

Alfonso Gómez Arzola is a designer, photographer, and typographer who writes essays about media design. He's written a defense of Syfy on his blog Sub which actually makes sense, both pragmatically (the channel needs a brand it can trademark) and aesthetically (Arzola makes a good case for why the homophone soundplay of the name is delightful).

He writes, in part:

So, Sci Fi is out of the picture, how do you name this sci-fi/fantasy/horror TV channel? Well, its viewers already know it by that sound, sci-fi. The damage, so to speak, is already done. So why not capitalize on what little familiarity we already have? Why not a variation on sci-fi? Why not Syfy? We've already heard a million times over why not, but here's why yes:

1. it rejects its predecessor's uptight, serious ways; and
2. it becomes a clearly distinctive (thus, in both ways described above, totally ownable) brand name while (bonus!) preserving pronunciation.

Syfy, as both the name and the resulting brand/identity, adopts a more imaginative attitude. The conspicuous use of the Ys makes it difficult to take it too seriously and invites speculation, which is excellent because speculation embraces what should be the channel's core cultural north: What if…? And while one could argue that the point is mute on the side of oral pronunciation (ie. it sounds exactly the same, so it can still be confused with sci-fi the genre), the argument bears little importance: A staggering majority of a viewer's interaction with the brand is visual. They read and talk about it on blogs, forums, and other means of online (see: written) interaction and they view it on the channel. It's not like Syfy's main outlet for advertising is radio spots.

This is the first time I've actually pondered what makes Syfy a cool name, and I have to admit after reading the rest of Arzola's essay I'm feeling persuaded. Maybe Syfy should hire this guy to do some designs and fonts for them. He seems to understand the mood they're going for.

"Why Syfy Is a Good Idea" via Sub

Variety reported on the variations in Trek marketing for different regions:

In Mexico and Russia, for example, the pic's poster features a huge column of fire coming down from the sky near the Golden Gate Bridge. In other territories where human drama is the appeal, the character of Captain Kirk was featured front and center, flanked by the characters of Spock and Uhura.

In Japan, the romance in a film is always played up, even when it's a big tentpole like "Star Trek, since the demo known as "office ladies" is considered crucial to a film's performance. (That's why Sony's campaigns for "Spider-Man" always featured the characters of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson.)

"These women in Japan are between 20 and 40 years old, and they go to the movies by themselves, after work. That's why a movie like 'Titanic' goes bananas. These office ladies are the holy grail," one international marketing exec says.

I'm not sure that anything explains the shitty British poster, though; it's the far left on the third row of various Trek posters below.

Hollywood Spins The Globe [Variety]

According to these viral spots - being tracked by fake site The Real Effing Deal and Giant Effing Robots, amongst others - we should beware of Transformers crossing over from the cinema screen into reality. We'd tell you not to be so easily convinced... but how do you know we're not working for Megatron all along?

Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen opens in the US on June 24th.

[Via Funkadelic Advertising and Digital Spy]

I know it is wearying to see ads masquerading as editorial, and it's especially difficult for us at io9 since we've been covering the show True Blood for over a year without any incentive other than the fact that it's part of our beat. Oh, and some of us actually like the damn show, and even think the idea of a fake vampire blog is a cool ARG.

What is uncool is that the ARG is not marked as advertising, and is therefore designed to hoodwink io9 readers in two ways. One, it makes it seem that our parent company has bought a blog written by vampires. Two, it taints our legitimate editorial posts about the show True Blood, calling into question our coverage and reviews because it seems that we've been paid off to write about the show. Already, Media Bistro has commented that io9 is "promoting" True Blood by posting a clip from it. This simply isn't true. If you look at the tag True Blood on io9, you can see that we have been posting clips and recaps of the show starting last year, long before the Blood Copy campaign launched on Gawker. In particular, our resident vampire expert Meredith Woerner has made the show her beat, and recapped every episode for you last season.

This isn't the first time we've written about media created by sponsors of the site. We've had ads from Star Trek running next to coverage of the movie on our blog for the past few weeks (and not all of that coverage was exactly flattering). We've had book ads for books that we reviewed like Neal Stephenson's Anathem. A few weeks ago, we had an ad for a new Alastair Reynolds book next to a somewhat negative review of the novel.

Blood Copy's ads, however, are not clearly marked as advertising and that is the problem. We're not happy with that, and you shouldn't be either. But that isn't going to stop us from covering a show that we think is worth critical attention. Please learn to be a critical reader yourself, and when a post comes up with a red circle around it that says "Blood Copy," realize that is an ad. Anything else is legitimate io9 content.

This goes for other ads you see on the site too. Hopefully, nobody has yet mistaken the Star Trek CheezIt ads on io9 for actual editorial.

The point is, we're not going to change our coverage of a media property just because somebody paid to put an ad on our site. We aren't going to make fun of Sookie any less because of this advertising deal, and we aren't going to stop telling you when the episodes get too cheesy for words. At the same time, if there is a good episode or breaking news about the series we'll tell you about that too - just as we have been for the past year.

If you aren't happy about the Blood Copy advertising campaign, you can make your voice heard in comments on that fake blog. They aren't going to turn comments off or edit them.

And you have my apologies in advance for the Blood Copy sponsorship campaign. If it had only been clearly marked as an advertisement, it might have been a pretty cool ARG. As it is now, I'm afraid it's only advertising.

UPDATE: I am happy to report that Blood Copy posts will now come with a notice that says "sponsored post." Thanks to Gawker top brass, who heard everybody's complaints and acted quickly.

Following Oprah’s foot-stomping, fist-waving televised love letter to the digital reading device, the Kindle enjoyed a nice bump in search traffic. Couple that with the endorsement’s timing – a convenient two months before Christmas and Hanukkah – and we could see increased Kindle proliferation.

Of course, scifi does acknowledge that people of the future will be susceptible to marketing. The “suckdisk” game from Star Trek: The Next Generation topped our list of suckiest scifi video games, but everyone on the Enterprise plays it, preferring it to activities like the holodeck, eating, and defending the ship from space pirates. And it’s not because the game is any good (it’s not), but because it triggers the pleasure centers of the brain as you play it. Sure, it was all a scheme to distract the crew, but it was also a great way to market an otherwise lame-ass game. And Snow Crash’s neurolinguistic contagion adds a new layer to concept of “viral” marketing.

And technology can be marketed out of existence as well. The 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? suggested that one of the reasons battery-powered cars never took off was that negative campaigning by oil and car companies undermined potential government and consumer support. Regardless of whether it’s true, we can’t expect Vulcans to step out of the clouds and tell us our latest invention will change our role in the universe. We’ll just have to hope that Oprah knows what’s best for us.

Unlike Batman Begins, which offered very few marketing tie-ins, The Dark Knight started life as a merchandising bonanza, according to the report:

Batman Begins" had played down its tie-ins, but for "Knight," Warner Bros. Consumer Products and DC Comics ramped up their efforts more than a year in advance of the picture's release, selling the master license to toymaker Mattel, with additional toys from Lego and Halsall and everything from Batman-branded underwear to a deal for Kmart to serve as the "Official Batman Headquarters." ...It was Nolan who came up with the idea of using the film's nearly six-minute opening sequence, a bank robbery, as a second teaser attached to the Imax release of "I Am Legend" in December.

"He wanted to make the movie into even more of an event," [Producer Chuck] Roven explains.

The death of Ledger threatened to derail all of the marketing plans... until his family stepped in, as Warners COO Alan Horn explained:

"We were already out with the 'Why so serious?' campaign," he notes. "We said (to Ledger's family), 'Look, is this an issue? Would you like us to pull this?' And here's what they said: 'Heath loved the movie, was very proud of it. This was just an accident.' They were fine with it — more than fine, they were completely supportive."

Sue Kroll, Warners' President of Worldwide Marketing, continues the story:

t became very clear when the family and others started to see some of Heath's bravado performance, and what a centerpiece it was to the movie, that there was no thought of marketing the film without him, as some suggested in the press around that time.

And news reports of Bale beating his family? Also easily avoided by the studio, according to Horn:

We just ignored it because it was his personal business... If he had asked us to involve ourselves, we would have been willing to discuss that, but he didn't mention it, and we didn't mention it.

That's right; Warners now operates on a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" basis when it comes to scandals. Or maybe that's just if your movie is about to become the second highest-grossing of all time.

Anatomy of a hit: The Dark Knight [Hollywood Reporter]

While there are several bizarre items in the nano-cookware category such as "antibacterial cookware," and the "nano silver teapot," the best items are the nano health supplements that just reek of futuristic quackery. How about the "LifePak Nano" supplement, that promises:

Lifepak® nano is a nutritional anti-aging program formulated to nourish and protect cells, tissues, and organs in the body with the specific purpose to guard against the ravages of aging. Lifepak® nano offers the highest bioavailability with a first-ever nanotechnology process and advanced levels of key anti-aging nutrients in a comprehensive formula.

This technology is called NSSL (Nano-sized self assembled structured liquids), which is a development of minute compressed micelles, which are called nanodrops. These minute micelles serve as a liquid carrier, which allows penetration of healthy components (such as vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals) that are insoluble in water or fats. The micelles are added to the food product, and thus pass through the digestive system effectively, without sinking or breaking up, to the absorption site. The minute micelles carry the phytosterols to the large micelles that the body produces from the bile acid, where they compete with cholesterol for entry into the micelle. The phytosterols enter the micelle, thereby inhibiting transportation of cholesterol from the digestive system into the bloodstream. This advanced technology was applied in the development of Canola Active oil, produced by Shemen Industries.

You can search through the nano-product goldmine at the E-Nano Project for yourself.

Consumer Products [Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies]

• 
  
• Star Trek: The Motion Picture - Okay, it's not false advertising to call it a motion picture, is it? There were indeed pictures in motion in this movie. But, this was part of the trend of calling things "The Movie" or "The Motion Picture." Did marketing people think they needed a title like this so as not to confuse people? Just ask the folks behind Superman: The Movie.The problem with this poster, other than featuring a triumvirate of Kirk, Spock, and the bald chick from the movie is the tagling "The Human Adventure Is Just Beginning." How is that true? Did we think it had come to an end?
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• Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan - No problems with the title, Khan did have a lot of wrath. No, our problem is with the whole "At the end of the universe lies the beginning of vengeance" line. How were they at the end of the universe? Plus, the poster shows the Enterprise firing on the Regula I space station, what the hell is up with that? "To hell with science, Spock! Blow that research station to pieces!"
• 
  
• Star Trek III: The Search For Spock - The tagline for this poster is "Join The Search." Uh, how do we do that? By buying a movie ticket? Actually, our main problem with this movie is the title. When did they go searching for Spock? They put the guy's dead body into a torpedo tube and shot it onto the newly formed Genesis planet, for the love of god. They kind of knew where he was. Granted, they later find the tube empty, but it's not like there was a massive galaxy-wide search for him.
• 
  
• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Just look at this artwork... is that supposed to be Captain Kirk or Chekov right next to Spock? Plus, did Spock decide to go extra-heavy on the eyeliner that day? Plus, check out the text on the seldom seen Australian version of the poster: "They traveled back where 23rd century man had never gone before, to a more crazy, outrageous time: 1986." Yeah, you know, the Dark Ages had nothing on 1986.
• 
  
• Star Trek V: The Final Frontier - Check this out "On June 9, Adventure And Imagination Will Meet At The Final Frontier." Really? How did that end up happening? Unless by "imagination" they meant horrible directing, acting, and writing. Ouch. Now, just when you thought things couldn't get worse for this movie... have you seen the teaser poster? It says "Why Are They Putting Seatbelts In Theaters This Summer?" Yes, because of Star Trek V. It's almost been 20 years, but we still want our money back. Maybe even more so, now.
• 
  
• Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country - "The Battle For Peace Has Begun," was it really a battle for peace? You could probably argue that it was. However, we only remember the Bird of Prey firing shots at the Enterprise, not the Battlecruiser. Maybe they needed something to spice it up a bit. We think General Chang's ominous eyepatch was probably enough. Why overdo it?
• 
  
• Star Trek Generations - Granted, it's hard to find a problem with this poster. "Boldly Go" ain't a bad tagline, so what are we supposed to say? "Um... the Enterprise never flew through a giant Starfleet symbol!" Although on the alternate poster the "Two Captains. One Destiny" line is a bit odd. What was that shared destiny, exactly?
• 
  
• Star Trek: First Contact - It's hard to figure out why the artists on these posters always make it seem like the faces are beaming in. Ever since Star Trek: The Motion Picture, it's like they have to be depicted as teleporting onto the poster itself. Bizarre. Anyhow, this poster features the Enterprise racing away from an army of Borg... and into the teleporting faces. Plus, is the Borg Queen winking at us? We're just not sure what's going on here, although resistance was definitely not futile.
• 
  
• Star Trek: Insurrection - The problem with the tagline on this poster ("The Battle For Paradise Has Begun") is that it's a direct ripoff of the one for The Undiscovered Country ("The Battle For Peace Has Begun"), which was only two movies prior. Did they just phone it in that day? Other than that, we actually kind of like Adhar's craggy face staring down at the Enterprise. It's just too bad the movie was a bit of a letdown.
• 
  
• Star Trek: Nemesis - Someone please explain to us how "A Generation's Final Journey Begins" works out here. Do they mean the Remans? The crew of the Enterprise who is beginning to go their separate ways? Picard, since he never had a son? Maybe all of the above... or maybe they meant people who would pay to go see more of these, yikes. The marketing people sure loved to have these posters signifying the beginning of something.
• 
  
• Star Trek - J.J. Abrams' film has had several teaser posters put out so far, with some of them even claiming "Stardate 12.25.08" at the bottom. However, now that it's been bumped to the Summer of 2009, those have all become a paper trail of false advertisements. It's gotten to the point that we've stopped trusting the posters altogether. What's next? Trailers that lie to us as well? Oh... wait.
• 
  

Here's what you'll get from this fictional company:

The DATAPOINTS Active Privacy® System allows members to control who sees and analyzes their unified data profile (UDP). In return DATAPOINTS® members receive an ongoing income stream based on the detail, purity and 'interestingness' of their UDP.

A kind of dystopian mashup of Choicepoint and Google, Datapoints comes from a future where Big Brother has been privatized and made "fun." If you're irritated by corporate-speak and web industry jibber-jabber, you've got to check this out.

Datapoints [corporate website]

Take last night's episode, for example: the reintroduction of old friend Pete Ross, who has gained superpowers from chewing kryptonite-powered chewing gum? That's kind of awesome. Finding out via press release that the whole thing came from a promotional deal with Stride Gum? Slightly less so. Thankfully, Stride Gum and Warner Bros. want to make it up to the fans by... giving them a new take on Choose Your Own Adventure. Huh? I'm not so sure that that's a good idea, but you can judge for yourself.

According to Warner Bros., the Stride-sponsored episode last night is only the start of an "innovative online promotion" for the Superboy Is Angsty show:

The writers and producers of "Smallville" have developed the beginning and the end of an all-new comic book adventure and will leave it to fans to determine the direction of all of the action in between... Fans can go to cwtv.com and read the opening pages of this new comic book adventure. They'll then be presented with two options (four pages each) which take the comic book in two different directions, and they can vote on the direction in which they want the story to go.

The CW, Warner Bros. Television Group and Stride Gum Offer Fans The Opportunity to Create Their Own "Smallville" Digital Comic Book [Time Warner]

A promoter named Warren Betts with Fox Pictures writes in his story pitch to Anonymous:

Generally, I cover the world of science and technology and publicize movies with those themes, but this is a very intriguing story and in the film the characters use very sophisticated technology and optics in trying to capture this apparition on film. Next year a Japanese company is introducing the first camera (very expensive) that will allow photographers to shoot in the invisible light spectrum. This might make a very powerful tool for understanding this phenomenon and the possible scientific causes. The public is very interested in this subject and I wanted to check with you and see if you might be interested in hearing more about this? Would this possibly be something you would be interested in covering on your pages?

Look, I have no problem with product tie-ins or goofy expensive shit that people buy when they like a movie. Hell, I have a ton of ridiculously expensive kaiju dolls — some of them are from the 1970s, and who knows what they'd be worth on Ebay. But nobody sold me those dolls pretending that they were somehow a "scientific" method of making Gamera come hang out with me, or helping me reach my dead mother. Pretending that something unscientific from a horror movie IS science in order to sell people movie tickets and expensive cameras is, as Penn and Teller would say, bullshit.

And it's the crappiest kind of viral marketing, too.

Hewlett Packard used a service called PayPerPost to pay bloggers to create posts or viral videos to promote Hewlett Packard's new digital camera. One woman had her children smash a Fuji camera with a hammer, filmed it, and put it on YouTube. The video didn't actually catch on virally, but did represent a strange and disturbing new phase in the evolution of advertising. A woman who clearly just wanted to feed her kids actually used her kids in a specious ad campaign in order to earn cash. This isn't the only time companies have tried this kind of stunt — paying bloggers a pittance to develop advertising for rich advertising firms — and it's bound to become more popular as more people get their entertainment via places like YouTube. In fact, Hewlett Packard had a much more successful viral ad campaign two years ago, in which people playing "finger soccer" on their desks at work and uploading the vids to YouTube were eventually outed as part of an ad campaign to make HP seem as cool and fun as Apple. By the time the outing happened, however, hundreds of people had spontaneously joined the "finger soccer" campaign just for fun, not realizing that the videos they uploaded were part of a viral advertising effort.

Another recent ad campaign that tried to use Web communities to generate artificial buzz was internet hardware manufacturer Cisco's "human network" campaign. You may remember seeing the phrase "human network" in Cisco ads, but Cisco wanted to do more than create a slogan. They wanted people to start using the phrase "human network" as everyday slang for the internet — the idea, I think, would be to cement a connection in people's unconscious minds between Cisco, the internet, and a kind of Utopian "human network" (which Cisco hardly is, given that its technology is what makes the Great Firewall of China possible). According to digital marketing blog ChasNote:

Since the "human network" isn't yet a well-defined phrase, [Cisco] enlisted thought leaders to volunteer their own definitions, without guidance from Cisco or Ogilvy. Contributors included a handful of FM authors, such as Boing Boing's David Pescovitz, 43Folders's Merlin Mann, Metafilter's Matt Haughey, GigaOM's Om Malik, Wi-Fi Networking News's Glenn Fleishman, Newsvine's Mike Davidson, XYZ Computing's Sal Cangeloso, TechCrunch's Mike Arrington, Searchblog's John Battelle and Make's Phil Torrone. These authors penned their thoughts and plugged them into Cisco ads on their own sites. The ads then invite readers to visit a Cisco landing page that hosts definitions from other thought leaders and gives them an opportunity to vote for a favorite. If they don't see a definition that gets it right, they can also click to the "human network" page at Wikia (a collection of freely-hosted wiki communities built on the same software as Wikipedia) to edit the definition there.

Why are these campaigns a harbinger of things to come? First of all, they are directly engaged with a form of media — social networks — that are only likely to grow bigger as time goes on. Advertising can't only be those little tiny Google ads that go up the side of the page, and advertisers are going to do everything they can to become part of the content on a YouTube or Facebook so that they are more closely woven into the fabric of those networks. After all, you go to YouTube to see wacky videos, not to read the ads. So if advertisers can infiltrate the videos and make you watch their stuff, it's as if you've voluntarily tuned into a TV ad.

This is more disturbing than what I guess you could call traditional advertising mainly because a lot of it is extremely misleading. Ads that are "teasers" are one thing — you know, putting some cool phrase or image out there, only to reveal that it's an Altoids ad three weeks later. But ads that pretend to be real endorsements from regular people? That hide their corporate sponsorship, and use the ideas of underpaid people? It's like turning YouTube into a marketing sweatshop. Advertising dystopia, here we come.

In point of fact, all the wines were exactly the same. But the results of the MRI scans showed greater neurological activity in people's pleasure centers when they were told they were drinking expensive wine. The best (creepiest?) part of all this is that the authors of the study hope to use these findings to manipulate consumers. The authors write:

Our results show that increasing the price of a wine increases subjective reports of flavor pleasantness as well as blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area that is widely thought to encode for experienced pleasantness during experiential tasks. The paper provides evidence for the ability of marketing actions to modulate neural correlates of experienced pleasantness and for the mechanisms through which the effect operates.

Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness [PNAS]

The cake-baking was our first clue that Warners had gone over the edge. The viral marketing for Knight involved following clues on various websites, which led you to even more websites, which led you to phone lines. Eventually you would be led to a bakery, where you could pick up a free mystery cake. Baked inside the cake was a cell phone, and further instructions. Thankfully, no one actually ingested one of the phones. We can just imagine the lawsuits.

Now, they're taking things in a strangely different direction, by sending muddied novelty packages to people like rock-lite star John Mayer, who promptly posted about the thing on his blog. Is it any surprise that Mayer's label is Warner Music? No, no really. So what are they trying to prove by having their own artists shill the goods and drink the kool-aid?

This reminds us about what Kevin Smith said at Comic-Con last year. It's not like Steven Spielberg has to come down to the Con and promise everyone free handjobs to go see Indy IV. People will go see it regardless. The Dark Knight probably falls into that same camp, right? We just wonder what marketing ploy they'll pull off next. Will Heath Ledger come to your house in Joker-wear and spend the night with you? It could still happen.

Cool Stuff: Dark Knight Promotional Items From The Joker [/Film]

With the strike going on, even rewrites can't be made to the film during shooting, so that nixes any possible fixes to the script, which is probably the main reason the studio is slowly turning around and saying, "Hmmm." That's also given them some time to consider the fan reaction to the cast of mostly unknowns and minor leaguers, and possibly to even consider the fact that they don't really want to alienate or piss off Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale, especially if there's now a possible third new Batman movie in the works.

We hope this means there's still hope for movies like Terminator 4, which even the producers have mentioned needs a bit of script work. When asked about the script for the movie yesterday, producer James Middleton had said they would have liked to do a rewrite on it but, "We have a very strong script going into production, and it's absolutely viable to shoot." However, given the news about the JLA film, they may reconsider and press pause on this film in order to get the script they want.

Justice League Movie has been delayed! [IESB]

Just because there's going to be a drought of entertainment doesn't mean we want lame crud rushed to the screen for our benefit. Take your time, smell the roses, and give those scripts another read. If they suck, toss 'em. We'll be paying especially close attention to Neuromancer, Ender's Game, The Diamond Age and all the other upcoming sci fi movies. You have been warned!

For those of you who haven't seen it, the Joker (who also is the central baddie in the upcoming movie) goes nuts in this film and dehydrates the world leaders at the United Nations, turning them into piles of dust. Luckily, Batman and Robin save the day, but screw things up a bit when they rehydrate everyone: everyone now speaks the wrong language. Hilarity! The dynamic duo then head off, leaving the leaders to deal with the problem on their own.

I'm surprised it's taken someone this long to do a Batman mashup with the old series, but this one made me laugh pretty hard. Especially the "Like me!" shot. I don't know why I'm finding Cesar Romero speaking with Heath Ledger's voice so amusing, but chalk it up to fumes and crossed wires. If someone could make us a some high-quality Heroes, or better yet, Misfits of Science meets meets X-Men mashups, we might be okay with the current state of television.

There are three more postcards in the set. Collect them all! [Kung Fu Rodeo] Or visit this freakish Wall-E tie-in site, allegedly belonging to Wall-E manufacturer Buy n Large, which does an eerily good parody of marketing speak at consumer robotics companies.