Monday, December 19, 2005
Universal Still Doesn't Get the 'Verse
Universal's failure to market Serenity properly has come full circle. After an abysmal ad campaign for the film that failed to sell it to an audience outside of the existing fanbase, Universal's marketing team has created the most hideous dvd cover for the film imaginable. It fails to speak of the tone of the movie, and instead pastes unrelated images and scenes together to create what they expect a sci-fi film to look like. Summer Glau hardly looks like herself, there is a large crowd of people milling about that never appear in the film, and Serenity, a freighter with no armaments, is blowing up warships with lasers on the cover. Did the cover artists even watch the film? It's the worst misrepresentation of a film by its cover since the American release of Nausicaa (I've watched that film dozens of times, and still have not noticed the cyborg with a lightsaber and the boy riding a Pegasus).The consensus in the Whedon message boards are right-on: this cover art looks like a strictly d-grade, straight-to-video or Sci-Fi-Channel-Original presentation. It looks cheap, and is horribly incongruous with the much better dvd art created for the Firefly television series. I guarantee the cover itself will turn people away from watching the film.
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