Where the amazing marketing is

Where the Wild Things Are

The film tells the story of Max, a rambunctious and sensitive boy who feels misunderstood at home and escapes to where the Wild Things are. ...

Rating: PG for mild thematic elements, some adventure action and brief language

Length: 94 minutes

Released: October 16, 2009 Nationwide

Cast: Catherine Keener, Max Records, Mark Ruffalo, Lauren Ambrose, James Gandolfini

Director: Spike Jonze

Writer: Michael Goldenberg, Dave Eggers, Spike Jonze

More info and showtimes »

HOLLYWOOD - If they gave out Oscars for marketing campaigns, you could pretty much hand out the trophy right now to Warner Bros. marketing chief Sue Kroll, who almost single-handedly managed to find an audience for "Where the Wild Things Are," the new family movie that turned out not to really be a family movie at all.

In fact, it would be hard to imagine a movie that had a weirder opening weekend than "Wild Things." Adapted by Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers from the much-beloved Maurice Sendak book, the film grossed $32.7 million, despite the fact that families with children - normally an overwhelming portion of a family film's core audience - made up only 43 percent of the audience.

According to Hollywood conventional wisdom, "Where the Wild Things Are" looked like a disaster in the making. Over budget and beset by endless delays, the movie kept being pushed back on the Warner schedule, picking up a nasty case of bad buzz after word leaked out that children had fled an early test screening in tears, put off by the dark tone of the film.

Even as the film made its debut over the weekend, rival marketers were skeptical of its chances, saying, with plenty of justification, that "Wild Things" was a tweener - not conventional enough to be a mass-appeal family film, but too associated with the soft blanket of childhood to appeal to Jonze's natural audience of twenty- and thirtysomething bohos, hipsters and cultural mavericks. Faced with two radically different audiences that rarely converge, most studios would have simply "cheated" - passing the film off as squeaky clean enough to pass muster with middle-American families in the hopes of getting as big an opening weekend as possible.

But amazingly, Kroll managed to thread the needle, attracting a sizable amount of both audiences, who were prodded into the theaters by the studio's emotion-laden marketing materials and a raft of glowing reviews.

She acknowledges that the film's early screenings weren't especially auspicious. "The younger children, the ones under 8, were not as engaged - in fact, they were a little bored," she said. "We were a little surprised to discover that the people who had the best experience with the movie were adults, even adults without children, and teenagers. So we knew our job would be complicated, but we just made an intuitive decision that we would come up with ads that would emotionally connect with these people."

Warner decided that if young adults loved the movie, they would grab them. Kroll said that 70 percent of Warner's TV ads were on shows aimed at teen and adult-oriented audiences.

"We didn't want the movie to look like one of those slick family films," she said. "We realized that this film got inside people in a very personal way, so we went for something that, in terms of our ads, felt a little smaller, more special and more specific, as if to say - this is a movie that's really for you."

It's been a long, rocky ride for "Wild Things," which was in development for years at Universal without ever getting a green light.

Sony also passed on "Wild Things," which ended up at Warner. In classic Warner fashion, the studio recruited a pair of outside investors who were willing to take most of the financial risk. Even though the film ended up costing in the $90 million to $100 million range, Warner is only in for 25 percent of the film.

As it turned out, most critics were on the side of the Wall Street Journal's Joe Morgenstern, who called the film "a movie lover's dream."

© 2009 Knoxville.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.