Well it made more than twice its budget back, which is pretty damn good for any movie. Certainly not a blockbuster, but it did very well.
Most studies on the financial success or failure of movies (
Bridge to Terabithia was certainly a success) say that word-of-mouth about how good a movie is is the best advertising, much more than trailers and TV ads and even the title of the movie itself. I think that's definitely true when a movie breaks the Top Ten as BtT did.
I recently started a thread on the board for
Gettysburg on a similar issue: the movie was (obviously) about the Battle of Gettysburg in the Civil War, but it was filmed under the title
The Killer Angels, the same as the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Michael Shaara from which it was adapted. But the producers changed the title after it was already in the can, because they figured that potential viewers would think that
The Killer Angels referred to a motorcycle gang. However, there is a definite prestige in keeping the title of a Pulitzer-winning book, especially since the movie followed it so faithfully. I wish that they'd kept the original title and don't think it affected the success of the movie; I don't think it impacted the (actually considerable) success of that movie, as those who would be interested in seeing a movie about an historic Civil War battle either already knew about the book
The Killer Angels or would have quickly found out about a movie with that title simply by word-of-mouth.
Conversely, there was the autobiographical novel
The Great Santini by Pat Conroy, about a teenage boy and his love-hate relationship with his abusive father, a Marine Corps fighter pilot. ("The Great Santini" was the father's nickname.) The Marine Corps actually assisted in the production of the movie version with a substantial amount of aviation footage. The movie (starring Robert Duvall in the title role) was filmed and released under the original title. When the movie fell short of expectations at the box office, the studio assumed that people thought the title referred to a magician or circus performer, and re-released it under the title
The Ace. That made no significant improvement on the box office draw. Fans of Pat Conroy's novels (all of which are autobiographical, BTW!) and people inclined to see movies involving military aviation already knew about
The Great Santini.
I realize that we're talking about the trailers and not the title of
Bridge to Terabithia, but we're still talking about a movie made from a book that already had a following and some prestige. (I guess you can call the Newbery Medal the Children's Books equivalent of the Pulitzer.) I don't think the bait-and-switch approach that the trailers took had any more impact on the box office draw of BtT than the title changes had on
The Killer Angels/Gettysburg or
The Great Santini/The Ace. I'm sure there were people who left the theaters and told their friends, "Don't see this movie! It's terrible! It's not a
Narnia-like fantasy and the girl dies!" But I think that was more than offset by people who said, "It's not what the trailer said it was, but I'm still glad I saw it!" and people who had already read the book over the previous thirty years and knew what they were getting into when they went in the theaters.
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