As Quentin Dupieux’s Daaaaaali! premieres in Venice this week, the French master of the absurd is enjoying the success of his surprise feature Yannick at the French box office.
Yannick is performing strongly after four weeks in cinemas with 362,000 admissions (around €2.6m). It is Dupieux’s most successful film in France ahead of the 317,000 tickets sold during the nine-week run of comedy Incredible But True, one of two films by the prolific director released by Diaphana in 2022. The other was Smoking Causes Coughing.
Shot in six days and announced just a few weeks ahead of its August 2 release, Yannick is an irreverent French-language comedy that stars Raphael Quenard as the titular character who stands up in the middle of theatrical performance and tells the actors how he feels about their work before things spiral out of control.
Dupieux and Diaphana have worked together on the marketing campaign that leans into the spirit of the 67-minute film. Their big play was inviting all cinema-goers named Yannick to see the film for free in local cinemas during its first week in theatres. Around 1,500 people requested invitations via a dedicated website, reveals Diaphana’s communications manager Alyssia Renard.
“We are always trying to think about creative marketing strategies with Quentin’s films because he has such a unique identity,” Renard explained.
Diaphana’s inventive campaign for Yannick is among a wave of recent creative marketing campaigns in France. Filmmakers Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache are at the halfway point of a 140-city tour of France ahead of the release of their latest film A Difficult Year on October 8 by Gaumont. The social satire follows two compulsive spenders who reluctantly join a group of eco-activists and antics ensue. The filmmakers have visited locations including multiplexes in large cities to tiny cinemas in small towns across the country, and will continue after heading to Toronto to support the North American premiere at the festival.
“People say, don’t you have other things to do? I don’t have anything else to do. I want to see audiences,” Toledano says. “We need to turn films into events. There needs to be a sense of sharing with audiences.”
Ladj Ly, whose Les Indésirables, is also screening at Toronto, is also planning a France-wide tour to give the film as much visibility as possible before its December 6 release. The film’s producer Srab Films is collaborating closely with distributor Le Pacte and local city authorities to be sure the film is seen particularly in neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Paris.
“We’re working with the distributor, with city mayors, and people in the neighbourhoods concerned by the film to make sure as many people can see it as possible,” says Srab’s co-founder and producer Toufik Ayadi. “We’re releasing it a bit later so we have several months after its premiere to really get out there.”
Reaching young audiences
For the August 30 release of teen comedy Super Drunk (Super-Bourrés) nascent French distributor Zinc launched parallel marketing campaigns specifically targeting the two demographics identified for the film separately. The company created one trailer for teen audiences through targeted advertising on TikTok and social media, then rolled out another trailer in theatres and for older audiences for a more “hipster, big city, intellectual crowd, ” as Zinc founder and president Jerome Hilal puts it. The latter was complete with excerpts from positive reviews from outlets including Cahiers du Cinema and Les Inrocks.
For the January 3, 2024 release of The Fantastic Three (Les Trois Fantastiques), which tackles the issue of bullying, Zinc is planning to screen the film at schools and host debates and talks between teachers and students. “We need to turn films into events again. We can’t reapply the same recipes over and over again,” Hilal says.
He believes the key is to adapt to audience responses and be nimble, responding to everything from what else is on release to the political climate to the actual weather conditions. “We need to change course while we’re moving if we have to,” he says.
Zinc’s flexible marketing has proven to be successful since its first release in March for Melanie Auffret’s Sweet Little Things. Zinc took the film set in a small French village to 100 different tiny towns all over France for premieres and the film ended up selling nearly 1m tickets and is among the top French films of the year to date.
Local arms of Hollywood studios are also rolling out the red – and pink – carpets for their titles, even as talent aren’t attending due to the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. While Warner Bros was not able to host a premiere for Barbie with its stars in Paris, the distributor did deploy similar pink-powered promotions among the popcorn at local theatres complete with life-sized Barbie boxes for photos and fully-decorated cinemas across the country.
For the August 2 release of The Meg 2: The Trench, Warner Bros also dove into a sea-inspired screening complete with a giant open-mouthed shark for photos and bright blue cocktails.
No comments yet