Steven Soderbergh is a filmmaker known for taking risks with his projects. Rather than cash big checks working for the massive studios making tentpole films, Soderbergh has always been the guy who changes it up almost each time out. Sometimes that means taking brief “retirement” periods between films to focus on other media, like TV series (“The Knick”) or app hybrids (“Mosaic”). In 2017, Soderbergh came out of “retirement” to direct “Logan Lucky,” which is a sort of backwoods “Ocean’s Eleven.” And well, it didn’t do so hot.
“Logan Lucky” is the first film to be distributed by Soderbergh’s own distribution company, Fingerprint Releasing, and because he was in control of the films creation as well as its release, he took a firm grip on its marketing. His idea was to try and circumvent the usual money that’s wasted by big studios, who take a carpet bomb approach to advertising, rather than zeroing in on their target demographic. Ultimately, Soderberg’s plan didn’t work out so well for the film’s box office which wound up with $47 million worldwide.
“We spent, at my request, a hugely disproportionate amount of money in social media in the digital space as opposed to television. In retrospect, I think that was a mistake … I think the potential audience for ‘Logan Lucky’ doesn’t really hang out in that space, and probably would have been better reached through a certain kind of television. I think that audience also believes, if they don’t see a lot of TV ads for the movie, the movie is not real,” said Soderbergh in an interview with Recode.
So, while Soderbergh isn’t going to blame the quirky film on not reaching a mass audience, he seems to think that it was down to the marketing. If you want to go back to August, when the film was released, it does stand to reason that there was more of an emphasis on digital marketing versus traditional. Does more money spent on TV spots equal more box office? With a film like “Logan Lucky,” who knows?
For those who aren’t big film aficionados, a movie where heartthrobs Channing Tatum and Adam Driver doing their best redneck impressions, and Daniel Craig doing whatever he was doing in the film, maybe means that “Logan Lucky” was never destined to be a box office darling. Or perhaps, as Soderbergh hypothesizes, Joe Public doesn’t think a film exists unless he sees it advertised during “The Big Bang Theory.”