Hollywood Babble On & On #841: Sometimes Being Clever Is Being Really Stupid

A short while back a trailer was released for the Relativity Production Mirror, Mirror, directed by Tarsem Singh.  Here's the trailer....

Now some sites that posted it got flooded with all kinds of comments about how cool it looked, and how they were going to see, and that everyone else should see it to.

Well, it seems that exuberance might be fake, because some intrepid internet investigators have found evidence that the comments are coming.... FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!

Oh, sorry, it was the creepy phone calls that were coming from inside the house, some of the fulsome comments were coming from the same IP address.

Now some are accusing the movie producer's marketing department for the questionable commentary, and if that turns out to be true, then someone was being stupid by thinking they were being clever. 

Here's how it works. Someone working to pimp the film tells an intern to go visit sites showing the trailer and post comments saying how wonderful the trailer and the film are. They think this will create a cascade of positive buzz for the film, make it a blockbuster hit, and then everyone will say that the executive who came up with the idea was really smart.

 

Here's where the stupid comes in. The semi-farcical trailer doesn't really strike most people seeing at as particularly deserving of such exuberant praise.  This makes people suspicious.

Suspicious people snoop, and when it comes to stuff done on the internet, trails are left behind.  Snooping people who know how to follow those trails will then promptly expose this bogus comment stunt.

That makes the film look really sad and desperate than the trailer already does, and creates negative buzz that can grow and hurt the film when it's released.

A really clever person would have seen these traps, and figured out another way to market the movie that wouldn't make the film look particularly sad and desperate.  But someone who thinks they're more clever than they actually are would easily blunder into turning their ad campaign into a boondoggle.