The Marketing Is the Movie

Written by Uma Mukhopadhyay (CAS & W ‘28), Edited by Cathy Sui (W’29)

Hollywood’s film industry has faced significant decline, and within its financial workings, marketing now plays an increasingly important role in the industry’s contemporary success. With the development of diversity in streaming platforms and competing entertainment options, younger audiences’ attention is harder to capture, often feeling less connected to traditional media.

Nevertheless, recent marketing campaigns, such as the rollout of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) and Universal Pictures’ Wicked films show how marketing has become central to modern moviemaking and why studios treat promotion as central to their financial fate.

From the box office, movies rarely become profitable simply by matching its production budget to ticket sales. The film industry operates on a “waterfall” system, where every dollar passes through a series of deductions long before the studio sees profit. Exhibitors often keep around half of global ticket revenues, distributors take a significant slice of what remains, and marketing budgets, which frequently soar above $100 million per film, must be recouped in full before any return reaches the studio. Consequently, studios generally need to earn about two and a half times its production budget to break even; for a $200 million film, this means crossing roughly $500 million before turning profit.

This financial constraint explains why mid-budget blockbusters—approximately $100 million in budget—often struggle. These films are too expensive to market lightly but not large-scale enough to justify global saturation. Ironically, films with budgets greater than $200 million seem to stand better odds given more expansiveness for marketing spend. Once a studio commits to a full-scale awareness campaign, the marginal cost of promoting a bigger movie doesn’t rise proportionately, and the global upscale is more predictable. In a marketplace of fragmented attention among audiences, scale and marketing reach allow for financial growth.

These same principles made Barbie a cultural phenomenon. The film’s release and parallel marketing campaign created omnipresence, blending brand collaborations and experience-driven amplification. By the time audiences reached theaters, they were responding to a cultural moment rather than a movie itself. The pink, hyper-visible aesthetic became its own economic mechanism, pushing the film past $1.44 billion in gross revenue worldwide. 

The pink-and-green aesthetic of the Wicked movies is using a similar strategy. The first film partnered with over 400 national brands and decorated iconic landmarks across the world, such as New York’s Empire State Building, in the franchise’s signature pink-and-green colors. Wicked’s star actresses Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande frequently appeared at global events, such as the Paris Olympics, which embedded the film into broader cultural conversations.

For the sequel, Wicked: For Good, Universal Pictures reduced its marketing spend to about $90 million while maintaining omnipresence, leaning on social media campaigns, meme culture, and returning partnerships, alongside new collaborations with Chili’s, Dunkin’, American Girl, and Procter & Gamble. The more recent campaign relied on residual awareness from the first film, demonstrating that the marketing drove audience behavior around the upcoming release.

Contemporary Hollywood has become a high-stakes marketplace, but when a film achieves cultural ubiquity, marketing acts as a driving force of revenue and audience engagement. Campaigns like Barbie and Wicked prove that in today’s entertainment industry, a movie’s success can depend on the strategy behind it. In an industry where profit depends heavily on promotion, expansive marketing has proven essential to a film’s success.