New Line Trying To Annoy People Into Paying Attention To Their Jim Carrey Movie
To date, we've found the marketing push for the upcoming Jim Carrey vehicle The Number 23 somewhat inscrutable, with the few commercials we've seen leading us to blindly guess that the film is some kind of thriller/documentary hybrid detailing how the mysterious reappearance of the accursed, titular number in Carrey's life is somehow to blame for his recent career deceleration. Slate's Kim Masters now reports that the campaign has taken a new and annoying turn by peppering media types with e-mails noting the supposedly heebeejee-inducing reoccurrence of [actual number deleted for concerns that reading it here again could plunge you into depths of madness] in actual news items:
Others are in more questionable taste. "Man Convicted After Girlfriend's Fatal 23-Story Fall." If you were a relative of Rachel Kozlusky, an attractive Pennsylvania woman who, fortunately for New Line, was just 23 years old when she fell just the right number of stories (a tragedy clearly freighted with cosmic meaning), would it not offend you to see this event exploited to market a creepy movie?
How about this one from Monday: "23 Pilgrims Killed in Saudi Arabia." If you bother to look, the report in question reads that "at least" 23 were killed. Another stroke of luck for New Line! If the story had confirmed just one more dead, that would have ruined everything.
We're more than a little disappointed in New Line's once-adventurous marketing department, which has resorted to the uninspired tactic of mere persistent annoyance over its truly boundary-pushing efforts of the recent past, Snakes in a Sparsely Populated Movie Theater and Let's All Go Down On Paul Walker's Wife!. (The studio has officially claimed responsibility for only one of the aforementioned campaigns.) Even if they didn't have the resources to break new ground for The Number That Shall Not Be Named, surely they at least could have repurposed the expensive technology developed for Running Scared's site, adapting an online game in which potential ticket-buyers could assume the role of a frustrated director trying to manage difficult talent who insists on adding some improvisational urination to a pivotal scene.
UPDATE: We take back everything we said about New Line above. Clearly, they're sneakier than we thought, coopting an entire world-famous brand to virally market their movie:
