#1 Hunger Games Explorer fan debuts Catching Fire Teaser Outdoor Art

Check out this new teaser outdoor art for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire! Click the image below for high-res.

Lionsgate gave one lucky fan @ToriiJaade the opportunity to debut this on her social media outlets since she is #1 on Hunger Games Explorer and has tons of sparks!

We're especially loving the Cinna quote! Too many feels!

Sources: Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook

District13.PN Awakens!

HTML source of District13.PN page

There's nothing on the page right now except the title:

CAUTION: RADIATION HAZARD. NO TRESPASSING BEYOND THIS POINT

Looks like this will have a role in the Catching Fire marketing campaign! Who's excited?! We know that Lionsgate likes to put secret messages in their projects, so everyone keep an eye on this website!

Source: HaymitchsEmptyBottle tumblr

Lionsgate Splitting Marketing Groups; Tim Palen and Nancy Kirkpatrick to Stay | THR

Fear not, Hunger Games fans! When the Summit/Lionsgate merger was announced, we wondered who would be heading Lionsgate's marketing. Since The Hunger Games had a very successful and innovative marketing campaign, we were hoping they'd keep Tim Palen so that we can expect more awesome marketing for the future Hunger Games movies. Looks like they've reached a compromise!

Lionsgate marketing head Tim Palen and Summit marketing chief Nancy Kirkpatrick are both staying with the company, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. 

The Hunger Games studio has closed a new long-term deal with Palen, who will now run marketing for the Lionsgate-branded film slate. Kirkpatrick will head up marketing for Summit-branded films, including the final installment of the Twilight franchise, set for release in late November.

There had been widespread speculation in Hollywood that one of the marketing execs would depart Lionsgate in the wake of the company's merger with Summit this year. As part of that deal, Summit'sRob Friedman and Patrick Wachsberger took control of the film studio, potentially giving Summit's Kirkpatrick the inside track. But Palen is considered a talented marketing executive, responsible for the campaign for Lionsgate's current blockbuster Hunger Games. The studio now has worked out a compromise that seems to have satisfied both executives in the short term while planting the seeds of a long-term plan. 

Combining the two studios has resulted in a large number of films on the upcoming release slate, so splitting the duties and allowing each executive to run his and her own slate makes sense. However, once the merged Lionsgate trims its film slate to about 14 films a year, as it has said it plans to do, two marketing heads probably won't make sense. 

At that point, locking Palen into a long-term deal probably gives him the pole position to remain with the company.

UPDATE: Lionsgate is confirming the news with a press release announcing Palin's new long-term deal. 

"Tim is a gifted marketing executive who has been a driving force in the success of our motion picture business over the years, and he elevated his game to a new level with a groundbreaking marketing campaign for The Hunger Games," said Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer and vice chairman Michael Burns in a statement. "His marketing campaigns integrate digital and traditional resources in innovative and cost-effective ways that reflect Lionsgate's entrepreneurial culture at its best." 

"One of the great benefits of Summit’s recent merger with Lionsgate is the opportunity to be in business with a marketing executive as talented as Tim,” said Friedman and Wachsberger said in a statement. “As we roll out a combined slate capable of generating more than a billion dollars at the North American box office, we are fortunate to have two extremely talented marketing executives to guide both the Lionsgate and Summit brands going forward.”

We're glad that Tim Palen's work on The Hunger Games hasn't gone unnoticed. We love the marketing done for The Hunger Games and we can't wait to see what's in store for Catching Fire and Mockingjay!

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Lionsgate Spent $45 Million on Marketing 'The Hunger Games'

How much did it take to market The Hunger Games? Oh, only $45 million.

From the LA Times:

Lionsgate is launching its biggest ever marketing campaign for "The Hunger Games," but still not outspending Hollywood's major studios.

To promote its biggest budget production yet, the Santa Monica-based studio is spending about $45 million to advertise the picture in the U.S., according to people familiar with the matter but not authorized to speak publicly.


Lionsgate typically devotes less than $30 million to selling its nationwide releases, which are often targeted genre films such as "Saw" and Tyler Perry's comedies, though it did spend $40 million to market the 2010 hit "The Expendables."


Hollywood's major studios can spend as much as $70 million to $80 million marketing their most expensive event movies domestically.

Lionsgate has the advantage, of course, of huge built-in awareness for "The Hunger Games." The trilogy of books by Suzanne Collins on which the film is based have already sold 23.5 million copies worldwide.

As a result, the studio has not only been able to afford a more cost-effective advertising campaign, but is able to get away with not showing any footage in commercials and trailers from the actual hunger games, in which teenagers hunt each other to the death in front of a televised audience.

Lionsgate's marketing strategy appears to be working spectacularly well. Pre-release surveys suggest that "The Hunger Games" will have an opening weekend of more than $100 million when it debuts across the country on March 23.

Also check out this interesting article from the New York Times on the specific strategies that Lionsgate employed and what their thinking was on developing the marketing for this movie.

Selling a movie used to be a snap. You printed a poster, ran trailers in theaters and carpet-bombed NBC’s Thursday night lineup with ads.

Today, that kind of campaign would get a movie marketer fired. The dark art of movie promotion increasingly lives on the Web, where studios are playing a wilier game, using social media and a blizzard of other inexpensive yet effective online techniques to pull off what may be the marketer’s ultimate trick: persuading fans to persuade each other.
The art lies in allowing fans to feel as if they are discovering a film, but in truth Hollywood’s new promotional paradigm involves a digital hard sell in which little is left to chance — as becomes apparent in a rare step-by-step tour through the timetable and techniques used by Lionsgate to assure that “The Hunger Games” becomes a box office phenomenon when it opens on Friday. 

While some studios have halted once-standard marketing steps like newspaper ads, Lionsgate used all the usual old-media tricks — giving away 80,000 posters, securing almost 50 magazine cover stories, advertising on 3,000 billboards and bus shelters.
But the campaign’s centerpiece has been a phased, yearlong digital effort built around the content platforms cherished by young audiences: near-constant use of Facebook and Twitter, a YouTube channel, a Tumblr blog, iPhone games and live Yahoo streaming from the premiere. 

By carefully lighting online kindling (releasing a fiery logo to movie blogs) and controlling the Internet burn over the course of months (a Facebook contest here, a Twitter scavenger hunt there), Lionsgate’s chief marketing officer, Tim Palen, appears to have created a box office inferno.

Read the rest of the article at the source.

While $45 million is a lot, especially for a studio like Lionsgate, it's actually on the low side when compared to other blockbusters' marketing budget. Lionsgate has used a lot of relatively inexpensive methods to market The Hunger Games.

Get A Physical DIP Card!!

Yesterday, news released that Lionsgate and Cafe Press partnered together to make the DIPs so many fans made an actual reality!

In a special promotion beginning on February 14th and continuing throughout the lifetime of the store, fans will also have a chance to create a free District ID Card* through a new exclusive HYPERLINK "http://www.becomeacitizen.pn/"Hunger Games Facebook application that will be available within the CafePress shop.  Any fan that registers for an ID card through the app can claim a physical ID card that shows among other things their district and job assignment. Existing "citizens of Panem" can also claim their free  HYPERLINK "http://www.becomeacitizen.pn/" The Hunger Games ID card* through the app.

source

While this continues to be one of the coolest marketing campaigns we've ever seen, we hope that they will eventually allow those who registered with Twitter to be able to sign in so we can get physical DIPs too!

Get your physical DIP HERE