Kristin Thompson, Click To View Trailer

(In The Frodo Franchise)

Here, Thompson outlines how the struggle between studio control of marketing and film information and fandom's insatiable desire for new details and minutiae can create extremely positive results for the studio from a promotional perspective. This struggle, I think, is indicative of the larger struggle between various kinds of users - producers, creators and audiences - which is the site of definition and articulation for a franchise. It is only in that give-and-take that the franchise exists.

It seems that The Lord of the Rings was instrumental in Hollywood's embracing the marketing potential the Internet, not only to attract and encourage fans but also to pitch new audiences on a film via mainstream, third-party news sites and so on. The Internet, even moreso than television, allows different forms of marketing and information to be targetted at various audiences for maximal effect.

One interesting anecdote Thompson relates is that apparently early in the marketing for the trilogy, it was assumed that the target audience was primarily 15-30 year-old males - an assumption which was disproven rapidly once the film was released. It strikes me that although the classic male fanboy audience might have been the most vocal and obvious potential audience, this particular franchise probably had a great many lapsed fans who had read the books as children in the 80s, 70s, 60s - probably even the 40s and earlier - but had not engaged with the franchise significantly prior to the films' release. The films, however, mainstreamed Tolkien in hitherto unprecedented ways, allowing these lapsed fans to reawaken their latent fandom.