Marketing Chiefs of Lionsgate and Summit To Remain in Current Roles

Unless you are living under a rock (which I am totally guilty of sometimes), you know that Lionsgate and Summit are merging together. The biggest question was which employees would be cut, considering that the job roles overlap. Some people were nervous about the marketing team for The Hunger Games: Tim Palen with Lionsgate or Nancy Kirkpatrick with Summit. Who would go?

It was announced to today that both Palen and Kirkpatrick will be keeping their roles and might even collaborate on some major projects from both studios, including Catching Fire and Breaking Dawn Part 2. 


Source: Deadline hollywood

Lionsgate Spending $45 Million on Ads

Lionsgate is spending $45 million on advertisements before the movie's premiere in theatres on March 23. It seems well worth it because the movie is projected to make $100 million just on opening weekend.

"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"

Source: LA Times