So much of modern movie marketing is about knowing how to make an audience feel like they are a part of your film’s success story. This has been made readily apparent time and again throughout the past year, especially when it comes to the horror genre. Films like Curry Barker’s Obsession and Kane Parson’s Backrooms became zeitgeist-capturing phenomena, due in no small part to the ways in which the marketing surrounding the film was able to communicate directly with the audience for the films.
Each of these films had a viral marketing campaign that caught on like wildfire, and each made audiences feel like they were getting in on the ground floor of something that was getting ready to explode in popularity. So it’s fascinating to see a new horror movie from a veteran filmmaker get all of this so wrong, when it comes to Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man.
On paper, Ice Cream Man had a lot of net positives going for it that could have led to the cultivation of a built-in audience in a similar way to those earlier successes. Roth has long been an established name in horror, and his creative and personal proximity to filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez has served him well in keeping his name afloat within the industry, even after disastrous releases like Borderlands. But Ice Cream Man marked a bold new chapter for the filmmaker; one in which he was taking full authorship of the story at large.
Roth founded the media company The Horror Section to produce and distribute small-budget horror films, including his own, and Ice Cream Man is the fruit of that labor. This kind of going-it-alone narrative could have worked extremely well for Roth and resulted in an extremely profitable release, but instead, the marketing of the film has been outright atrocious and resulted in the film ranking in eighth place at the box office on its opening weekend, netting barely $2 million.
For frame of reference, Ice Cream Man had a budget of $5.5 million, a small but not small-enough figure in the grand scheme of things. That budgetary total is not accounting for the cost of marketing either, meaning that Ice Cream Man likely needed to recoup at least $8 million before even beginning to nudge into profit. In theory, that seemed entirely possible even just a few short weeks ago, but it’s difficult to overstate just how much Roth and the team around the film shot themselves in the foot over and over again in the lead up to this release.
The first and most critical factor in Ice Cream Man’s demise was the actual quality of the film. It is a rancid film, and was greeted as such by audiences and critics alike, receiving scathing reviews and terrible word-of-mouth. But further accentuating these issues was the very public guffaw of utilizing AI-generated footage within the film, lying about it in interviews in the hopes of avoiding potential backlash, and then ultimately getting scooped and being forced to admit that the film is littered with AI-generated elements. This made the film an even more radioactive topic than it already was, as it became the centerpiece of a larger discussion about the relative qualities (or lack thereof) of such decisions.
If Ice Cream Man were generating a more positive reception with those who had seen it, a $2 million opening would be nothing to write home about, but it wouldn’t be a disaster either. Just earlier this year, Obsession famously saw its box office totals growing higher each subsequent weekend as word-of-mouth travelled far and fast. However, given how utterly devoid of anything remotely positive the discourse surrounding this film has been, it is extremely unlikely that the film will even be in theaters more than another week, much less get much closer to recouping that budget.
In other words, due to some awful (AI -generated) marketing materials, the quality of the film, and some very public snafus, Ice Cream Man is very much dead on arrival.
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