I came across this tonight on Twitter, something that really makes me wonder how all of these great PR decisions are being made. TechCrunch, a must-read tech blog, rented out an AMC theater in San Francisco on Wednesday for a special pre-screening of the Iron Man movie (which looks awesome, by the way). They were going to charge people $1 to go see the movie, taking care of the rest of the ticket costs. This looked like a wonderful idea, until they got a nasty-gram from Marvel ordering a cease & desist of the movie screening. Despite working directly with Paramount on the movie screening, Marvel is serious in their threat to shut down the operation.
You’re kidding me Marvel. It’s been disappointing to watch one of the most cherished companies of my youth shoot themselves in the foot time and time again. The one big thing they’ve got going for them is their licensing for movie properties, and they somehow still manage to screw that up
Look, if it’s that important that Marvel doesn’t want people to see this movie, then I guess I won’t be going to see it this opening weekend. Normally I’m all over super-hero movies, standing in line on opening night, but apparently Marvel doesn’t want geeks to watch the movies. I realize that my boycott of Marvel doesn’t mean anything to them, but I’m not going to give Marvel (through Paramount) money when they think they can jerk people around like this – at least not on opening weekend.
Update: TechCrunch got to the bottom of it, it turns out Oracle was the culprit. Marvel apologized, so I’m good with Marvel once again. Oracle, on the other hand…