Post-Viewing: Alien Covenant's marketing and audience expectations

When bringing attention to an upcoming film, what you choose to unveil and put in the promotional material can be crucial in getting audiences into cinemas. But there’s also a balance between under and over-marketing a product that can negatively impact it on release. Alien Covenant is a great film but its advertising left me scratching my head more often than not. The trailers and promotional material may not be as spoiler-filled and pandering as Batman v Superman or Terminator Genysis but it’s still noticeable for how much footage was put out before the film’s release this year. Let’s have a look at how this happened.

Ridley Scott himself recently said that he believes Prometheus was a mistake, but was it? That depends on what you expected from it; the 2012 sci-fi flick, in terms of advertising, swung back and forth between prequel and not-prequel in the lead-up to release, causing some confusion in audiences. When they finally sat down to watch it, quite a few people were very disappointed that Prometheus wasn’t a direct prequel to Alien but instead a means to explore the mythology of the franchise’s lore and the engineers/space jockeys that were shrouded in mystery since the first film in 1979. Personally, I really enjoyed getting into the film five years ago, despite its dumb moments but the common audience isn’t always so easily satisfied. They wanted the classic monster to make a return and shouted for the director to give them just that.

So, with Alien Covenant, Scott and company decided to appease this frustrated crowd; they reassured people right away that this would be a true Alien film and the dreaded Xenomorphs would make a full appearance. They nailed down the title from the off-set and set about making the film with the monster at its centre. This also carried over into the promotions which revealed a little too much over the past year or so. The trailers revealed a couple of the more grotesque death scenes, some of the battle sequences and the creature itself straddling the hood of a Covenant vehicle. More recently this was followed by “The Crossing”, a prologue of sorts which features David and Elizabeth Shaw bridging the gap between films while also spoiling one of Covenant’s bigger twists. I get the sense that all this material was put out to the public to either fill in the gaps or tide them over, to make sure there was no doubt that Covenant would be a fully-fledged Alien movie. In doing so, they ended up diluting some plot points and scary moments. Some of the pre-release material doesn’t appear in the final product either; possibly being kept back for a director’s cut or Blu-ray release.

This kind of tailoring towards audience needs has happened before for the Alien franchise; when Alien 3 was released to a mixed reception in 1992, the studio felt they had to make up for it somehow, despite the story having a clear and conclusive end. Because of that mind-set and audiences not warming to 3’s bleak tone, we got the crappy Alien Resurrection as a consolation which went way too far with its light-hearted vibe and ended up becoming the worst of the series. Taking on feedback and criticism is one thing but this comes with its own balance; go too far and you risk veering off what makes a film hit home with audiences.

Now that Ridley Scott has (hopefully!) won back the fanbase, the next planned prequel should consider its advertising more carefully, getting the balance right between presenting the film’s tone while not revealing too much. The original Alien film had a masterful trailer that perfectly encapsulated its nightmarish qualities without showing the monster once. Perhaps the crew should take inspiration from that next time. Until then, we’ll have to see how Covenant fares with general audiences; it’s definitely had enough exposure to achieve success, albeit a revealing one.