Perhaps it’s never too early to promote a movie, which is why I was surprised to see there’s already a teaser campaign for RoboCop.
And like the Total Recall campaign, it’s a false advertisement, trying to fool you into thinking Rekall is a real company.
I’ve always enjoyed teaser campaigns, and modern teasers can be especially fun, like the District 9 teaser that warned non-humans not to sit on the bus bench, or a simple teaser like the one for Tim Burton’s Batman, which only showed the bat signal with a release date.
This may have been the first time a teaser poster had done this, showing a symbol without a title or credits, even though we see this being done all the time now.
You’re probably also seeing the teaser campaign for Total Recall everywhere too, except it’s a fake ad for Rekall, the company that can make your fantasies come true. Then there’s anti-Rekall ads, which remind me a bit of the “Psychiatry Kills” campaign that’s been launched by Scientology, which shows us that in the new Total Recall, people are onto what Rekall really is and are trying to stop it.
So before the reboot of RoboCop even starts filming, a teaser commercial for OmniCorp, the corporation that creates RoboCop, has already gone live on YouTube.
”Thanks to OmniCorp, you can protect your city with our full line of products,” the commercial tells us. “The Ed-209 protects our battlefields, and now our cities. And in the coming months, we will unveil our newest and most exciting innovation yet, where human resources meets robotic engineering. The RC-2000, the next generation of defensive products. OmniCorp: We’ve got the future under control.”
So it’s definitely way early to promote a movie that’s still well over a year away from theaters, but with RoboCop, this is definitely an interesting method of building interest, and a fun way to potentially fool some people a la District 9 and Total Recall.
The reboot of RoboCop is slated to start shooting this September for a summer 2013 release with Joel Kinnaman in the title role. Gary Oldman, Samuel L. Jackson and Hugh Laurie are also co-starring.
