“If we weren’t making decisions based on marketability, John Malkovich would be in every movie.” Tad Friend's New Yorker article about modern movie marketing is full of great quotes like that. (It's attributed to a nameless "movie marketeer.") Friend writes, "It is often said in Hollywood that no one sets out to make a bad movie, but the truth is that people cheerfully set out to make bad movies all the time. It is more accurate to say that no one sets out to make a movie without having a particular audience in mind." Here's the way it breaks down: "The collective wisdom [among marketers] is that young males like explosions, blood, cars flying through the air, pratfalls, poop jokes, 'you’re so gay' banter, and sex—-but not romance. Young women like friendship, pop music, fashion, sarcasm, sensitive boys who think with their hearts, and romance—-but not sex (though they like to hear the naughty girl telling her friends about it)...Older women like feel-good films and Nicholas Sparks-style weepies: they are the core audience for stories of doomed love and triumphs of the human spirit. They enjoy seeing an older woman having her pick of men; they hate seeing a child in danger. Particularly once they reach thirty, these women are the most 'review-sensitive': a chorus of critical praise for a movie aimed at older women can increase the opening weekend’s gross by five million dollars. In other words, older women are discriminating, which is why so few films are made for them." On the other hand, a marketing consultant named Terry Press told Friend that “Guys [i.e., "older men"] only get off their couches twice a year, to go to Wild Hogs or 3:10 to Yuma. If all you have [in your movie's target demographic] is older males, it’s time to take a pill.”

Although marketing divisions may be the enemy of the art of movies, there is an art to devising a successful marketing campaign. Friend spends much of his time profiling Tim Palen, a 47-year-old who has designed campaigns for Lionsgate films ranging from Crash and W. to Rambo and the Saw franchise. It was he who came up with the weird mix of gross-out provocation and graphic elegance that was the poster image for Saw II: a pair of severed fingers laid out to look like a "II."

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