For movies and series, reviews are important because apart from the critic’s opinion, a good review can also mean good publicity. Bad reviews, on the other hand, can prevent viewers from going to the cinema. The film Legend creatively used a bad review in a poster instead of hiding it.
What kind of film is Legend? The film is about the twins Reggie and Ronny Kray, who built a crime empire in England in the 1960s. The film is based on the true story of the twins and is a classic biopic, meaning it is a feature film based on a true story.
The special thing about the film is that Tom Hardy plays both twins simultaneously. The film has received mixed reviews. On Rotten Tomatoes, the critic score is 61% (based on 173 reviews) and a user score of 59% (with over 25,000 reviews).
The film did not hide from a bad review, but even included it on a poster with many good ratings – with a clever trick.
The film about Borderlands has very few positive reviews: The film about Borderlands starts with a rating of 0%, breaking negative records on Metacritic
A trailer for the film can be found here:
A bad review right on the poster
What can be seen on the poster? Many posters and trailers promote shortly before the release of a film or series with various reviews. Legend did the same. On the poster, you can see the two twins, played by Tom Hardy. In the lower foreground, there is the quote: Essential…. A British classic.
In the upper background, there are several 4-5 star critic ratings. However, if you look at the middle rating from The Guardian, you will notice that it actually only has 2 stars. But this is well hidden on the poster since the 2 stars are positioned between the heads of the two twins. There might be more stars hidden behind their heads. You can see the poster here:
The critic also reacted to the poster. In 2015, Benjamin Lee, the critic who gave the 2-star rating, wrote on The Guardian about the poster. Although he found it a smart idea
, he criticized how companies try to re-contextualize quotes and reviews to generate the best publicity.
While my two stars on the poster for Legend were, in my opinion, a fairly clever move, in other cases a careful massage of the truth has often turned into something akin to outright forgery.
Benjamin Lee on the Legend poster (Source: The Guardian)
That was in 2015. Nowadays, film advertising is significantly more prominent on social media. Platforms like TikTok create real hype. For example, a dance video of the evil AI from the horror film M3gan went viral. (via Den of Geek)
The use of negative reviews for Legend also created a small hype on Twitter, as Jim explained in his article. However, there are also anti-hypes
. This could be said again about Borderlands. The film is so poorly received that even a German trash director comments: German trash director Uwe Boll looks at the Borderlands film with schadenfreude: “Now you wish I had directed”
