The new Mission Impossible movie is titled Rogue Nation. Paramount cleared their title with the MPAA in January, so they could have gone after Lucasfilm/Disney, but instead the companies agreed not to market Rogue One until after this summer, per The Hollywood Reporter.
Rogue Nation hits July 31; It moved up from December 25 this year to avoid… You guessed it… Episode VII. Rogue One isn’t due until December 2016.
I doubt they were going to do much marketing for the movie in any case – and an exception was made for Celebration, which is pretty much the only place I’d expect anything anyway. I wonder if this means we won’t get a filming or further cast announcement from StarWars.com, but I’m not sure what they consider ‘marketing’ in that case. (I fully expect they’ll drop it all at Anaheim…)
This is so ridiculous.Do they think that people are really so dumb as to confuse the two? Just because one word out of several in the title is the same?
I really don’t see this as silly at all, and that’s because I really do think that the general public *could* confuse the two films.
Considering that many (most?) go to the cinema relatively infrequently, and given the two pictures have single additional title words that differentiate them, it’s important that the studios make their film stand out from the crowd. There’s a lot of background noise, and it’s usually only the films with the best and clearest marketing ‘message’ that push through to make the significant returns Hollywood craves.
To me, this actually seems a pretty sensible way to go about this ‘situation’.
It’s not as if us fans won’t be hearing about the Star Wars ‘Rogue’ movie regardless, and everyone else – from Disney/Lucasfilm’s perspective – needs to be focussed on The Force Unleashed first and foremost.
For general audiences, it might be confusing to be advertising two different Star Wars movies at once, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they held off major advertising until after The Force Awakens is released.
To be honest, I find it rather nice to see that they can work out stuff like that without wasting time on nonsensical legal battles. Might not be the best example that the world is not entirely messed up but still: I like happy endings like this. :-o
As for the likelihood of people mixing up the two: It may be just me but don’t all movie trailers look the same these days? Everyone is doing the same sort of color correction, everyone is doing the same sort of editing, the same shots, the same over the top production design… M:I and Star Wars might not be the most similar of all the franchises but personally I can no longer tell which superhero movie / fantasy epic / sci-fi action extravaganza is which. So I kind of – if only kind of – understand if a major studio doesn’t want to blow half its marketing budget on promoting another studio’s not even finished movie.