Guillermo del Toro recalls the moment he realised his gothic romance Crimson Peak was destined to not find its audience.
Given the incredible quality of his filmography, 2015’s Crimson Peak is sometimes viewed as a misstep for Guillermo del Toro. The dark gothic romance earned $75 million from a $57 million budget and picked up generally favourable reviews from critics. For a filmmaker who has won Oscars and produced some incredibly revered films, that does leave Crimson Peak as something as an outlier.
It should be added though that the film still very much has an audience that will tell you what a great watch it is. Film Stories is one of them, given that we put it on our list of 11 creepy and unsettling films that aren’t traditional horror movies back in 2022.
According to del Toro, that ‘s the reason why the film didn’t perform as well as he’d hoped. The filmmaker has popped up at in an interesting new interview at Vulture, and reminded us that the film’s position as an unsettling gothic tragedy – but clearly not a horror – meant that it was misrepresented to audiences, hurting the film’s reception.
In his own words: “the thing that will always, pun intended, haunt that movie is that it was sold as a horror movie. But I remember distinctly, when we had the meetings [about promotion], they were all targeted toward getting the horror audience for the opening weekend. And I knew we were doomed! I was saying ‘you should promote the romance, and you should promote the mystery. The last thing you want to do is promote it as horror.’ We were opening in October, and October is the month of Halloween, so I understand why it happened.”
Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddlestone and Jessica Chastain starred in the film which was, as Guillermo del Toro has pointed out, more of a love letter to tragic gothic romances than a straight-up horror.
Still, studio marketing departments (Universal Pictures in this case) will try these misleading strategies, even if we’ve seen them fail so many times: from musicals being marketed as non-musicals to films marketed off the back of stars who aren’t that present in the film, it’s a tactic that we’ve seen plenty of times and will no doubt see agin, often when a Hollywood marketing department doesn’t really know how to sell the film in question.
del Toro’s next movie is a Frankenstein project for Netflix, so marketing that one should be a breeze. Mr del Toro can rest easy on that front, we hope.
