Did ‘Montana’ dupe parents?

The Hannah Montana 3D movie could be considered marketing mastery or a sneaky trick. Hannah Montana Release: Savvy or Sneaky? No Big Surprise When Disney Extends ‘Hannah Montana’ Limited Release.

Hurry, hurry, hurry! The movie event of the year! One week only! It’s one of the oldest tricks in the marketing book — the limited-time offer — and The Walt Disney Co. worked it to perfection last weekend when tweens spent $31.3 million to see the studio’s latest hit, “Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert.”

But now that the 3-D film’s run has been extended, were parents duped into rushing their kids to the theater? Or was it just another case of Disney’s marketing mastery?

Dan Smith, marketing professor at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, called the strategy “a legitimate tool.”

“When you create that kind of buzz and combine it with scarcity, you’re going to drive up demand,” Smith said. “The model strikes me as not much different from a rock concert.”

As most media companies are ceding control of when and where consumers can watch shows or listen to music, Disney is managing its content as tightly as ever. And based on the movie’s results — the “Hannah Montana” film set a record for any movie opening on a Super Bowl weekend — people are falling over themselves to keep Disney’s schedule.

“When you have a successful franchise, setting the time table and controlling the distribution just develops an appetite for more,” said Michael Kupinski, media analyst and head of research at Noble Financial Group. “No one is as good at this as Disney.”

The company rode the strength of its “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “High School Musical” and “Hannah Montana” to a 9 percent increase in fourth-quarter revenue and better-than-expected earnings. Fees at its ESPN sports networks and higher visitors to Disney theme parks also boosted earnings. Disney shares rose $1.43, or 5 percent, to $31.50 Wednesday.

Robert Iger, Disney’s president and chief executive, credited the company’s focus on developing brands and producing content across its various media and theme park properties.

“Five years ago we could count upon only two major franchises, and today we have 10 vibrant, creative properties,” Iger said in a conference call with Wall Street analysts.

“Hannah Montana” fits the mold perfectly. It started as a TV show on the Disney Channel and the concert tour generated $36 million in ticket revenue last year. The movie has already grossed more than five times the $7 million the company said it cost to make.

Disney plans to produce a third season of the TV show and may produce a feature film based on the show.

The company says it planned all along for a one-week run for the “Hannah Montana” film, envisioning it as an extension of the wildly popular concert tour that played to sold-out arenas across the country last year.

Disney has also used limited-time offers to sell anniversary or special versions of its iconic animated movies, from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” to “Pinocchio,” and has changed the terms to meet demand.

The studio extended the “Hannah Montana” run on Saturday, giving theater operators the option to show the film for as long as they like. Disney said it responded to “astounding” demand on the opening weekend.

But the company also knew long ago the movie would be a smashing success.

Advance ticket sales were higher than for any movie that was not a sequel, and the fifth-highest ever, according to online ticket seller Fandango. In fact, it has been the top-selling movie at the service since the tickets went on sale Dec. 1.

Fandango alone sold more than $9 million in advance tickets for the weekend shows of “Hannah Montana,” nearly a third of the total box office. Disney says it told theater operators well in advance the company would extend the run if demand was high.

The company says it wasn’t trying to manufacture scarcity to drum up demand.

“We were trying to make it like an event, like a concert,” said Mark Zoradi, president of Walt Disney Studios, Motion Picture Group.

“If we were trying to make it scarce we would have had a more limited release,” he said.

The movie ran on all of the country’s 683 public screens equipped to handle 3D films, and averaged $45,534 per screen over the weekend. A typical blockbuster opens in 3,000 theaters and averages about $7,000 at each, according to industry statistics.

Most movies are released as broadly as possible, Smith said. “You want a large number of people to see it quickly just in case it doesn’t fly,” he said.

A trend that has alarmed studios is huge opening weekends that fade quickly after a blast of negative word of mouth. That makes the first weekend even more important, Smith said.

“By limiting the run, you can eliminate the effects of bad press by forcing anyone who’s interested to see the movie right away,” he said.

Apparently Disney won’t need to worry about an abrupt falloff in ticket sales. “Hannah Montana” received an “A” grade from moviegoers polled by CinemaScore, and Fandango said advance sales remain strong for the movie into next week. ~ By Jeremy Herron, AP Business Writer

Most powerful celeb couples

Celebs: Brad Pitt | Angelina Jolie | Cameron Diaz | Justin Timberlake | Jessica Biel | Nicole Kidman | Kate Moss |

For a culture of star gazers, the only thing more intriguing than Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie is the star couple “Brangelina.”

The public need only flip open a tabloid or surf the blogs for the up-to-the-minute happenings of the duo, better known by their one-word media moniker. That widespread fascination with the minutia of their lives earned the couple a spot atop Forbes’ first-ever list of Hollywood’s Most Influential Couples, a look at which celebrity pairings have the greatest impact on popular culture.

To determine which couples landed on the list, we looked at both Web presence and press clippings for more than 50 A-list couples — some still together, some not — over the course of the last year. Then, with a whittled-down list, we reached out to both Encino, Calif.-based E-Poll Market Research’s E-Score Celebrity for appeal data, and celebrity weeklies — People, Life & Style and In Touch — for a tabloid cover count.

Pitt and Jolie score high across the board, thanks to their humanitarian lifestyle, ever-expanding brood, and general likeability as a couple. And according to People magazine Deputy Managing Editor Peter Castro, the duo, like so many star couplings, are far more appealing as an entity than they are on their own.

“[Pitt] is pretty to look at, and he’s a fabulous actor, but he’s not the most scintillating person on his own,” Castro says. “But hook him up with, arguably, the world’s most beautiful woman, and then you have the makings of a really interesting tableau.”

But while the public’s access to couples like Pitt and Jolie has grown, thanks to the proliferation of celebrity weeklies and blogs, the fascination with Hollywood romance is nothing new. In fact, it was once the workings of the movie studios to publicize — if not manufacture — such scandal-prone courtships.

The relationships offer a real-life soap opera with daily, if not hourly, twists for the public to feast on. And it’s that drama that keeps the public interested, explains Castro, who likens the ups and downs of A-list couplings to a modern-day version of the 1980s TV drama “Dynasty.”

Consider supermodel Kate Moss’s on-again, off-again romance with rocker Pete Doherty. Though the second-place couple finally called in quits in July 2007, the duo was long known for serving up dish-worthy news. Whether it was their celebrity looks, rocky relationship, or hard-partying ways, they quickly became a tabloid staple.

What’s more, the particulars of a star’s relationship give the public a window into that celebrity’s life, adds Jill Stempel, the New York bureau chief of photo agency World Entertainment News Network.

For Nicole Kidman, that window has served up a host of highs and lows in recent months. Thanks to the buzz surrounding her country-singer hubby Keith Urban’s stint in rehab and her “is she or isn’t she” pregnancy (for the record, she is), the pair ranked third on the list.

But it isn’t simply the details of getting — and staying — together that garner big buzz. In fact, many times it’s the breakup that sends the tabloids swooning.

Case in point: longtime lovers Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake, who famously split in early 2007. The end for the ninth-place couple didn’t happen happily or quickly: Upon seeing her ex flirting with “Seventh Heaven” star (and Timberlake’s current squeeze) Jessica Biel at a Golden Globes party shortly after their split, Diaz reportedly snapped at both stars, garnering plenty of media mentions in the process.

Embarrassing? Sure. But Diaz’s visible vulnerability had an upside: It made the Hollywood beauty more real to her fan base. The way Castro sees it, the emotions she exhibited were those the average person can relate to.

But there’s another reason for the public’s fascination: “Let’s face it, these are fabulously wealthy, gorgeous people, and I think there is a certain amount of, ‘Oh goody, something bad is happening to them,’” he says of the perverse delight the public takes.

According to E-Poll President and Chief Executive Gerry Philpott, it comes down to this: Marital bliss alone doesn’t sell tabloids. Rather, a couple has to offer constant relationship developments (think: getting together, getting pregnant, or getting divorced) to maintain the public’s interest.

“If a couple is just happily married, it gets boring for the average person,” he says. “It’s probably wonderful for the couple, but it’s not too exciting for the press or [its] readers.”