I Want To Play A [Marketing] Game.

“If it’s Halloween, it must be Saw.”

That’s the tagline that Lion’s Gate has been using to promote its annual horror franchise outings for the past few years now.  Since 2004 when the first Saw debuted on October 29, the gory, plot-twist filled series centering on the moralizing, trap-obsessed Jigsaw Killer and the police investigation devoted to stopping him has dominated the scary movie dollar in the weeks surrounding Halloween – an important couple of weeks for horror cinema.

In 2004, the series debut earned a solid but unexciting $55,185,045.00 and a hefty profit on its $1.2 million budget.  Other than Saw V, which opened second behind High School Musical 3, the first Saw is the only one to not open at number one.  For all its unimpressive showing, though, the movie gained strong word of mouth and built a cult following in the DVD and pay-per-view aftermarket.

The movie that did dominate cinemas that Halloween was The Grudge, a spooky ghost story based on a popular Japanese horror film that came with star power in the form of Sarah Michelle Gellar and a more teen-accessible PG-13 rating.  The big names attached to The Grudge saddled it with a bigger budget, but it paid off to the tune of a $110,359,362.00 domestic gross – a great figure for a time of year when a successful opening weekend means breaking $20 million.

The Grudge 2, on the other hand, earned a fraction of the first film’s domestic gross, and the third Grudge film (ironically starring Shawnee Smith – who gained notoriety as Amanda Young in the Saw films) is headed straight to video when it’s released next year.  Compare that to the performance of Saw II, which earned over double what the Grudge sequel took in.

Saw has become a potent and implacable brand in modern horror cinema, which has trended away from the lengthy franchises of the 1980s and hewn to the trilogy model that everyone and their brother seems to be embracing.  Since Saw II’s breakout performance at the box office, the threat of competing with Saw has driven better films – Michael Dougherty’s Trick R’ Treat, for instance – away from wide theatrical release.

How much of the franchise’s dominance is a matter of image, though?

Every Saw after II has earned progressively less, a trend that Saw V seems poised to repeat.  The second-week drop in box office revenue trends up in proportion to these reduced earnings, and the last two installments have each spent less than two months in release, compared to 9 and 10 weeks for the first two films.

So, does this have anything to do with SEO, or am I just reveling in my love of scary cinema?

The takeaway here is that dominance of the Saw movies is mostly marketing-driven, that it has stayed popular by promoting its popularity even in the face of rookie directors, ballooning budgets and increasingly contrived plots.  It has created a window of time in which it is the only viable competitor for as long as the studio continues to produce more films.  Lion’s Gate succeeded in doing this because of strong word of mouth, effective branding, and by staking out a reasonable territory to dominate (one weekend a year) and proceeding to meet its goals.  The marketers working on the Saw films discovered their core viewer and, maybe most importantly, took the seasonality of those viewers into account – horror enthusiasts treat Halloween like Christmas – in order to capitalize.

In the world of e-commerce, the box office is the Google rankings and the movie is your Web site.  What’s your strategy for winning your weekend?