Maybe it's because I don't watch a lot of TV these days, but I've been very fortunate about hype. I saw the trailer for Inception maybe twice before we saw the actual movie. I managed to watch the film and form my own opinion about it well before the hype train crashed through my living room.
The early reviews I read of Inception were great. Everyone called it creative, mind-blowing, intelligent, and so on. But as the days went on, I started seeing more and more reviews that called it over-hyped and not worthy of all the attention it was getting. In other words, these people listened to the hype and built the movie up to be the greatest film ever created, which of course it wasn't. I hate that kind of review, because it really doesn't review the movie itself; it only measures whether the movie lived up to the anticipation. These reviews also make the flawed assumption that everyone is going to experience the same amount of hype. That's obviously not going to be true, since different people watch different amounts of TV, and visit different web sites.
Back in 1994, a couple of friends of mine refused to see Forrest Gump because of the hype. They figured that since most people are idiots, anything that popular must suck. I agree with them about the idiots part, but even so, some things are popular simply because they deserve to be. Knowing these friends, they would have loved Forrest Gump if they could have seen it sans hype. But they never gave it a chance. That's how deep Hype Aversion runs for some people.
Heck, just a few weeks ago, a friend of mine complained about how much hype Titanic got when it came out. That was 14 years ago, are you not over it yet? Those wounds must run really deep. Were you bitten by a movie trailer when you were a child?
But when a movie is over-hyped, exactly who are you blaming? Are you sure it's the people who deserve it? In most cases, production and marketing are two different departments. You shouldn't blame the makers of Forrest Gump just because it was over-marketed. I doubt Robert Zemeckis himself was the one buying up ad time. Besides that, no matter how good a movie is, it's always the job of marketing to give a movie as much advertising as they think they can afford. So really you're just mad because the movie had a large advertising budget, which has nothing to do with how good the movie is.
Plus, a lot of the hype comes from the fans, not the studio. This is the information age. If a movie is good, people will talk about it. If you spend any time at all on the internet, you're going to hear about this movie 1000 times a day. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is. It's one thing to "punish" an overly-advertised movie by not buying a ticket, but I've actually heard people complain about hype that came from non-funded sources, such as news articles, blogs, and online forums. Seriously? You're complaining because a movie was talked about? Should they only make movies that aren't worth talking about?
Don't get me wrong, I don't actually enjoy seeing the same commercials over and over. I don't like seeing the best scenes of the movie 100 times before I actually get to watch the whole thing. I don't want to sift through 50 posts on the same subject just to find a new topic on a message board. But none of these are reasons to judge the film itself. I try not to pay much attention to commercials, and I already disregard 90% of what I read on the internet. If a movie looks good, I'll see it. While I'm sitting in the theater, I don't give a moment's thought to what the internet thought of it. My advice - if you truly can't enjoy a movie for its own merits, and have to compare everything to the buzz around it, then sell your TV, stay off the internet, and see movies either on opening weekend or 10 years later.
