The 30-second TV spot for "The Village," the new film by M. Night Shyamalan, uses the director's previous films as the key selling point, showing clips from "The Sixth Sense," "Unbreakable," and "Signs"- as the years the films were released- 2000, 2001, and 2002, respectively- flash on the screen.
But there's just one problem: the first two are off by a year. "Sixth Sense" came out in 1999, and "Unbreakable" in 2000; the producers got one out of three right, correctly stating that "Signs" was released in 2002.
A whole NYT magazine feature in '02 detailed the massive, time-consuming process that goes into the launching of a trailer/ad campaign for a movie, using "Signs" as an example. Apparently Night's new film didn't go into such a long process, because at no point did anyone realize that they had the friggin' release dates wrong.
Posted by Stephen Silver at June 8, 2004 10:32 PM