THIS is officially Dreamworks’ worst movie?

This is the second time I’ve heard about this movie in the last week, still don’t know anything about it.

Have seen zero marketing

Since the last short about this movie I saw, I completely forgot this movie existed. I've seen no ads or trailers for it.

This is literally the first time Ive heard about this movie

Likely, they do it to not spoil stuff too.

I didn't even see an ad of the movie until a day or two before it released. The ad was on a bus stop and it just said "Forgotten Island". No characters, no scenery, just the title on a swirly blue background.

if you haven't heard of this movie or are just assuming it's not worth your time, indifferent, dismissive, etc., please read this comment. i understand the inclination to watch this short and think something like "dang that sucks but i'm sure if the movie was any good then i would've at least HEARD of it" but please hear me when i say this movie is GREAT. i wasn't even aware of how under-marketed it was. i go to the movies a lot so i've seen the trailer a few times and i've been seeing the poster around my theater, so it's actually a huge shame to learn that studios still haven't learned the lesson that it is in fact beneficial to promote good movies even if they aren't a proven IP.

forgotten island is by the same directors as puss in boots the last wish, and it is clearly a passion project that (in my opinion) surpasses the last wish. it tells a really heartfelt story of two lifelong friends with very different personalities suddenly facing a major change in their lives that could separate them indefinitely. the story takes place in two artistically distinct (but both beautifully realized) worlds: the characters' home of the phillipines, and the titular "forgotten island," the mystical island of Nakali populated by different spirits and creatures from Filipino folklore.

the movie has incredible, bombastic animation that doesn't waste a single frame, and it even has several brief scenes that are entirely hand-drawn 2D animation and feature a completely different artstyle each time.

the thing that actually surprised me most is that this movie is FUNNY. like, shockingly funny. which is even more shocking considering this movie probably averages like 20 jokes per minute and i don't remember a single joke that fell flat for me. i was consistently smiling, frequently exhaling air from my nose, and even laughed out loud a couple times.

i implore anyone to please go out and support this movie. we need more stories like this that are told with a singular voice, clear vision, and beautiful and passionate animation.

They didn’t market it to anyone who would watch it. This is only the third time I’ve heard of this movie and it’s after it “flopped”

Elemental was such a good movie,really sucks it didn’t do well in the theaters

This movie is going to go crazy in a few years. I promise

Once again, once we as the consumer take away the will of corporations, finally we will start to see a balancing of power. So many amazing movies get swept under the rug and go “straight to DVD.”

this is so sad bc its beautiful

Same as I felt about Hoppers. They enjoy the Lizard bit which was pretty fun, but also the rest of the comedy bits, and sure you don't have to spoil the THIRD act change which was a great twist, but you could at least have shown more than just the two other creatures we met during the trailers 😂

when u mentioned transformers one, i felt the harsh sting 😭😭😭 its always the good movies that get this sorta treatment, its not fair :(

the problem is studios don't bet on marketing anymore. a good marketing major could make this work. however they are probably just contracting with the same uppy tight people who aren't on par with the fast moving era. this will happen again and again until a good marketing agency proves that new is good, and then they will change the industry

While it may be true that there is zero marketing, also note that even when it was released during its debut week, it was only shown in certain number of theaters and had limited number of screen times and only on certain dates. When I watched the following movie in a theater, even though it was on the date of its debut, it only had one or few screening time

The selling point of the movie should be about the mystical Island but the marketing focused more heavily on the personal backgrounds of the voice actors and the director.

The Forgotten Island -> The forgotten Marketing

(But in all seriousness these studios need to lock in. TF1 was one of the best movies in the franchise in years and a large part of it’s flop was due to poor marketing so nobody gave it a chance upon opening)

I REALLY want to see Forgotten Island. But recently my husband lost his job and had to take a lower paying job and one of our cars just completely gave uo the ghost. On top of that gas is disgustingly expensive. I just Can Not afford to go to the movies.

These studios refuse to market original, non-franchise films, and then use it as an excuse to claim that nobody wants original stories anymore when they underperform. People aren't watching it because they don't know about it.

Oh dreamWorks, how far you have fallen off while you have made some good ones You’ve also made a bunch of garbage that your audience has lost your trust

Just came back from the cinema
PLEASE watch this movie
Not every joke lands but THE ARCHITECTURE, THE COLOR WORK AND THE ENDING ARE SO WORTH IT

It's such a shame the movie isn't performing well in the box office. I'm FilAme and went to watch it with my boyfriend in theaters. It was nice to see a movie that's in touch with my culture, and share the joy in seeing it on the big screen with my partner. Especially since I live in a town that doesn't have a lot of Filipino cultural presence.

just watched the movie, and it was GENUINELY BEAUTIFUL. Easily one of my top favorite movies now, one of the funnest ones ive seen. Its so sad to me knowing that this will probably flop, considering the horrible marketing.

Reminds of pan's labyrinth. Which famously is a good movie but the trailer and marketing misrepresented the movie making it seem children friendly (it's not) or letting people know it's in spanish. That was no English dub. Some a lot of movie goer who didn't want to read subtitles were and kids were horrified at some scenes in the movie.

This video is literally the first time I have heard about this movie

I'm chronically online and I've never heard of this movie. That tells me enough about how bad the marketing failed it.

It’s either trailers reveal too much about the movie or they reveal almost nothing about the movie there’s no in between.

As someone who's in the know of these things... This is literally the first time I'm hearing about it. Shame!

A lot of movies this month are having the problem of being actually good movies but having atrocious or confusing marketing that kill its box office performance

Digger is the biggest example. Critically praised and will probably win plenty of awards, but a total box office nuke bookending WB’s legacy, all because nobody knew wtf the movie was meant to be based on the marketing. This movie is in a similar boat.

I was surprised when I saw people talking crap about the movie, and mentioning how much it was failing. Then I realized, I haven’t seen a single advertising of it, except the trailer for it in a theater not long before its release. I fell in love with the concept and visuals pretty much instantly, and it makes me so sad to see just how badly everything went.

I've seen zero marketing about this movie. The way I found out it existed was when I was trying to book tickets to Coyote vs. ACME.

This movie made me cry.

Honestly, the trailers were very accurate on showing it's vibe, pace, and jokes. People were skipping it for a reason. It personally wasnt my cup of tea overall. But the visuals were indeed beautiful, especially watching it in dolby cinema. So that kept me from walking out. I could totally see it being some peoples' 10/10, but def not breaking the box office even with different marketing. It's gonna be getting good numbers when it hits streaming.

This short is how I learned about this movie's existence

I’ve seen plenty of ads for this movie. It has been annoying, and I’ve heard it’s a good movie.

Couldn't also be that it's increasingly unaffordable to see movies in theater during a recession, so folks are less likely to spend money on a film that isn't a blockbuster hit?

Why do they always have the same overworked facial expressions in these computer animated films. I see real life zoomers imitate it too and it’s annoying. Isn’t everyone sick of it by now?
The goofy quirky but capable of anything girl character was cringe to start and is now thoroughly worn out

Uh huh, yeah we just don't want to watch movies about characters that look like this 😭

It’s cause they never market original films anymore. I didn’t see any trailers, ads, etc for this. I didn’t even know it existed until people started talking about how bad it performed on opening

I think another big problem is simply how expensive it is to go to the theater. Sometimes tickets can run you upwards of 20 bucks. Alot of adult audiences just aren't willing to spend that kind of money on a movie that could very easily just be enjoyable for kids. I think there's been a lot of really good original movies this year, movies I'd love to go see, but often times I can only afford to go to one movie per month.

I know some people are saying they haven’t seen any marketing, but I’ve actually seen A LOT. The problem is, nothing I saw made it look like a good or origin movie, I kinda just assumed it wasn’t worth my time

I have been seeing constant ads and trailers for Forgotten Island across all my social media pages for the last month. It was more 'in my face' compared to the other films mentioned who I heard next to nothing about [ besides TF1 ] before their box office release. Unless I'm magically the only one whose algorithm caught it?

Maybe it wasn't the marketing itself, just not marketed well and failed at reaching the right audience. With exception of one or two clips I did notice advertising heavily focused on the goofiness of the film and the voice actors, shying away from thematic emotional weight. Maybe that was the mistake.

Let's all just remember that The Princess Bride was also marketed horribly, and came back as one of the most widely known movies ever made.

Y’all say there was zero marketing and yet somehow I was still getting ads for it because of Jollibee. What kinda algorithm do y’all have?

i guess you could say forgotten island was... forgotten

The forgotten island wasn't "marketed badly" it was BARELY MARKETED AT ALL.

With elemental I couldn't get AWAY from the trailers, but the trailers themselves were badly designed and didn't convey the compelling nature of the film so I still heard about its quality and watched in on streaming when it came out.

I had not seen even a SINGLE trailer, advertisement, billboard, poster, NUTHIN for this movie until AFTER it released at a loss.

They do need better marketing, but the bigger problem is that they need MORE marketing in the first place.

This movie was awful. The main characters were unlikable. Plus the animation was just alright.

Hollywood will only learn all the wrong lessons from failures like this

I didn’t seek this movie out; I just saw it. The issue is expectations from both audiences and publishers. For a decade, social media has gatekept nostalgia as the standard, and many people accepted it, so they stick to the familiar. We need to stop blaming only studios. Many people aren’t open to new things; things are expensive..watching a movie is expensive so, they rely on the familiar. Some are hostile to new products, ideas, or settings, and make it everyone else’s problem. So the claim that the studio simply didn’t market it enough isn’t entirely true.

I still don’t think that’s all there is to it

like, my honest first impression of this film WAS that it is a deep, emotional film about friendships
And that was from one trailer! I think like the first one
I haven’t watched yet, though I’m looking forward to it!

I don’t know what the secret sauce is, but it has at least ONE good trailer that worked for me
That had to count for something

These non-franchise movies are also just incredibly boring. Except maybe Elements.

I honestly think that future movies are gonna be so trash that this bs is gonna look good

I'm glad Laika is doing pretty good with marketing Wildwood. The trailers have all done really well. But I guess we'll see how successful the marketing was at the end of the month.

I've been seeing ads for several months but they definitely made it look like just a bunch of wacky humor I've seen before. It didn't look compelling at all.

On the contrary I saw the ad and immediately knew it was going to be about two friends and how they navigate their friendship as they grow into adults. The actual problem is the fact that no one’s attention span is longer than 3 seconds any more because social media has gotten us into this “give me all information in 3 second” culture with reels/shorts. Ads have always been like this if you look in the past, people just don’t want to search for what they want to see, they want it put in front of them at the dinner table and force fed into their mouths.

The ONLY reason I even took interest in this movie is because I’m Filipino. And I heard for OTHER FILIPINOS that it was based around Filipino folklore. I never saw any substantial ads at all. It’s really disappointing because it’s one of the first mainstream movies about Filipinos and it was actually extremely good!

Tbh the characters look unappealing & forgettable

Someone just needs to hard reset the marketing departments, they have been terrible for years

I'm pretty sure they mention the "losing friendships" in the trailer, when one of them says they are doing to a different college and the other is really sad, and then it goes on to say they they've been together for a very long time, and now they are forgetting everything they've been through...

The only ads I had ever seen for this movie was during previews for other movies in the theatre. I have never once seen an ad for Forgotten Island elsewhere online

Transformers One especially made me super upset. The couple of ads they made were absolutely abysmal and effectively disguised what was a refreshing, extraordinarily poignant action adventure with gratuitous robot violence as a kid-focused comedy with bad jokes and a shitty celebrity voice cast.

The voice acting was amazing!! The story drew me in immensely! The designs were incredible! And the music was absolutely stellar. It is a CRIME that movies like this get buried.

Meanwhile the Wildwood trailer is a cinematic masterpiece all on its own!

Eh, I didnt see it because the character models looked like the typical Millennial-maxing type of slop character designs, and those tend to also carry Millennial-maxing writing that I honestly can't fucking stand; ie *something crazy happens* "Woah, so THAT just happened" type of stuff. With television having a lot of bangers, most aren't gonna spend money at the theater for something they already think they'll hate before they even know what it is. And we are all very worn out and tired of the H.R department millennial style of writing, it's been too often lately. Not saying this has that, because I don't know, but we now correlate animation style with what the writing will be, similar to how we now do that with casting choices in live action content. It's a learned prejudice

They also need less generic names. "Forgotten Island" is not a name people are going to remember when they see it. Just like "Strange World".

Am I the only one who saw everything about everything of this movie? I was overwhelmed with ads, clips, behind the scenes, and such

You also have to take into account the amount of racists there are that will not watch a movie if the main characters are poc let alone women on top of that

This is the type of movie people end up discovering on a plane flight

For me the commercials made me hate this film with the cringe dialogue like the "fart in the wind" line

Current film companies do not want to market original non-franchise films not just cause they are worried of them underperforming but because they are worried of the stories. Due to current social and political issues, many shows, games and other media are attacked for their stories and more important subject matter. If influencers and critics gets any hint of the film or show having any type of content that goes against their anti-human views they scream woke and discourage people to watch the shows. So as a result many film studios are not going to properly market a new series shows due to the fear of it literally be shot dead in the water.

I still plan on seeing it. I’ve just been busy. I hope word of mouth helps this movie

It was for a small majorty of america. This wasnt for everyone. It was a finding myself and dealing with emotions. We are tired of those stories.

I'm tired at this point of pink and purple in everything. I don't wanna see an entire movie in that palette.

Another quirkslop mass produced movie that is targeted to nobody with the same style of animations and they wonder why they don’t do well

Sometimes I dont know if they only market the “goofy” parts for kids to be interested or something, but it usually doesnt really work.

I agree with you that it's shit and too emotion focused like where's the originality?

Marketing problem is not the only problem, people are broke.
I will probably see it when it is only it's last few weeks as my cinema does $8 tickets on movies that are about to go out.

From the trailers it feels like its trying too hard to be "hip with the kids"

To be fair, the trailer is riddled with DEI, feministic and LGBT+ markings
And so many are done with that stuff
The pacing looks so fast, only people with ADHD can keep up

The shift in animation, gives the feel of Hyperactive Impulsiveness, so pretty much any impulsive thought got through, instead of asking, will this benifit the story

Lol I forgot the forgotten island existed

They mostly don’t know how to market animated franchise films either, but at least those mostly market themselves based on the strength of the previous film so the ads just need to remind you that it exists. If I had a dollar for every time an ad has actively made me avoid an animated film that I later find out is actually great, I’d have enough to buy a pretty fancy sandwich.

Compare the trailers to Wildwood and that'll show you how to market a non-franchise, original animated movie. It looks beautiful and haunting all at the same time, full of emotion and pain but also epic in scale. It looks like a personal journey for siblings and a dysfunctional family, mixed into a dark fantasy world where war and magic is everywhere.

Forgotten island just looked like 2 girls go on a wacky adventure and theyre so quirky and everyone else is so quirky too. Dog boy goes full dog was the bookend of the trailer.

Not to riff on Forgotten Island, but as a big fan of their recent films Puss in Boots The Last Wish and The Wild Robot (another non-franchise big success), they just made Forgotten Island looks very generic and pretty immature - going purely from the trailer. I have no idea what the final product is like.

A few years ago, I was hanging out with a friend, and their movie-snob roommate mentioned he was going to a movie showing. There was practically no marketing for it, so he assumed that meant it was going to be awful. I said that just because a studio doesn’t advertise doesn’t mean it’s not good. Our Flag Means Death got barely any advertisement on HBO, but became a runaway hit purely by word of mouth, even beating out the premier of their big marvel show, Moon Knight (and tbh, I think hbo was super bitter about it, but that’s a different story). The roommate went to the showing, and the next time I saw him, he said it was fantastic.

But yeah, long story short: no advertising doesn’t mean anything about the movie

this is the first i ever heard of this movie

Movies like this need 90’s style commercial advertising

I've seen more marketing for Forgotten Island than I saw for Kpop Demon Hunters, yet that movie BLEW UP. I bet if they put it on a streaming service it would also do well. I haven't seen it yet, but I do want to!

Meanwhile Studios are force feeding me their old reheated nachos while fresh new food is being left to go bad in the kitchen…
I’m so sick and tired of remakes

I'm skeptical about it because I'm over overly quirky charater tropes. Ill still watch it because I like to try and give animations a chance so we'll see if I like it.

Maybe people just weren’t hooked by the premise . It’s not my fault i didn’t want to watch this

I didn't even know this one came out already, christ. The marketing definitely failed them. I saw more for the last _Jackass_ movie, and A24 was ruthless with Backrooms marketing.

Properly market?? I saw ads for this all the time at the movies and when it came out my son had 0 desire to see it lol

OH WAIT I REMEMBER THIS NOW, when I was at the cinema to watch the last episode of the amazing digital circus there was trailer before the movie and this was one of them and I DIDNT REALISE IT WAS THE SAME LOL

When we watched it, my brother and I were making jokes that all the movie review YouTubers will be making “Forgotten Island is an underrated MASTERPIECE” in 4 years

I hadn't even SEEN any advertising for this movie until there was a tie- in with the Finch app.

Yup. I kept talking about it to my parents, how cool the animation was, the themes usually unexplored, then an ad came up for it on youtube a couple days later with fart jokes and that "quirky" focus and they looked at me like I was crazy. Why won't they just advertise the movie for what it is?

On your take of the movie. I think its pretty symbolic of how Filipinos cope with unfair circumstances -often using comedy as a cover up and as a way to bring awareness to issues.

I saw that one ad on YouTube for this movie. But I like to think I’m sort of an adult now, and a trailer full of nothing but “do you see our quirky dialogue and jokes? Look at how _cool_ and _hip_ we are!” just doesn’t work on me anymore. And I decided that if _that_ the best thing they could highlight about their movie for an ad, I wasn’t interested.

Totally true but also, at least from the trailers/screenshots, this movie oozes millennial quirk

I'm a simple man. I see the side-shave and hipster glasses and I skip. Really though the only time I go to see a movie anymore is when I'm craving popcorn, and it really doesnt matter what movie it is.

I almost went to see this, but in one ad I saw there was a clip where they needed to be chill and respectful to a very cutesy mushroom guy but of course one of the girls was like “I can’t do it he’s too CUUTEE I’m gonna SQUISH HIMMM” and I immediately got the ick. It’s a dumb, quirky-girl trope that’s I’ve seen done so many times before. and I was like “if this is what they’re marketing the movie on, I don’t think I actually want any part of this.” Now that I hear the marketing was just done poorly, I feel a little bad

This is gonna be one of those years in film where people are going to look back and go “wait THAT came out within a month of THAT?! And it was the same year as all these other movies, what the hell??” (The hell is the industry finally rebounded from covid and the pendulum swung a bit too far)