Film com­pa­nies are now cut­ting ​‘ston­er’ ver­sions of trailers

Ston­er movies have been a pop­u­lar sub-genre ever since the hazy hal­cy­on days of Cheech and Chong, but rarely are these films mar­ket­ed in way that allows explic­it ref­er­ences to drug use. That’s large­ly down to restric­tions enforced by the MPAA, which deems trail­ers suit­able for ​“all audi­ences” only if they adhere to its strict rat­ings guide­lines. But giv­en that one in eight adult Amer­i­cans say they use cannabis (accord­ing to a 2016 sur­vey), film com­pa­nies are start­ing to devise alter­na­tive mar­ket­ing strategies.

In The Hero, vet­er­an Hol­ly­wood actor Sam Elliott plays an age­ing movie star who goes on a soul search­ing jour­ney after being diag­nosed with can­cer. It’s a ten­der indie dra­ma about com­ing to terms with your own mor­tal­i­ty, with the weighty sub­ject mat­ter off­set by Brett Haley and Marc Basch’s warm, good-humoured script.

Much of the film’s light­ness comes from Elliott and co-star Nick Offer­man smok­ing a tonne of weed while rem­i­nisc­ing about the good old days. You wouldn’t know this from watch­ing the offi­cial trail­er though, as any sug­ges­tion of such activ­i­ty has been com­plete­ly obscured pre­sum­ably to keep the film’s appeal as broad as possible.

Curi­ous­ly, there is a sec­ond trail­er aimed specif­i­cal­ly at mar­i­jua­na users, whom US dis­trib­u­tor The Orchard have iden­ti­fied as a key tar­get demo­graph­ic. To our knowl­edge, this is the first instance of a movie trail­er being cut with ston­ers in mind. To bet­ter under­stand the think­ing behind this mar­ket­ing tac­tic, we spoke to David Wil­fert, who works to bridge the mar­ket­ing gap between main­stream movie cul­ture and cannabis. Here’s what he had to say about the The Hero’s aim to con­nect with pot-smok­ing viewers.

“Famil­iar with the pre­vi­ous work my agency had done mar­ket­ing films in the mar­i­jua­na space, The Orchard approached TWBE to come up with some­thing cool for The Hero. They knew they had this great film, with awe­some stars and some pot smok­ing, but the demo­graph­ic they were focused on skewed a bit old­er and more con­ser­v­a­tive. They want­ed a trail­er that could cap­i­talise on the film’s ston­er tendencies.

“To me, The Hero is a ston­er dram­e­dy with main­stream poten­tial. I’m always on the look­out for new, inno­v­a­tive avenues to reach eye­balls, and had pre­vi­ous­ly found a com­pa­ny that had installed TV sets in mar­i­jua­na dis­pen­saries and pot doc­tors’ offices to dis­play ads for weed prod­ucts. Sur­pris­ing­ly, no movie dis­trib­u­tors had ever pur­chased space to adver­tise their films, so I fig­ured that this would be a fan­tas­tic plat­form to cap­ture this audience.

“Think about it, they’re in there to buy pot, and they’re sit­ting in the wait­ing room look­ing at a TV. If we put these stars on the screen in front of them doing the same thing that they’re on their way to do, they’re going to con­nect. Since the orig­i­nal trail­er wouldn’t trans­late to the intend­ed audi­ence, we decid­ed to re-cut the spot and cre­ate an upbeat, mar­i­jua­na high­light reel that told the sto­ry in a more famil­iar way. The Hero has great reg­gae music in it, so we took cues from that vibe and played up the ston­er bud­dy angle between Lee (Elliott) and Jere­my (Offer­man).

“We expect­ed that the video would also have life online, so we real­ly want­ed to make it as fun and relat­able as pos­si­ble. With more than enough mate­r­i­al to work with, and Sam Elliott riff­ing a tagline for the strain ​‘Plat­inum Cook­ies’ that was a breeze. Who­ev­er the geneti­cist is behind that plant must be stoked!”

So there you have it. We’ve embed­ded the two trail­ers below so you can see the dif­fer­ence for yourself…