Sony Finally Releases Artwork For IT ENDS WITH US. We Have Questions.

Finally. Finally!

Sony has given us a poster for IT ENDS WITH US less than two months before the film’s August 9th release. For those who are wondering, yes, that is very late.

Regardless of why it took so long to get key art, now that we have it, we have questions. The artwork is a bit of a head-scratcher. The studio gave us two versions of the poster. At first blush, it would seem as though the one on the left featuring Blake Lively in profile with flowers in her hair is the primary image. The flowers evoke the pink flowers on the book cover (far right).

Not so fast. Take a look at the bottom right. Yup, it says “only in cinemas.”. The word cinemas, of course, is the first sign that this is an international poster.

Meanwhile, the image in the middle appears to be the domestic poster. How do we know? It says, “exclusively in theaters,” with the American spelling of theater. But it’s an odd choice. Not only do we see very little of Blake Lively’s face, but the image seems slightly out of focus and has no visual link to the book cover. No flowers. No pink. Just the same strong sans-serif font.

As a sidebar, The Quorum will be posting audience grades for both posters next Monday, so keep an eye out for that.

Has the delay hurt the film? Last week, we reported that ENDS is demonstrating some groundswell of unaided awareness. It is close to reaching 1% unaided, which is not bad for a modestly budgeted film two months away from release.

But, as you can see below, the overall awareness numbers have barely budged since the trailer was released a month ago (vertical grey bar). Before the trailer, awareness was at 16%. Since then, there have been two fieldings for the film, and it still sits at 16%, though there have been decimal-level gains.

Remember, unaided awareness is completely unprompted, meaning we ask our survey takers the open-ended question, “What upcoming films are you aware of.” When we survey total awareness, we provide respondents with artwork and a brief description of the film. As you can imagine, these numbers are much higher.

So what does it mean that ENDS is generating some unaided while total awareness has remained flat? Keep in mind that ENDS is based on a wildly popular book, meaning it has a built-in fanbase. Unaided is likely coming from fans of the book. The flat overall awareness suggests the film has yet to expand its audience beyond those core fans.

Hopefully, the arrival of the poster will change that. As we saw with WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING, popular books often translate into box office winners. And though the tracking has been soft, we’re by no means saying it won’t rise to where it needs to be in order to be successful.