Real Steel: New Robot Character Posters and Viral Fight Video
Posted 09.13.11 by BrentJS
The marketing campaign for the upcoming sci-fi sports movie Real Steel mixes the old with the new, taking the message to the people on the street with large billboards and bus shelter posters. It also targets the Internet-savvy crowd with a 'World Robot Boxing' (WRB) league website. The movie stars Hugh Jackman as a former fighter-turned-robot promoter, but you can tell by the recent batch of posters and the new viral video that the robots are the real stars of the movie.
The WRB website offers a history of the league and has a feature that allows you to build, train, and fight your own robot boxer. Last week, Touchstone kicked the campaign up a notch by distributing a viral marketing package that revealed the existence of an anti-WRB group calling themselves "The Underworld" that promised to show "a real bot fight". Sure enough, the WRB site was "hacked" by The Underworld on the date given in the warning by four short clips from underground, street robot boxing matches. Now, a new viral website has been discovered that shows a brief preview clip of two of the main robots, Noisy Boy and Midas, engaged in an underground brawl.
Evangeline Lilly, Kevin Durand, Anthony Mackie, Hope Davis, James Rebhorn, and Olga Fonda also star in Real Steel.
The movie, based on Richard Matheson's (Stir of Echoes, I Am Legend) 1956 short story "Steel," was adapted for the screen by John Gatins from a story by Dan Gilroy and Jeremy Leven.
Here's the synopsis:
A gritty, white-knuckle, action ride set in the near-future, where the sport of boxing has gone hi-tech, Real Steel stars Jackman as Charlie Kenton, a washed-up fighter who lost his chance at a title when 2000-pound, 8-foot-tall steel robots took over the ring. Now nothing but a small-time promoter, Charlie earns just enough money piecing together low-end bots from scrap metal to get from one underground boxing venue to the next. When Charlie hits rock bottom, he reluctantly teams up with his estranged son Max (Dakota Goyo) to build and train a championship contender. As the stakes in the brutal, no-holds-barred arena are raised, Charlie and Max, against all odds, get one last shot at a comeback.
Next Showing: Real Steel opens Oct. 7