popular thinking

MARKETING NARNIA FROM WALDEN MEDIA

At the downtown Boston headquarters of Walden Media, co-producers of Disney’s big-budget adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, executives tilt their heads at the notion of Christian marketing.
“There is a keen interest on the part of the American media to throw us in the middle of a culture war,” Walden Media president and co-founder Micheal Flaherty said.
“That’s not our expertise.”
C.S. Lewis’ epic fantasy, which opens Friday, may recast Old and New Testament themes. But Walden Media keeps its focus squarely on the film’s book, devoting its time and energies on educators and librarians - a formula that succeeded for it before in adapting childrens’ books “Holes” and “Because of Winn-Dixie” for the big screen.
Only the scale and pressures for “Narnia” are much larger.
“We never had (a project) that people had such high expectations for,” Flaherty said.
So “Narnia” arrives along with a video game, toys and McDonald’s Happy Meals. There also will be a separate Christian marketing campaign by the same people who hailed The Passion of the Christ.
“That’s Paul Lauer. That’s my friend,” Flaherty said. “He’s a great marketer.”
Lauer’s efforts on “Passion,” exceeded all media and Hollywood expectations by hundreds of millions of dollars.
Still, as Disney’s movie marketing chief Oren Aviv told the Wall Street Journal, “We’re not going after any audience we haven’t gone after before. The difference is that this is the first project (where) we’ve gone after all of them at the same time.”
Walden Media did get involved in the PBS production of Dr. Armand Nicholi’s long-running Harvard seminar and book on “The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life.”
But Deborah Kovacs, Walden’s vice president for publishing, laughed at the notion of grassroots volunteer efforts.
“We’re in the heavy-lifting grassroots marketing,” Kovacs said. “We’re really in retail.”
Walden Media has sent out 350,000 educator’s guides and 90,000 copies of “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe” nationwide, covering just about every elementary and middle school. The company has partnered with Reading is Fundamental, Read Across America and the American Music Conference.
Randy Testa, Walden’s vice president for education and professional development, has visited 17 regional teacher groups.
With help from the Massachusetts Department of Education, Testa developed a “summer content institute” for teachers. Twenty-six teachers from around Boston read the book and developed their own in-school projects.
Testa said teachers here and everywhere else had a simple question: Would the movie be faithful to the book?
Some parochial schools did wonder what faith-based elements made it into the movie, while school districts in the South wondered if the evacuation of the Pevensie kids would translate to students impacted by Hurricane Katrina. Nevertheless, Kovacs said Walden Media is helping school districts nationwide to organize movie field trips this weekend “to a level that theater operators are telling us they haven’t seen.”

Related: Walden Media's official Narnia site
Related: Official movie site
Related: Faith-ful adaptation?: ‘Narnia’ promotion efforts highlight book’s virtues (Boston Herald)