'The Hunger Games: Catching Fire' Marketing Campaign - Suzanne Collins Approves!

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire made the cover of the October 29th issue of Variety. The issue has loads of new photos and an article on how The Hunger Games changed Lionsgate, Jennifer Lawrence, and what the future brings for the franchise and the studio. Check out that article and photos HERE. Variety has another really interesting article about Lionsgate CMO Tim Palen and the innovative marketing campaign he's spearheading for Catching Fire. Oh, and the coolest thing about it? Suzanne Collins approves.

From Variety.com

Just as The Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins introduced a dystopian world that entranced millions of readers and moviegoers, so Lionsgate’s marketing chief Tim Palen has brought that universe to life in an elaborately detailed campaign for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire that goes beyond traditional movie posters, billboards, trailers and websites to establish a unique realm of its own.

Palen’s innovative ideas — not the least of which was setting the book’s iconic mockingjay logo ablaze — helped propel the first of four planned Hunger Games movies to nearly $700 million in global ticket sales. He’s now taken the marketing narrative and imagery to a new level in hopes of broadening the audience for the upcoming Nov. 22 release beyond teens and tweens to the faith and family crowd, Hispanics, African-Americans, fashionistas, even seniors.

For Palen, whose soft-spoken, understated demeanor defies a fierce, tattooed marketing warrior with a meticulously plotted battle plan, Catching Fire has unleashed the 51-year-old’s creative ingenuity, and he’s seized the opportunity to tell a bigger, more color-saturated story through provocative visuals, bringing a complimentary world to life that has connected with Collins’ rabid fan base.

“This was dramatically different from anything we did on the first movie,” Palen says. “It was brave of the filmmakers to agree we should be that bold.”

During the year-long campaign that launched last November, Palen went so far as to create a faux online fashion magazine, dubbed Capitol Couture, modeled after luxury publications like DuJour, Gotham and Ocean Drive, built around the ultra-rich and style-obsessed capitol city of Panem, the fictional nation in the bestselling author’s trilogy of young adult novels. The mag features manufactured articles curated by freelance journalist Monica Corcoran Harel, and photos of the film’s characters that reveal their elaborate look, shot by Palen himself.

With Palen crafting the images and message, Hunger Games is well protected. He’s as much of a fan of the franchise as the teens and tweens who made the original film a hit, and passed the books on to their friends and family. Collins has a loyal friend in the marketing topper.

“I’m thrilled with the work Tim Palen and his marketing team have done on the film,” Collins told Variety via email. “It’s appropriately disturbing and thought-provoking how the campaign promotes ‘Catching Fire’ while simultaneously promoting the Capitol’s punitive forms of entertainment. The stunning image of Katniss in her wedding dress that we use to sell tickets is just the kind of thing the Capitol would use to rev up its audience for the Quarter Quell (the name of the games in Catching Fire). That dualistic approach is very much in keeping with the books.”

Pretty much every element of the sequel’s campaign is bolder than its predecessor. Where the first installment relied on a more subdued look to capture Collins’ bleak, oppressed world, Palen and the author felt this was his chance to brighten things up.

“This is the book and the movie of color,” he says, having consulted closely with Collins before designing the campaign. “This is the moment where we can actually have some fun and explore some opportunities that we might not get to have later,” he added, referring to the final book in the Hunger Games series, which Lionsgate is splitting into two movies, Mockingjay — Part 1 and Part 2.

Read on about Palens's inspiration for some of the photo shoots and SO much more at Variety.com