Peter Stormare is a Hollywood legend. Whether you know him for Ingmar Bergman’s stage production of Hamlet, as the hauntingly dim and ruthless Gaear Grimsrud of Fargo, various side character roles in blockbusters like Armageddon, The Big Lebowski, Bad Boys II, or the Corporal Penguin in the Madagascar franchise, he’s the kind of actor who knows how to entertain, even if you may not exactly recognize that face or voice.
Today Stormare is turning heads for a blockbuster of a different kind. He is the guy you may not quite recognize playing the Replacer for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s marketing campaign.
This marketing is absolutely unconnected to the grim war spy story of the upcoming title and revolves around the fan culture around the Call of Duty franchise instead. In the past few weeks, Stormare’s Replacer has been going around replacing people in their real jobs, so they have time to play Callof Duty, of course.
But this time, Stormare’s Replacer has taken it to another level. So far, he has shown up to Shannon Sharpe’s show to replace musician Fat Joe, copied Sky Sports presenter Mike Wedderburn’s iconic calls, and prepping MMA fighter Anderson Silva.
In a new interview with Variety, Activision Chief Marketing Officer Tyler Bahl has revealed that this viral marketing campaign does not come cheap. In fact, in his words, it is at the scale of any “major motion picture blockbuster that would be launching this year.”
Now, just to put that in context a bit, this year’s dud of a video game movie, Borderlands, had a marketing budget of $ 30 million and a production budget of $ 150 million. In the end, that film made just about enough to pay for the marketing, and only the marketing.
In contrast, the Super Mario Bros. Movie cost $ 100 million to make, and had a marketing budget of $ 150 million. Illumination’s and Nintendo’s movie made $ 559 million in net profit, but what’s really important here is the scale of marketing budgets in these movies.
In fact, the Super Mario Bros. Movie is at the lower range of production budgets, as Disney and Pixar usually spend as much as $ 200 million on making their movies. Movies can now cost as $ 100 million to market, or even more, particularly if the film companies expect large returns from large engagement.
That blockbuster movie thinking is how Activision and Microsoft has approached Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. If Microsoft’s head honchos are expecting big returns for their acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, there’s no better place to look at first than Call of Duty.
And with Microsoft doling out even more big bucks to get the word out, they have definitely raised that ceiling. But call me crazy, they just might make those blockbuster sales that they’re hoping for.
