Don promotion

NOTE: Since this post probably has more youtube videos embeded than I should have embeded, if you have any problems with sound or anything then try refreshing this page. If that doesn't work then click directly onto the video - that will redirect you to the video as it is on youtube.

Don, the new Shah Rukh Khan film was released in India on the 20th of October. It is a remake of the 1978 classic with Amitabh Bachchan. It is also Shah Rukh's return to playing bad guys, he's not done that for the last 10 years I think :D
I have not seen it, so I can't tell you anything about it really. All I know is that it's getting mixed reviews, but doing rather well despite that - especially overseas.

The point of this post is not the film itself though, but the promotion of it which I think is great :D I don't think I've seen anything like this in Western cinema. Then again the only marketing of big Western hits that I follow religiously are the Harry Potter movies, so perhaps this sort of thing has been done before and I just haven't come across it ;-P But to me it is new and I really liked it, so I thought I'd share :) Perhaps the trailers on their own aren't that extraordinary, but I think the scale of the marketing is quite something :) (if you're not into the song and dialogue trailers, do scroll down to the Channel V trailers cause those are totally hilarious :D )
I've tried to put them in the order that they were released but I may have made mistakes, also there might still be some trailers that I don't know about.

The first teaser trailer that came out was this:


Then came trailer number two (and a recent law in India forbids depicting smoking on screen unless it's specifically stated that it's bad for you, so as you see - there is no cigarette in that final shot hehe):


And trailer number three:


At about this time I think, they finally released the theatrical trailer:


A veeeery (in Indian cinema terms), spicy teaser trailer number 4 followed:


And then there was a second "dialogue teaser":


And further song teasers:



And if this isn't enough for you, this is where the marketing got really, really hilarious. The promos on Channel V were really quite something.
Here's the first one:

And the second one (no English subtitles on this one, but they do speak quite a lot of English, so you should be alright):


And of course apart from the trailers, there was lots of merchandising as well. I've not been following that part of the promotion that carefully, but I thought the clothing collection was hilarious. Of course there was an official reception to unveil the collection, you can read a short article about it here
And you can see Shah Rukh wearing one of the Don jackets with the inscription "When I Die Bury Me Down So That The Whole World Can Kiss My Ass" here. And of course a sign of Don's presence at the reception had to be left as well! :D

On a final note - don't you think it's amazing that they've managed to make so many different sort of promos and yet one is still left pretty clueless as to what the actual plot of the film is? :D