The going rate for a 30-second-long Super Bowl ad these days is a cool $4 million, which means that Paramount Pictures spent 3.2% of Noah“s $125 million budget on the below ad alone.
Will the gambit pay off? According to a story in The Hollywood Reporter, Noah can use all the publicity it can get. Test screenings have reportedly been held at three different locations, each of which was meant to appeal to a different audience—a Jewish audience in New York, a Christian audience in Arizona, and a general screening in California—and all three generated “troubling reactions.”; (The rep of director Darren Aronofsky dismissed The Hollywood Reporter“s story as “false rumours and gossip.”;)
But even if Noah bombs, the executives at Paramount can rest easy. The company has also purchased a Super Bowl spot for Transformers: Age of Extinction, a film which—no matter what the quality of the finished product—is guaranteed to bring in over a billion dollars worldwide. With that kind of cash flow, Noah“s comparatively modest budget is basically the equivalent of a single rain drop in the middle of a massive Biblical flood.
