Santiago Segura premieres the sixth part of his most popular saga, ‘Torrente Presidente’ without an official trailer and without a prior screening for specialized critics. A decision that is not improvisation but tactical: the director trusts in the popular pull of his most profitable franchise and avoids a press with which he has been in a cold war for decades.
There is no trailer. That Santiago Segura is one of the smartest producers in the Spanish industry is something that no one is aware of. There is not only the success of Torrente’s five previous films, or his intelligent and very profitable turn towards family comedy with his ‘Padre no hay mas que uno’. It is also the way of selling an image that changes according to the audience of each film: increasingly frequent appearances on television, taking advantage of the opportunity to promote their films to a minimum… or the opposite, refusing to use the most common dissemination tools, such as the trailer or the press.
With the lack of a trailer (and the only minimal promotional help from a Taburete song), Segura here has tried to find a kind of voluntary Streisand Effect: to talk about the film by suppressing all information about it. Not generating promotional material is the promotional material itself, and the proof is in this article, which says that there is nothing to talk about. The issue of the press pass already has other connotations.
There is no press pass. Critics’ opinions about new releases no longer have the depth they had decades ago. The massification of tools for disseminating opinions such as social networks or rating aggregators such as Rotten Tomatoes have replaced the weight of professional criticism, but the ties between industry and the press remain active, often for publicity reasons. Traditionally, the absence of prior projection suggests a lack of confidence in the product, which is a message that no studio wants to convey. This is not the case of Santiago Segura, who knows that his films are rejected by critics and sweep the box office.
The beginning of this confrontation can be traced back to 1998, when journalist Nuria Vidal published a negative review of ‘Torrente’ in ‘Fotogramas’, as the journalist recounted on her blog. Apparently, Segura personally called the editorial office to demand explanations, but with the box office he forgot the rudeness: his classification as a “commercial filmmaker” is something of which he would end up being proud. Box office success seems enough legitimization to him, and the fact that there is a pre-release screening (“for the fans”) before the press sees it is almost a declaration of intent.
The Spanish superfranchise. In March 1998, Santiago Segura hit Spanish theaters with the first ‘Torrente’, which despite accusations of bad taste, grossed 10.9 million euros and was the most watched Spanish film of the season. A return on investment of more than 540%, not counting home video or television. And from there, everything went further: ‘Torrente 2’ tripled the budget and doubled the collection. At the box office it was only surpassed by ‘The Others’, in English and with international financing. Budgets grew and collections fell, but it never stopped being profitable. After the fifth installment, in 2014, Segura put Torrente fallow.
The aggregate balance of the five installments exceeds 80 million euros and 16 million tickets sold in Spain alone. Adjusted for inflation, the figures amount to 115 million euros and 18 million viewers. There is no other comparable case in modern Spanish cinema of an author franchise with such public support without awards, without going through festivals and without relevant international distribution.
In WorldOfSoftware | The most watched film in history on television is not a Hollywood success, but a classic from the most carpet-loving Spain
