I noticed something interesting when I worked as a projectionist while in college. I noticed that smart producers who knew they had a really good movie on their hands wouldn't market their movie at all (or very little). Producers who knew they had a crappy movie would market the crap out of it.
The biggest example of a good movie's lack of marketing was the 6th Sense. When the movie first came out, we had at best a single movie poster to advertise it's existence. No trailers, no t-shirts, no banners, etc. We started that movie in our smallest theater guessing it would do squat. The first week, it didn't do much, but warranted a slightly larger theater for the next weekend. The next weekend again, we moved it to yet a bigger theater, then a bigger, then a bigger until it resided in our biggest theater for 6 weeks. All this with zero marketing dollars spent.
Then you look at this weeks teeny-bopper-crappy-movie-of-the-week, and you the marketing machine is immense, but the movie dies in a week or 2.
I guess the moral of this story is, you only need to market if you know word of mouth will kill something. Otherwise let it ride it's own wave of success
