It’s hard to fault a movie marketing campaign that has people giving blood, always a worthy endeavor. I’m going to do my best to fault it, though, since it’s Saw III and I really dislike those movies.
According to the folks at Posterwire, the first Saw blood drive collected 4,200 pints of blood. Saw II collected 10,000 liters of blood (I don’t know why the accounting method suddenly switched from pints to liters – maybe they decided 21,000 pints sounded too showy?). I don’t know who got this blood, but if it was the Red Cross it wasn’t enough to stop them from putting their legal foot down on Lionsgate – the poster for the Saw III blood drive originally featured a trio of creepy nurses with that familiar red cross on their hats. Sadly the red cross is a copyrighted image, not just a generic symbol for “hospital” or “medic,” and Lionsgate has pulled the cross off the nurses’ hats.
Posterwire points out that the Saw films seem to always have posters that get banned or edited, and you have to give it up to Lionsgate for setting up situations where they’ll get some free press out of a slight image kerfuffle. Sadly, I must also give them props for getting people to donate blood. I will not give them props for Danny Glover’s performance in the first Saw, although seeing him chill with Hugo Chavez in Harlem last week really put that in better perspective.
And look at it this way – at least Lionsgate didn’t use the Red Crescent symbol. Now that would have been a disaster.