So what do you do if you don't have the luxury of a franchise? Interestingly both "Hancock" and "The Love Guru" appear to be taking similar approaches: fake blogs. Thankfully they aren't taking the subversive approach that has felled many consumer products of late. But then it's kind of hard to pull that off when you're dealing with a homeless man with super powers, or anything that features Mike Meyers.

In the case of Hancock Was Here, we have evidence of an online marketing gimmick that appears to play to the movie's strengths: dark sarcastic humor. Hancock is meant to be an anti-superhero, a clumsy, drunk, but well-intentioned homeless guy who does more harm than good. The various photos of collateral damage and man-on-the-street accounts are entertaining in their own right, and even the site's relatively scant content is explained away: Hancock accidentally destroyed the building housing the web-servers.

In the same vein, "The Love Guru," inspired by an "Iconoclasts" episode that paired Mike Meyers with Deepak Chopra, tries to bring to life the fictional philosophies of Guru Pitka via a variety of fake websites. Pitka's book club offers titles like "Does It Hurt When You Do That? Don't Do That." TMYourself™ offers handy advice on how to… well, trademark yourself. Guru Pitka even has his own Facebook and MySpace profiles. If "The Love Guru's" viral campaign strikes you as uninspired, you are not alone. A lot of these tactics have been done before and better. We'll see if anything more compelling surfaces before the movie opens.

"The Happening," the new film by M. Night Shyamalan, appears to be going the "old school" new marketing route by utilizing YouTube videos of flash mobs re-enacting scenes from the trailer. Again, this is hardly original, though at least the innocent bystanders appear to be sufficiently spooked... unlike anyone who's likely caught the first salvo of viral marketing for "The X-Files: I Want to Believe," the most hotly anticipated sequel of 1998 (ahem). Instead of playing up the mysterious qualities that made "The X-Files" a hit show, we get what appear to be outtakes from an old series of Taster's Choice commercials.