(FORTUNE Magazine) – You eat breakfast. (Size does matter.) Read the paper. (Size does matter.) Drive to work. (Size does matter.) Grab some lunch, watch TV, pick up some groceries. (Size does matter, size does matter, size does matter.)

"Size does matter" is the slogan that Sony is using to promote its big summer release, Godzilla, but you already knew that. Indeed, you may not even have noticed, but you've probably seen the slogan three or four times today, given that it's been plastered on billboards and buses, buttons and T-shirts, caps and toys, batteries and Taco Bells, saturating the public consciousness like a deceased princess. "Size does matter" is, in many ways, the perfect slogan for Godzilla, not least because it neatly answers a big question that some portion of the film's target audience is no doubt asking: Why should I go see this movie if I've already seen Jurassic Park? The answer, Sony would like you to know, is this: because Godzilla is around eight times as big as a T. rex. Or in a word, size.

And the slogan is appropriate for another reason: It sums up just how studios have come to approach the marketing of a big summer release, or a "tentpole movie" in studio parlance, so named because if one of them clicks, it can support a whole range of other opportunities. A tentpole movie can carry a price tag of $70 million or more in production costs alone, making it a huge gamble, but the rewards when one hits are commensurate: The profits from licensing, spinoffs, TV sales, sequels, and merchandising from a smash--a Lion King, a Batman, a Jurassic Park--can easily top $1 billion.

The problem, however, is that every studio in Hollywood long ago realized the value of tentpole movies; ever since Jaws ushered in the blockbuster era 23 years ago, the major studios have spent much of their effort on producing potential tentpoles. And with all the studios trying to make their movie into a smash--and releasing more of them each summer--the cost of marketing has swiftly escalated. In the decade between 1987 and 1997, the average cost of making a movie jumped from $20 million to $53 million, while marketing costs zoomed from $6.7 million to $22 million. That figure doesn't even include the explosion in spending on the part of promotional partners--corporations that agree to hype a movie in exchange for the use of its name. Some of this escalation can be attributed to the rising cost of print and TV advertising, but there is another factor at work: With the market so clogged with heavily promoted films, studios have to go to extremes just to break through the clutter, to make a movie seem so big, so important, so unavoidable that you absolutely, positively must drop everything and see it RIGHT NOW. Size--or at least the perception thereof--does matter.

To manufacture that perception around Godzilla, Sony has spent an estimated $50 million, and its promotional partners have committed $150 million more--in total about as much as it cost to make Titanic--all of it to create a mass-culture phenomenon that will burn itself out in six to eight weeks. Hard though it may be to believe right now, when Godzilla is appearing on the cover of every magazine, when every other story you read seems (like this one) to be about it, when its trailers blanket television and its stars are on every talk show and it's all but impossible to pass a day without seeing its name, it will soon pass, to be replaced by the next big summer-event movie, most likely Armageddon, Disney's giant-asteroid flick opening July 1. For the moment, though, Sony has, with a lot of money and ingenuity, efficiently inserted its film into the national consciousness. How it did so is revealing, not only as a demonstration of what makes the movie business tick today, but because the science of creating a stampede for a blockbuster film has become so refined, so precise, that it also demonstrates a thing or two about what makes the moviegoing audience--that is, you and me--tick as well.

GODZILLA: THE CORPORATION

Bob Levin calls it "the strangest thing I've ever heard," a statement "that really opened up my eyes to how people think about movies." It came a few years back, when he was leaving a movie and overheard a woman say to her husband, "Well, I really didn't like it, but I must be wrong because everyone else likes it." He arches his eyebrows in incredulity. "I mean, people aren't even confident enough in their own opinions because everyone around them likes it."

Levin tells this story in an affectionately bemused tone of voice, a tone that conveys that he doesn't quite understand this phenomenon--and may even find it slightly unnerving--but he also knows that it's immensely useful to him. Levin, 54, is Sony Pictures Entertainment's president of worldwide marketing, and his job rests on his ability to create just that sort of overwhelming public sentiment, sentiment so strong that it sweeps away the naysayers. In conversation, Levin comes across as ingratiatingly blunt and pragmatic; he came to Hollywood from consumer advertising more than a decade ago, but his direct style and Midwestern accent still make him seem more like a Chicago adman than a slick studio executive. Inside the business, though, Levin is seen as a master at what he does; before coming to Sony in 1996 and overseeing campaigns for hits like Men in Black and My Best Friend's Wedding, Levin built a reputation at Disney, where he helped oversee the marketing of that studio's animated-film revival. In much the same way that directors are said to be the authors of films--a not entirely accurate characterization, given the medium's collaborative nature--Levin may be considered the auteur of the Godzilla marketing blitz, which is a sort of mixed-media artwork unto itself.

It is a testament to Levin's skills--and to the centrality of marketing in the movie business today--that the film probably would not have been made without his support. In October 1996, when it came time for the studio's newly appointed president and COO, John Calley, to decide whether to proceed with plans for Godzilla, he called Levin before making his decision. This may not sound like the cliched studio meeting, where the chief hears a pitch, waves his cigar, and gives a picture the go-ahead, but it is how Calley prefers to run his studio. Says Calley: "We are thrilled to say that the marketing guys read our scripts. They don't make final decisions about them, but we obviously value their input. And in this realm, it's critical. I mean, if Bob throws up his hands and says, 'I don't know what to do with a giant lizard,' we're all gonna be scratching our heads." That of course didn't happen. "Everybody saw the potential of this," Calley says.

As Calley sees it, that potential is huge: To him--and to his bosses at Sony--the film isn't so much an end in itself as it is a way for the company to get into the Godzilla business, something he hopes will be akin to Warner Bros.' Batman franchise or Disney's animated characters--an instantly recognizable, hugely popular brand that can be used to sell any number of other products. Already the studio has signed up 220 licensing partners worldwide to make everything from Godzilla pajamas to Godzilla edible cake decorations. "Of course," Calley says earnestly, "we're all artists here, and we try not to confuse ourselves with commercial considerations." He pauses, smiles. "Just kidding."

Given Calley's desire that Godzilla become a cash cow--and the picture's reported $125 million budget--he would have been insane not to have consulted with Levin before putting the movie into production. The movie may eventually become just one small part of Godzilla Inc., but it is the cornerstone: The only way Calley's plans will work is if the film is so overwhelmingly popular that it not only pulls people into the theater but also manages to push them back out again, into record stores and T-shirt shops and theme parks and dozens of other venues. Fail to launch the movie right, and everything else goes pffffft. And as if that were not enough pressure, Levin learned early on that he would be launching that product line with a handicap no new-product marketer would envy: He can't show his audience what they're supposed to buy.

GODZILLA: THE BILLBOARD

Dean Devlin still remembers the shocked silence in the room when he told Sony's team that they couldn't use a single image of Godzilla in marketing Godzilla. Though Devlin, the film's producer, had a pretty compelling argument for why they should hide their star--"this is our most valuable asset," he says, "this is what people are paying to see, this creature"--there was another, even more compelling reason for the studio to listen to Devlin: the $800 million-plus worldwide gross of Independence Day, the last movie that he and his partner, director Roland Emmerich, made. A hit of that magnitude enables a producer to call the shots. That doesn't mean Sony had to be happy about it. "It seemed like the worst nightmare that could be handed to a marketing department," says Levin. But as it turns out, Devlin's restriction became a great boon to Sony's creative team, allowing them to harness a strangely powerful force: the imagination of the public.

Take, for instance, the movie's billboards. When Dana Precious, Sony's senior vice president of creative advertising, began meeting with one of the ad agencies engaged by the studio, Ikon Creative Services, she found that without an actual picture of Godzilla next to a cityscape, nobody appreciated the scale of the monster.

Precious often found herself saying, "He's 22 stories tall," only to be met with polite nods. "No, no, no," she'd say. "Come outside and look at a building! Count! Look how many stories that is!" After doing this several times, Precious realized that the best way to get across the sheer size of the beast would be to do the same thing for the audience--give them a visual reference point. And so in March 1997 three teams of researchers crisscrossed the country, visiting 12 cities and, Precious says, "basically checking out every billboard that existed." For eight months, Precious and staffers from Ikon and the media-buying firm McCann-Erickson pored over their research in a war room papered with maps of each city, plotting each billboard with colored pushpins. The fruits of their efforts went up in April: a series of signs placed next to landmarks, bearing messages like "He's as tall as the Brooklyn Bridge" or "He's as long as the Hollywood sign." The ads are oddly evocative: If they work on you at all, in your mind you see a really impressive giant lizard--indeed, a giant lizard that's probably way cooler than anything that could possibly appear on screen. As Precious puts it, "Sometimes the imagination is so much better than seeing it"--though she hastens to add, "even if the thing you're going to see on film is going to be very spectacular."

GODZILLA: THE TRAILER

So far, the only film that the general public has seen of Godzilla amounts to around six minutes of celluloid, in the form of three trailers, strategically placed in theaters last summer, last Christmas, and this April. The second and third of these trailers are great ads, featuring, respectively, a fisherman who hooks Godzilla, and the standard action-movie montage of clips set to fast-paced music. But the first Godzilla trailer was something else again: a perfectly executed visual gag that stands on its own as a terrific piece of filmmaking. If you've seen it, you know the one: It shows a class of grade-schoolers gawking at a giant T. rex skeleton at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. As their teacher drones on, the walls begin to shake, and finally a giant green scaly foot crashes through a skylight and crushes the skeleton to bits; the trailer ends with a punch line: "Guess who's coming to town?" (This was the original slogan for the movie; for all Hollywood's alleged phallocentrism, "Size does matter," believe it or not, didn't occur to anyone until the marketing plan was well along.)

That first advertisement was shot and paced with the timing of an excellent joke...and it doesn't even appear in the finished film. Devlin and Emmerich spent $600,000 to shoot the trailer last spring, before they'd even shot a frame of the actual movie; their idea was to get out early and, while they were at it, take a swipe at last summer's big dino-action movie, The Lost World: Jurassic Park. And here was the thing: Wherever the trailer played, the crowd went nuts, whooping and shouting and cheering...for a movie that didn't even exist yet. As with their Independence Day trailer, which elicited a similar reaction with its shot of the White House being demolished by aliens, Devlin and Emmerich had come up with a simple, primal image that tapped a deep nerve in the audience. Indeed, the trailer was so popular that some theater owners asked if they could advertise the fact that Godzilla's trailer was playing before Men in Black; the studio, shocked, demurred.

GODZILLA: THE NEWS STORY

That trailer created that most rare and elusive quality in the movie business: buzz. Suddenly, people were talking about Godzilla as a potential blockbuster. The movie even began attracting its first whiff of press, when Newsweek gave it a favorable mention last September, pronouncing it "next summer's surest thing." Now, you may well ask why a magazine like Newsweek was scrambling to cover the crucial matter of what movie would be No. 1 at the box office nine months hence. The answer is simple: to move copies. The mass media of news and entertainment grew up together at the beginning of the century, and each has fed upon the other ever since. In recent years that symbiotic relationship has intensified as Time, Newsweek, and People now scrap for movie stories with Movieline, Premiere, and Entertainment Weekly (and yes, from time to time, FORTUNE), and Entertainment Tonight now shares the TV beat with Extra!, Access Hollywood, and E! Entertainment Television.*

This huge media apparatus is perpetually hungry for stories, and Sony was happy to fill the maw: In the year since that initial trailer hit, just as Precious' creative materials have been unleashed, one by one, on schedule, her counterparts in publicity have been just as steadily burnishing her message in the media. The studio began courting the press on Godzilla early on, says Levin, to win the trust of the audience: "When the public only sees things in advertising, they're skeptical," he says. "But if it's in all the forms where they expect to see things, then it lifts [the campaign] to another level."

The task of getting out the Godzilla message fell to Levin's lieutenants in the publicity department, Ed Russell and Dennis Higgins. The studio's EVP and senior VP for publicity, respectively, Russell and Higgins are a matched set of hyperenthusiastic pitchmen with an admirable ability to stay on-message; in the course of a 40-minute interview, they used the terms "big" 24 times, "fun" 20 times, and "popcorn movie" seven times. If you've read a story on Godzilla that included a quote from anyone involved with the production, it probably began with an interview request to one of them--and there are plenty of requests they turned down because they felt the stories weren't sufficiently big or important. As Higgins puts it, "This is a big-event movie, and our feeling was, let's place the publicity in big-event kinds of pieces."

The term "place" tells you a lot about Higgins' job; through the strategic granting and withholding of access, he and Russell are able to control, to a large degree, the picture of the movie that the media are able to present to the audience. On May 15 the duo placed a whole lot of Godzilla press at once when they flew 200 journalists, mostly from local newspapers and TV stations, to New York for a weekend press junket, at which the reporters screened the movie, assembled into small groups to meet and interview the stars, and stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria on Sony's dime. Studios now routinely arrange such affairs as an easy and efficient way of ensuring that on the weekend before their movie opens, it will appear on the local news and in the hometown papers of much of the country. That coverage doesn't come cheap--have you ever seen a pack of journalists at a free buffet?--but it's less expensive than buying a full-page ad or a minute of commercial time, and because of the trust that people put in the press, it's far more effective.

There is one more story that Russell and Higgins would dearly like to read, though they can do little to directly control it: It is the story reporting that the movie is No. 1 at the box office for its opening weekend. This is more important than it might seem at first glance; box-office returns, once scrutinized only by studio executives, are now a regular fixture of Monday newspapers and TV broadcasts, and viewers seem to make their moviegoing choices based on what movie tops the list. The scurry to be the No. 1 movie has grown so intense that studios have occasionally accused their rivals of cooking their numbers, artificially inflating them to secure themselves the top spot. Levin eyes the public's obsession with box-office stats wearily. "We can all wring our hands about it, but nothing's gonna change," he shrugs. "The public does work on this perception that 'I wanna see the commercially successful movie.' " The nice way to explain this is that we're eager to be part of something larger than ourselves. Or--if you prefer--that we secretly enjoy being part of a herd.

GODZILLA: THE TACO

The blitz of information about Godzilla isn't confined to the media, of course; it's also made its way to your corner market, where 3,000 products bearing Godzilla logos, including Hershey bars, Duracell batteries, and an ice-cream flavor called Godzilla Vanilla, now await you. These are not to be confused with Godzilla merchandise; these are ordinary consumer products that have signed on to cross-promote Godzilla. The transformation of stores into billboards is the handiwork of Mark Workman, Sony's senior vice president for strategic marketing, who describes his mission thus: "No. 1, we're trying to endear the creature into the culture, and No. 2, we're trying to drive folks into theater screens." To that end he's also signed up support from Taco Bell, which has committed some $60 million to promoting the movie--and, of course, its own wares, including the new Gordita line of tacos. ("Godzilla and our chihuahua really love Gorditas!" burbles Vada Hill, Taco Bell's chief marketing officer. Whatever.) These promotional partnerships are mutually beneficial--the products get to associate themselves with (they hope) a huge hit, and the studios get plenty of free advertising for their movie. The reason companies are willing to shell out so much to advertise someone else's stuff is simple: When a movie works, it creates an aura of cool around itself that extends to everything it touches.

This is especially true in the area of product placement, where specific brands are strategically inserted into the film itself. For Godzilla, Workman has lined up placements for Swatch watches and Kodak cameras. "Corporations are interested in the field," Workman says, "because, man, suddenly people start feeling a whole lot better about a certain dress, a certain style, certain products, certain sunglasses, certain cameras." For both promotions and product placement, there is only one real danger: that the audience begins to pick up on it. Ideally, any corporate affiliation with a movie should be subtle enough that it doesn't distract from the movie itself. "I want to be proud of what I'm doing, and the best way for me to be proud is for no one to ever notice my product placements," Workman says. When his job is done right, he adds, "you go for the movie, then afterwards you want the other stuff." In other words, you're supposed to want the stuff. You're definitely supposed to want the stuff. You're just not supposed to figure out why.

GODZILLA: THE MOVIE

"What if the movie sucks?"

If you want to see a Sony executive squirm, try asking that question. Their eyes go all squirrelly as they try to frame the most politic response--which usually boils down to "That's not an issue, because the movie's great." But the truth is, at this point the quality of the movie is not an issue, period. Here is the secret about movie marketing: When it is practiced at its highest levels, it is more important to the success of a movie than the filmmaking itself. The marketplace is so crowded nowadays that a good movie with weak marketing will undoubtedly fail. But a bad movie with great marketing? Hell, that's called Batman & Robin, and it grossed $107 million last summer. Though it was loathed by critics and audiences alike (an Entertainment Weekly poll found critics' grades averaged out to a C; audiences were slightly more generous, awarding it a C+), the movie grossed $43 million in its opening weekend and ended up as the 12th-highest-grossing movie of last year. True, it may not have done much to maintain the Batman franchise--anyone for Batman 5?--and few moviegoers were impelled to go buy the soundtrack, T-shirt, novelization, and so forth. But the fact remains: Some 25 million Americans lined up and paid their money to see a movie that was marginally more enjoyable than botulism. Batman & Robin was, in its perverse way, a triumph: a triumph of splendid marketing over abysmal filmmaking, true, but a triumph nonetheless.

The cost of mounting a major effort aside, there is little downside to overselling a subpar film. "There's unbelievable resiliency in the motion picture audience," Levin says. "People get lured into movies that don't turn out to be what their expectations are, and they just say, 'Well, that one wasn't too good.' They don't walk out and say, 'I'm never going to another movie again.' They're tremendous."

Godzilla is now generally thought to have huge hit potential; its "want to see," as measured by the Hollywood survey firm National Research Group, is in the blockbuster range. And yet this eagerness is based on...well, what, exactly? Three trailers, a bunch of billboards, some news stories, and maybe some Taco Bell sacks. But what fine trailers, billboards, news stories, and Taco Bell sacks they are! Levin observes that "we're at a point where the marketing itself has to be entertaining," and he's right, as far as he goes--the fact is that Levin and his ilk have become so good at what they do, the marketing is often more entertaining than the movies themselves. That can, perhaps, account for what happened last summer, when the movie theater owners tried to call attention to the Godzilla trailer that preceded Men in Black. Here they were, sitting on the most intensively marketed movie of last year--and a pretty entertaining one, at that--and what did they think would really pack the crowds in? A two-minute advertisement for another movie.

The theater owners were right, of course. As a rule, we want what we can't have. We prefer anticipation to fulfillment, the tantalizing possibility of holding the gift-wrapped box to the faint disappointment at finding whatever's inside. We'd rather have our interest piqued by a trailer than have it satisfied by the movie itself. This hopefulness makes us, in certain ways, startlingly gullible and manipulable. Thanks to this basic quirk of human nature, Levin's team has managed to harness millions of people's attention to a remake of a cheesy 1950s Japanese monster movie--to create a stampede of moviegoers forking over eight bucks on opening night, regardless of reviews, for something that will be at discount theaters in three months and at Blockbuster Video in six. The facility with which Sony's marketers have seized hold of the national imagination is brilliant and insidious and ever so slightly creepy. And you know what?

The line starts behind me.

*Time, People, Entertainment Weekly and Extra! are all owned by Time Warner, FORTUNE's parent.