Southpaw ad saved by last-minute reference to other boxing movie

As per standard procedure, we emailed all journalists after the first screening and asked for a brief statement of their opinions. To our shock, none of the responses contained a single reference to another boxing film, or even use of an active verb as a boxing metaphor.

They just said things like "Yes, it's quite good" and "I thought they could've developed the wife character a bit more".

After a day or so we sent a few follow-up emails, asking whether they were quite sure that Southpaw didn't "pack a punch like Rocky" or "leave Cinderella Man out for the count", or "take the crown from When We Were Kings". We suggested that at the very least Jake Gyllenhaal's performance amounted to a "one-two punch of knockout intensity and glass-jaw vulnerability", and that the film "went the distance like a hundred Real Steels".

But all the journalists were adamant that their opinions could be expressed without external comparison. In the end we gave up and advised the distributors we'd just use a big sans-serif font and maybe put a crack in the final "W" so it looked like it'd been punched.

Right before going to press, however, we went for broke and circulated a SurveyMonkey whose only question was: "Complete the following: 'Southpaw is the best boxing movie since _______'."

The correspondent from Sky News was the only one who provided a serviceable answer, which we slapped onto the poster with about three minutes to spare before we had to FTP it to the printers.