The New Era of Film Marketing

Traditional marketing, like giant billboards or posters, is an effective way to reach an audience, but guerrilla marketing may be the most powerful method of all. Guerrilla marketing involves unconventional, low-cost, high-impact stunts or placements in public areas, like sidewalk chalk art, pop-up experiences, or flash mobs.

Timothee Chalamet is a prevalent example of this. Take his promotion of A Complete Unknown: he showed up at a Bob Dylan look-alike contest dressed as Dylan and rode a Lime bike to the premiere. Bold tactics like these grab the audience’s attention and persuade people to see the movie.

Today, creating movies can cost anywhere from nothing to thousands or even billions of dollars. For example, the upcoming movie The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan, is costing a breathtaking $250 million just to produce! That $250 million doesn’t even cover marketing costs, so the studio has to ensure the movie makes back far more than that budget, because if it doesn’t, it results in a financial loss. This raises an important question: what is the best way to market a movie?

With it being a spooky season, we see new Halloween movies like The Black Phone 2 also using this approach by doing a marketing text campaign. They sent a mysterious and eerie text message that read: “Hello YOUR NAME – the phone is ringing again. Are you going to answer?”. It was sent to recipients’ iPhones and included an unsettling video with a black and white cover image. That “what the heck is going on?” energy is exactly what draws audiences in. 

By creating this kind of crazed energy something even red carpet premieres rarely achieve, audiences have a reason to see the movie beyond traditional ads. Posters and trailers work, but if you really want to build a dedicated fan base and attract a massive audience, you have to do something bold, unexpected, and unforgettable. Only then will the audience come flooding in.