Hollywood studios are going to ever more creative lengths to attract attention in a jam-packed entertainment market where social media plays a key role in promoting content.
For Matt Damon’s October film The Martian, in which an astronaut is stranded on Mars, 20th Century Fox Studios hosted a media day last week at the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (Nasa) Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California just to promote a trailer.
Journalists got a sneak peek at the first 50 minutes of the film, toured the lab and interviewed Damon at its Mission Control which is usually reserved for scientists working on operations such as landing the Curiosity rover on Mars in 2012.
“We’re in a world with a very crowded marketplace,” said The Martian producer Aditya Sood. “We want to make sure that people get the message that the movie’s coming out.”
After the media day, The Martian trailer became one of the top entertainment news stories, garnering 4.8 million views on Facebook and 3.3 million views on YouTube in just 48 hours.
“It makes sense for studios to spend money to get journalists to tweet and use social media because they believe it somehow will turn into box office dollars,” said Entertainment Weekly film reporter Nicole Sperling.
Trailers are becoming the fast, bite-size way to attract an audience at a time when five or more movies a week are released in the United States.
In August, movie reporters received a visit from two men with zombie makeup, mimicking the creepy twin characters from Focus Features latest horror movie, Sinister 2.
The “twins” delivered a wooden box with a taxidermied rat and a USB card with a link to the movie’s latest trailer.
“The people covering the industry are in some ways tastemakers, so even if people aren’t reading our magazines or articles, they’re reading our Twitter feed,” said Sperling.
Earlier in August, Warner Bros hosted a party at a Los Angeles hotel to promote its Peter Pan prequel — Pan. The rooftop was decked out to look like Neverland, with set pieces and costumes from the family adventure film.
But the media guests were distracted by the word “Compton” from a sky-writing plane to promote Universal Pictures’ rap music film Straight Outta Compton.
