Marketing Mojo! 5 Studio Stunts that Struck Gold

I bestow honors today on recent strategies that won audience, broke the mold and beat the internet

IT POPPED The Dune 2 popcorn bucket. (Photo illustration by The Ankler; AMC Theaters)

The battle of Hollywood is no longer just about dividing up the audience pie, it’s about luring audiences away from other entertainment choices. If this project is to continue, it’s no longer good enough to win the biggest slice of the viewers we have. You have to lure in new ones, or entice waning viewers back — find new voters, as they put it in political parlance.

And we have to keep doing it over and over and over — probably forever —because the competition from social media-led viewing isn’t getting any smaller.

As recently as a few years ago, the idea that the best will just find an audience without any help still had some sway. That early internet utopian fantasy has been disproven so many times, it’s almost hard to believe it was ever the governing credo. We each have our own favorite heartbreaking recent example of something great sinking beneath the seas. (Strays still gets my vote.) 

If Hollywood is going to have a future, it’s going to involve not just finding more and better ways to connect with the current young generation, but constantly finding ways to carry its message to them where they live. It has to take great movies and turn them into unmissable events.

In the past year, studio marketing has increasingly broken free of the old rulebook, rolling some dice and trying something different. The grandest example of the recent era is, of course, Barbenheimer, and both halves of that equation are the first chapters of any new playbook. But the Barbenheimer story has been well told. Mercifully it’s not the only instance where new trails were blazed for the big screen and small. And these efforts continue, as I’ll highlight below, proving that what has just worked is merely a jumping-off point to try something new again to engage audiences.

Here are five of my favorite recent examples of marketing audacity that won the day from Lucasfilm, Sony, Warner Bros, Paramount and Universal, the innovative strategies that got them there, and some honorable mentions: