5 Movies Whose Marketing Campaigns Went Viral In No Time

Hey, folks! Today let's talk about movies! We all see those flashy trailers, movie posters, and celebrity interviews publicizing an upcoming hit all the time, right? And often we'd think all that effort is enough to build hype around a movie. But sometimes studios go the extra mile and come up with a marketing idea that grabs the audience and stirs them to the core.

Here are five movie marketing campaigns that took our breath away and went viral in a heartbeat. Are you ready?

1. Cloverfield

In the summer of 2007, when the movie Transformers was released, it dropped a bomb on the audience. Well, on its opening weekend, the film featured a trailer for an unknown film. The trailer opened with camcorder footage of some young people at a friend’s going-away party. After the first 35 seconds, the camera shakes and the lights go off. Loud rumbles and roars can be heard in the dark. Fireballs shoot out of nowhere. And the trailer ends with the detached head of the iconic Statue of Liberty rolling down the street. And the final shot is a date – a release date.

The internet went berserk with suspense. No one knew what the monster or the movie was. The hunt led to missing posters, websites of fictitious companies in the movie, MySpace profiles of the characters, etc. This movie was Cloverfield, which has given rise to a franchise today.

2. Blair Witch Project

The Blair Witch Project was made on a budget of only $22k. But it went on to collect around $250M at the box office – thanks to its cutting-edge marketing.

Approximately six months prior to its first screening, the directors created a website, which shared details relevant to the movie’s story. Even after the movie was sold to the distribution company, they kept on updating the website with news stories, and real-life pictures of the site where the characters in the movie disappeared.

The thing is – the movie never claimed to be a work of fiction. Missing posters were made and circulated. Even throughout the campaign, the actors were prohibited from making public appearances. This movie, clearly, was not the first of its kind but its marketing did something remarkable – blending fiction with reality.

3. Psycho

Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was released in 1960 – a time way before the Internet.

And this movie is the epitome of viral marketing in a no-internet age. You see, at the time of Psycho’s release, movies did not have set play times. Instead, they played on a loop. And the director Alfred Hitchcock worried that it might ruin a psychological thriller like Psycho for the audience. So, he came up with a brilliant idea.

To ensure that the movie only be played at set times, he put up cardboard displays with him saying that no one will be admitted to the theater after the start of the movie. It was a new concept at the time and piqued the public’s interest. And the rest is history!

4. The Last Exorcism

The horror film The Last Exorcism was released in theaters in 2010. At the time, the Internet was booming, and a website called Chatroulette was quite popular. It was sort of a social networking site where users could randomly match with total strangers and engage in video chat.

Interestingly, around the release of the film, many users matched with a girl. She would start flirting and teasing them. But within 15-20 seconds, she would stare deadpan into the camera and her eyes would roll up. She, then, would start contorting abnormally and jump at the camera with a scream. At the end of the video, there is a web address to the movie’s website.

It was an unprecedented marketing stunt and caught many Chatroulette users off-guard. And well, it worked for the movie’s phenomenal success.

5. The Dark Knight

This movie’s prequel Batman Begins was a huge success. So, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight hardly needed any marketing.

However, the studio (Warner Bros.) still decided to put the pedal to the metal. The idea was to put the audience right in the middle of the chaos of Gotham City. As a fan of the movie, you could show your support for Harvey Dent who also had a realistic campaign website. Even more, you could join hands with the Joker or support Batman himself.

What’s crazier is that the studio left numbers in the air over the convention centers that fans could dial. This led to a chance of them finding cakes with phones hidden inside. The Dark Knight was already on the way to being a box office hit but this real-life adventure fueled the rising fire.

Bottom Line

And that is a wrap of our list. Hope you enjoyed it. If you have a marketing campaign in mind that could have been covered in today's blog, feel free to let us know in the comments.

We’ll be back with more awesome content for you to enjoy. Until then, stay tuned!