“Number Slevin” Making Its Own Luck?
So I just finished watching the opening sequence of the new thriller Lucky Number Slevin on my TV. I wasn’t watching a bootleg or an illegal download. Rather, I was watching the teaser that the Weinstein Company has made available on YouTube in the hopes that it will go viral and goose the box office.
According to the Weinstein Co and YouTube, this is yet another first in terms of using the Web for film cross-promotion, and it’s a pretty interesting experiment, at the very least.
One of the reasons is that this film has been in the theatres for a couple of weeks — where it has grossed $14M — and doing this type of publicity goes against the current Hollywood model of doing the lions share of the promotion prior to the first week.
Perhaps they thought that it had underperformed, given all of the stars — Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Lucy Liu, etc. — so rather than totally giving up, they figured that they’d try this. After all, it probably cost next to nothing to do so — especially as compared to another couple of weeks of TV buys — so there really isn’t a lot of downside.
On the other hand, given the fact that you can’t really force true viralness, it may go down as nothing more than an interesting experiment, as opposed to a precursor to a new way of marketing films.
Oh, and about that first eight minutes: eh, whatever. Which might be a bigger problem.
- YouTube and the Weinstein Company Premiere First Eight Minutes of Lucky Number Slevin to Promote New Film
- Watch the Premiere of Lucky Number Slevin
Technorati Tags: YouTube, Lucky Number Slevin, The Weinstein Company, movies
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1 Comment(s) so far
1. Medialoper » “Number Slevin:” #12 wrote on April 24th, 2006 at 7:39 am
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