I am a huge movie fan and spend hours every week watching movies and reading up on what is coming up. I am also a fan of clever marketing so when I ran into a movie called Paranormal Activity I was intrigued. A movie that had a 15 thousand dollar budget and is being distributed by Paramount and Dreamworks is pretty huge.
What I like about the marketing is that it is unorthodox. Paramount could have used some of its billion dollar marketing budget to release the movie in the US and all over the world. Instead they have been hyping up the movie with a few screenings all over the USA and using the internet to spread the word. This reminds me of the marketing stunt of the Blair Witch Project. Personally, I couldn’t wait to see that movie after reading the journal of the main character online beforehand.
Click here to check out the official trailer.
On the movie’s website you can see that they will open the movie nationwide when it will be demanded 1 million times, currently the counter stands at 796.124 demands. The tagline is: “First ever major film release decided by you“. It is no fluke that this hype is starting in October, Halloween is just around the corner and everybody knows that if you release a great horror movie before Halloween, you have struck gold. Just look at the Saw quintology, the first movie was without a doubt one of the greatest and cheapest horror movie ever made.
I am predicting that paranormal activity will do as good or even better than Saw, which made around 100 million dollars. So the profit of the initial $15,000 investment will be around 6.700% not too shabby.
This is great example of creative marketing, low cost and enormous revenue potentials. I just came from a lunch with one of the most influential movie promoter in Scandinavia and we had a brief talk about this movie, along with other heavyweight subjects of discussion, of course and we totally agree that, whether this movie will yield in the low or the high end of the Hollywood revenue spectrum – it will be a huge return on this investment and probably also a great return on all the work spent on making this great idea a reality – two thumbs up !