Five Movies That Mastered Marketing

If you build it, they will come. And if you market it (and market it well), they will watch it. Blockbuster films often come with blockbuster budgets. But not all of that budget goes towards actually producing that film, and paying Hollywood stars to feature in it. A lot of that money can go towards marketing.

Sometimes, movies market themselves effectively. Hype is generated, movie-goers flock to the cinemas and make box office hits. Sometimes those films live up to the hype and other times they don't. But that's not what this article is about.

Marketing a movie isn't just come down to plastering the trailer on every social media feed and repeating it before every other movie in the cinema. We've actually seen some very creative marketing moves in the past, often times on a budget, building hype and leaving a lasting impact.

Here we look at five movies that mastered the art of marketing...

The Blair Witch Project

1999, Directors: Eduardo Sánchez & Daniel Myrick

Life was simpler in 1999. You could get away with a lot more in media and the people behind The Blair Witch Project certainly made use of that long-gone watershed.

The Blair Witch Project had us on edge months before it even hit cinemas. A website - blairwitch.com - was launched ahead of the film's release. On it, a whole narrative was released unto the public. It claimed the found footage that eventually made the movie was real and that the people in it were actually missing people. Missing people who hid from the media, fake police reports, and an eerie tale of a witch made an estimated $248million worldwide, from a production cost thought to be well under $1million.

This brave ploy made The Blair Witch Project a must-watch at the time, a film that has lasted the test of time, and an absolute trailblazer in the marketing game.

Barbenheimer

Although 'Barbenheimer' wasn't a direct marketing ploy from either the folks who produced Barbie or those who made Oppenheimer in 2023, neither spoke out against the internet phenomenon that had people flocking to the cinema to watch either film (or indeed both), in droves. Some took on the marathon challenge of watching both these vastly different films back to back and in the end, it made for two of cinema's biggest box office hits this Century. Combined, the two films netted a staggering $2.42billion at the box office ($1.447billion for Barbie and $975.8million for Oppenheimer). It made Barbie the 13th highest-grossing movie of all-time.

Could we see more close-releasing films team up in some weird way again?

Passenger

2026, Director: André Øvredal

A very recent release, Passenger is a horror film based around lives lost in road traffic accidents. Whilst this film may not have necessarily mastered marketing, it's a great example of a film whose trailer is miles better than the movie itself, which is marketing in itself. In cinemas for weeks now we've seen Passenger's trailer. Its whole ploy is around the number of lives lost on the road and how so many never make it back. It made for a genuinely terrifying trailer but the early reviews are weak to say the least.

'Whoever made this trailer needs a pay rise' is one common theme among those early reviews. Passenger may well make itself a hit in the box office given how well it marketed itself and its subject. But it's not a film that will last the test of time.

Sonic the Hedgehog

2020, Director: Jeff Fowler

Now that some time has passed, is it fair to say that the whole schtick around Sonic the Hedgehog and the design of the namesake character was a hoax?

Released in 2020, the first of now three Sonic films grossed $320million. The pandemic no doubt impacted its numbers, but for some time, this film was all the rage. And it was ‘rage’ quite literally; fans were astounded with the design of Sonic which the creators eventually changed due to the uproar. This movie was Jeff Fowler's directorial debut and so it could have been an honest mistake. But would all involved surely have allowed for that absurd-looking, way too humanoid original Sonic to go to the trailers, surely knowing it would be controversial? Maybe, maybe not.

Perhaps this was an example of a film rage-baiting fans into watching. In that case, well played.

Alien

1979, Director: Ridley Scott Alien's marketing campaign was the simplest of this list, but just as impactful as spending millions on advertising, or coming up with some crazy Blair Witch kind of idea. 'In space, no one can hear you scream', was the single tagline that made this movie a classic.

The initial 1979 film recorded $131million at the box office off of an $18million budget. And what many remember about this film, other than the alien bursting out of John Hurt's chest, was it's short but iconic tagline. What was the last modern movie whose tagline you remembered? I mean, is it even a thing now?

The Alien franchise has since grossed $1.6billion at box office. It all stems from the original movie of the series and its clever wordplay.