There are very few film franchises that can make the passage of time feel quite as tangible as Toy Story.

When the first film arrived in 1995, its central premise was wonderfully simple: what happens when the toys come to life once their owner leaves the room? Thirty years later, the question has changed somewhat. What happens when the child doesn’t need the toys to come alive anymore?

That is the rather brilliant starting point for Toy Story 5.

Pixar has taken a franchise built around the magic of childhood and placed it against one of the most recognisable realities of modern childhood: technology.

Bonnie is growing up in a world where screens are no longer some futuristic novelty but an ordinary part of everyday life, and Lilypad - a frog-shaped smart tablet - has arrived to compete with Woody, Buzz, Jessie and the rest of the gang for her attention.

On paper, it is almost suspiciously convenient.

Toys versus tablets. The analogue childhood we remember versus the digital childhood we are watching emerge. A thirty-year-old franchise suddenly has a very contemporary problem to solve.

And that raises the first question I had about the campaign: does this actually feel like a problem families recognise, or does it feel like Pixar has grafted an issue-of-the-week onto some of its most beloved characters simply to justify bringing them back?

Because there is a very fine line between relevance and manufactured relevance.

The good news though, is that Toy Story 5 itself understands the distinction. The film isn’t really arguing that technology is bad, or that children should simply put the tablet down and return to playing with wooden toys. If anything, it lands somewhere much more sensible: technology is here to stay, but the way we use it matters.

Imagination, friendship and play still need room to exist alongside it.

That makes the premise considerably more interesting than “screens are ruining childhood”. It also gives the marketing a much bigger challenge.

Pixar isn’t simply trying to convince an audience that Toy Story still exists. Everyone knows that. It needs to convince an entire generation that grew up with Woody and Buzz to come back, while simultaneously making the franchise feel relevant to the children who are experiencing it for the first time.

That means selling nostalgia without making the film feel old.

It means introducing new characters without making the old ones feel disposable.

And, perhaps most importantly, it means turning a thirty-year-old piece of childhood into something that can be experienced by families together.

Because that is where I think the Toy Story 5 campaign gets particularly interesting.

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Making Toy Story a Shared Experience Again

If the central tension of Toy Story 5 is between the toys of yesterday and the technology of today, then the marketing needed to find a space where those two generations could actually meet.

And rather than treating parents and children as two entirely separate audiences, much of the campaign seems to have understood that Toy Story works best when it is something families experience together.

That sounds obvious, but it is actually quite an important distinction.

A child might be the person asking to see Toy Story 5, but the parent is very likely to have a relationship with Woody, Buzz and Jessie that predates them. Remember, the first Toy Story came out in 1995. So, some of the parents taking their children to see the fifth film will have grown up with the franchise themselves. The opportunity, therefore, isn’t simply to sell the next Pixar film to a child. It is to create that slightly magical moment where a parent can say, “I remember watching this when I was your age.”

That is why the campaign’s use of traditional media caught my attention.

ITV’s interview with Tom Hanks around the idea that technology “robs kids of time“ is a fairly straightforward example, but it also places the film inside a conversation that parents are already having. Likewise, BBC Leicester’s story around Vinny - who went viral as a child in 2020 and, six years later, recreated the photograph and was invited to the Toy Story 5 red carpet - gives the campaign something much more valuable than another piece of cast coverage: a real-life reminder of just how quickly childhood changes.

It isn’t just here’s another Disney film you should see. Rather, the focus is on how much childhood can change in six years. That feels particularly appropriate for a franchise whose entire identity has always been built around the passage of childhood.

The same logic extends into entertainment media. Entertainment Weekly is an obvious home for a franchise with this much cultural history, while the campaign’s CTV and streaming activity provides another opportunity to put Toy Story 5 in front of families in environments where they are already consuming entertainment together.

The channel logic here is therefore less about any one platform and more about co-viewing. Parents and children don’t necessarily need to be convinced separately; the campaign can put Toy Story in the same room as both of them.

Even commercial radio starts to make more sense through this lens.

Pixar giving Capital presenters voice lines for characters, followed by the wider Capital Summer Time Ball takeover, could easily be dismissed as another brand partnership. And, frankly, some of the audience reaction proves that point, given there were comments questioning whether people had essentially paid to attend a concert only to be served an advertisement disguised as a performance.

But that misses something about the role of the activation.

Capital isn’t necessarily being used because its listeners are all desperate for more information about Toy Story 5. It is being used because radio is already embedded in everyday family life: in cars, at home, on the school run, and in those slightly mundane moments where parents and children are together.

That makes the characters part of the environment rather than simply another trailer interrupting it.

And the same principle becomes even more apparent when you look at the campaign’s relationship with music.

Enter Taylor Swift.

There are very few people you could introduce into the Toy Story universe who would immediately create this level of generational overlap.

Taylor Swift is obviously enormous in her own right, but what makes the collaboration strategically useful is that her audience isn’t confined to the children who might be discovering Toy Story today. There are parents who grew up with the franchise and have since grown up alongside Swift herself. There are younger audiences who have grown up with Swift while Toy Story has remained part of the cultural landscape around them.

Then Pixar goes one step further and gives Swift an original song connected to Jessie.

Suddenly, the collaboration isn’t just a celebrity endorsement bolted onto a film campaign. It becomes another piece of the Toy Story world.

The reveal itself became a miniature campaign. Swift’s Instagram post exploded, fans immediately started investigating the clues, Pixar amplified the conversation, the mystery billboards fuelled speculation, and eventually the song - “I Knew It, I Knew You” - arrived as a genuine piece of Toy Story 5 content.

And I think this is where the campaign demonstrates something that becomes increasingly important as the film progresses: nostalgia is much more powerful when it is allowed to evolve.

Taylor Swift can be nostalgic for Toy Story too. She can literally position herself as someone who was a Toy Story kid. The franchise therefore isn’t being presented as something that belongs to a previous generation. It is being presented as something that has travelled with us.

That feels like the real opportunity behind Toy Story 5.

The film doesn’t need to pretend that childhood is still exactly what it was in 1995. It would be impossible. The entire premise acknowledges that it isn’t.

Instead, Pixar can say: look how much has changed and look how much still matters.

The toys have changed. The technology has changed. The way children discover entertainment has changed. The way families consume media has changed. Hell, the way we market films has changed.

But the fundamental desire to play, imagine, belong and create memories together hasn’t gone anywhere.

And that is why I think the strongest part of this first layer of the campaign isn’t any individual ITV appearance, radio partnership or Taylor Swift post.

It is the attempt to make Toy Story 5 feel like a shared cultural event.

The parent gets to revisit something they loved. The child gets to discover something new. And, ideally, both walk into the cinema with a slightly different reason for wanting to be there.

And this is only the beginning.

Because if the campaign’s first job was to put Toy Story 5 into the same cultural spaces as both generations, the next question is what happens when you take the toys out of the screen altogether.

From shared media experience to shared physical experience

If the first half of this strategy was about putting Toy Story 5 into the places where parents and children already consume culture together, the next step was to quite literally put the toys in their way.

And this is where I think the scale of the campaign becomes much more apparent.

Wrapped aircraft from Virgin Australia and Alaska Airlines turned Toy Story 5 into something you could quite literally see taking off. There is even a lovely piece of content showing the Virgin plane alongside a toy version, which makes the execution feel almost self-aware: Toy Story has spent thirty years making us believe toys have lives of their own, and now the campaign has made a real aeroplane look like one.

It’s a small detail, but these are the kinds of executions I find most interesting because the medium itself becomes part of the idea.

The same is true of the Orlando Airport security bins. There is nothing particularly exciting about airport security. If anything, it is one of the least magical parts of travelling. Yet suddenly, the place where you put your shoes, laptop and liquids becomes a Toy Story prop.

That is quite different from simply putting a poster in an airport, because instead the campaign goes that little bit further to make the environment itself feel like part of the film.

And that idea scales up considerably once you get into traditional OOH. Toy Story 5 appeared across Sunset Boulevard and Times Square, including a particularly nice connected LED execution at night, alongside placements across the New York Metro and LA Metro.

There is something important about seeing Toy Story occupying that kind of advertising real estate, given this isn’t a children’s-only property being tucked away into the spaces where children’s films are expected to live. It is being given the same visual prominence as the biggest films, brands and cultural moments in the world.

After thirty years, Pixar doesn’t need to tell us what Toy Story is. It needs to remind us that it still matters.

And perhaps nowhere is that more obvious than in the Taylor Swift billboards. What could have been a fairly conventional music tie-in instead becomes another layer of the same generational conversation: Jessie belongs to the Toy Story generation, Taylor belongs to the generation that grew up alongside it, and both are now occupying the same billboard.

The campaign is effectively using nostalgia as a form of cultural currency.

But it isn’t stopping there.

Bringing the toys into everyday life

Retail is where this strategy becomes particularly tangible.

The George at Asda activation in Milton Keynes saw the store transformed with Woody, Buzz, Jessie and Lilypad across the exterior, while selected stores featured animated Toy Story content on digital screens. Inside, customers could enter a giant toy box for photographs, try toys from Mattel, LEGO and Simba, sample themed products and shop from a 182-piece Toy Story 5 collection.

This is where the campaign starts to feel less like advertising and more like world-building.

You aren’t simply telling a family that Toy Story 5 exists. You’re giving them somewhere to encounter it, something to interact with and, naturally, something to take home. That’s particularly fitting for a franchise whose entire emotional premise is that ordinary objects can become extraordinary when a child gives them meaning.

The campaign is essentially doing the same thing in reverse.

It is taking an ordinary supermarket and giving it a little bit of Toy Story magic.

The same thinking appears internationally, with Central Park Mall Jakarta hosting character meet-and-greets and immersive activations.

And then Pixar went properly literal at the world premiere.

Experiential Supply Co. created a giant interactive Lilypad for the premiere, turning one of the film’s newest characters into a physical object that audiences could actually stand beside and interact with. The sizzle reel makes the scale of it particularly clear.

Again, the interesting part isn’t simply that Pixar created a big photo opportunity. It’s that Lilypad has escaped the screen. A character whose entire purpose is to represent the intrusion of technology into childhood physically occupyies the same space as the people who came to see her story.

There is something almost wonderfully meta about that.

And the cinema itself becomes another canvas. Large-scale AMC paste-ups and vinyl executions turn the place where the film is ultimately consumed into another part of the campaign.

By this point, Toy Story 5 isn’t simply being advertised for the cinema.

The cinema is being turned into Toy Story.

Don’t just advertise culture. Join it.

That principle is probably best demonstrated by Soccer Aid, because Disney and Pixar didn’t simply buy media around Soccer Aid. Instead, the campaign became part of the event itself.

There was a bespoke 90-second Toy Story video during the ITV broadcast, the characters appeared as part of the match-day experience, and Tom Hanks and Tim Allen eventually arrived on the pitch to help kick-start the game.

That progression is worth paying attention to.

First, Toy Story is advertising around culture. Then, it is participating in culture. Finally, the characters and their actors become part of something that audiences were already there to watch.

That’s a much more valuable position for an entertainment brand than simply interrupting someone’s viewing experience with another trailer.

It also gives the franchise access to an audience that isn’t necessarily thinking about animated films at all.

You’re watching football.

Then Woody, Buzz and Jessie turn up.

The marketing doesn’t have to convince you to enter the world of Toy Story because, for a moment, it has brought that world into yours.

And then Disney starts pulling the bigger levers

This is where I think Toy Story 5 provides a particularly useful glimpse into the machinery Disney has at its disposal.

The ESPN “We’re Going” campaign took the franchise into ESPN’s year-long build towards Super Bowl LXI, with Toy Story 5.5 turning ESPN personalities into action figures and sending them on a journey to Los Angeles alongside Woody, Buzz and the gang.

And this is where the campaign starts to become much bigger than the film itself, because The Walt Disney Company isn’t operating with film marketing as a neat little box.

It has Pixar. It has Disney+. It has Disney Music. It has ABC. It has ESPN. It has retail. It has parks. It has live events. It has talent. It has advertising infrastructure.

And Toy Story can move between all of them.

That is an extraordinary advantage for an IP that has existed for three decades.

The Super Bowl activity is particularly interesting because it isn’t simply a case of buying one enormous media slot and hoping for the best. ESPN describes the wider “Year of the Super Bowl” as a year-long initiative connecting Disney, ESPN and the NFL across multiple platforms and marquee moments.

Toy Story therefore becomes another character in a much larger Disney ecosystem.

And that, I think, brings us back to the generational mirror.

A parent might remember buying a Toy Story VHS → Their child might know the characters from Disney+ → They might hear the new song on Spotify → They might see Woody on the way through an airport → They might encounter Lilypad in a shopping centre → They might watch the characters on ITV during Soccer Aid → They might see them on a wrapped plane → They might walk into a cinema covered in Toy Story.

And somewhere in all of that, the same franchise keeps appearing; not as a relic of the parent’s childhood, but as something that has successfully inserted itself into the child’s world too.

That is what makes this first pillar work for me.

The campaign isn’t simply trying to reach two generations, it’s repeatedly trying to put those generations in the same place.

The parent gets the nostalgia. The child gets the discovery. And Toy Story gets to become the thing they share.

Which brings us to the slightly uncomfortable question underneath all of this.

If Pixar has spent so much of the campaign proving that Toy Story can still belong in the modern world, what exactly is it asking that modern world to care about?

Because making an old franchise feel present is one challenge.

Making its new conflict feel necessary is another entirely.

Can playtime be refreshed?

Whilst all the pillars are pretty essential to this overall breakdown, this one has the most interesting channel tension in the whole brief; Disney & Pixar marketing an “anti-screen” film through screens. Specifically through social media platforms like TikTok, which is arguably the most addictive screen platform currently aimed at children; now whilst TikTok will argue it’s not aimed at children, if we go by recent news relating to social media bans for children, it’s evident that there are a lot of youngsters spending time on TikTok - both consuming and creating their own content. Whilst this isn’t exclusive to TikTok, other more recent news suggests it’s the mainstay for reaching a younger demographic: “The Walt Disney Company and TikTok Announce a First-of-its-Kind Global Short-Form Content-Sharing Deal.”

Another example of actively trying to resolve the anti-screen-and-play contradiction is a physical, imagination-led mechanic: the BBFC card competition. I didn’t include it in my Superman post, and it’s the last campaign I remember digging into this competition for. The reason I looked into this is two-fold - one, I had no idea what the significance of the BBFC actually was beforehand, and second, I learnt that in the case of Superman, if the movie could get a PG rating in the UK (given the BBFC decides whether the language, sexual and violent content is mild enough for a younger audience), it’d become the best-case scenario for the UK release in particular, because a PG rating meant the campaign would have a much easier time attracting families to the cinema. In actuality, Superman was rated 12A, which is still great for reaching a younger audience whose parents can decide for them.

In the case of Toy Story 5 though, this didn’t matter too much because the BBFC gave it a PG rating, which is excellent, because the film could then be shown to and reach a much younger audience. Children again wouldn’t be the primary target audience, but they’d be just as essential to get the message to, given they have that pest to power. As the social media post I linked above indicates, the primary target audience to me reads as parents with kids aged 4–11 (maybe with an added interest in Toy Story/Disney/Pixar/animation for extra accuracy), given they included this in their caption: “We’re calling on young artists aged 4 to 11 to come to the rescue to design the official BBFC Black Card.”

Now, before I lose myself in the sauce of the BBFC, let me just clarify the significance of this being part of the campaign. Outside of literally making it so “the winning artwork will be shown ahead of every cinema screening of Toy Story 5 in the UK 🪀✨,” it’s an opportunity for younger children to be encouraged to be creative; removing the screens for a moment by encouraging them with an initiative that just asks them to draw their favourite characters. It’s not really about winning a medal in essence. It’s more of an opportunity to explore what childlike wonder and imagination can add to the already-existing story, and to ask to see that same IP through their eyes.

Everything else in this pillar, by comparison, relates back to social media, which arguably deepens the irony of screen time rather than answering it, because as you’ll notice, the next few examples are all taken directly from social media, where, as you can imagine, I had to spend a fair bit of time just consuming to even get the examples in the first place.

However, as is the case with marketing and advertising generally, when you want to reach an audience of parents - or really anyone else for that matter - social media usually over-indexes and shows up as a predominant channel; sitting within the wider range of channels like TV, OOH and radio, but for pretty much every single audience I look at, it’s in the top five without fail. In essence: social media is here to stay, the average person uses it heavily throughout their day for a plethora of reasons, and it’s cost-effective for reaching your audience and drives results if you’ve got good creative, targeting and know how to optimise it.

Now that you’ve had a short crash course in why social media, and why so much of it, here are a few examples I thought were worth noting down, and why.

There was a proper in-person “Toy Meets Tech” TikTok event, the kind of thing that’s clearly built with influencers in mind, and the carousel from it tags a rotating cast of brand partners I’ll come back to shortly. Around the same time there’s a video literally titled “It’s Toys vs Tech, the battle is on,” which I find interesting, because I sat through a BFI panel with Andrew Stanton where I’m told there are “no villains” in this film; yet here’s a piece of official content leaning hard into “the age of toys is over” as a gimmick. Make of that what you will!

Then there’s the red-carpet launch, which streamed on Disney+ under that same “it’s toys vs tech” framing, and honestly, the only reason I flagged this one is the SVOD tie-in. I genuinely don’t know how often Disney live-streams its own red carpets on Disney+, so that alone made it worth a note.

Ladbible ran a nice bit of ‘earned’ PR too: first look at Bullseye’s “Evil Play Time,” and Alan Cumming voicing the horse for the first time. Classic earned coverage, but I liked that Ladbible actually co-posted it with Alan Cumming’s own account rather than just running it solo.

Then Walt Disney World had Joan Cusack visiting Jessie’s Roundup, co-posted across the Walt Disney World, D23 and Disney Parks accounts, and wrapped into the “Cool Kids Summer” parks initiative. I’m a total sucker for synergy, and this is a great example of it; you’ve got the parks, the IP, the film and the cast all pointed at each other, each serving its own goal while still reinforcing the others. One message says “Cool Kids Summer,” the other says “in theatres,” and both land.

Now here’s the one that actually stopped me scrolling. Someone in the US has wrapped their own car to look exactly like the Pizza Planet truck, Buzz and Woody hanging off the back and everything. Someone else has of course filmed and posted it with zero affiliation to Disney, Pixar or Toy Story.

When I first saw it, it sat at 2.3 million likes, but revisiting it months later for this piece, it’s sitting at 4.1 million. And in the comments, the account who posted it asks those reacting to share it: “everyone, thank you very much for the visibility and likes on the video. I would like some help from all of you to tag @disney @toystory @pixar so that this video reaches them.” That, to me, reads as a genuinely missed opportunity.

You’ve got an adult who owns a car that looks exactly like the one from your IP, it’s gone viral completely organically, so why not run a competition off the back of it, or partner with an actual car brand - say Toyota- and get a small fleet of these things onto real roads? It’d cost more upfront than just letting it happen organically, sure, but it’s essentially the same instinct as the 501st Legion fan organisation, just on wheels. Look at me giving out free ideas, lol. This isn’t even that far-fetched, because - small spoiler for what’s coming later - Disney and Pixar did go on to pull off exactly this kind of real-world partnership with Papa John’s, who launched actual Pizza Planet pop-ups to celebrate the release.

Now back to what did happen, there’s also a straightforward “turn your tablet into Lilypad“ partnership, which - and I say this with love - completely undercuts the toys-vs-tech message they’ve spent the whole campaign building. Its got over 135k likes, so clearly nobody minds all that much. Having now seen the film, the actual resolution is that digital devices and classic toys can coexist and help kids build real friendships, so this is really just an adjacent bit of merch selling a bit of immersion. If you want a Lilypad tablet skin, hey, who am I to judge it is kind of cool.

Then there’s “Disney Download,” which genuinely had me confused the first time I saw it. I thought it was some brand-new format from Disney UK covering Disney news, though I’ve since noticed more of these in my feed and I’m honestly not sure when they started. Digging around, I think it began on April 17th. It functions as a kind of all-in-one bulletin, which I love, because creators already make a living recapping Disney news for people, so why wouldn’t Disney just do that themselves? The example I found flagged Hercules’ themed 5K Toga Run in July, which I otherwise would never have known about. Makes you wonder whether that’s worth doing with your own films, your own products, your own work more broadly - I mean, owning the recap of your own news rather than leaving it entirely to creators.

Disney Spain was doing something similar but locally: a native, disruption-style Instagram video speaking directly to a Spanish audience. I like flagging these wherever I find them, because I work on a global basis myself, and while it’s genuinely hard to know every market’s nuance, the one rule that never changes is that you talk to people in their own language and their own formats.

Sticking with the purely native stuff, there’s a TikTok of the toys dancing the second Bonnie leaves the room, and one comment nails exactly why it works: “I love how Pixar may be hiring animators that only make TikToks.” Now if I’m honest, it’s not really a transmedia layer, it’s just IP-native social content, but it’s Disney and Pixar showing off, and the characters range from the actual core cast all the way to Bad Bunny’s Pizza, lol.

Tony Hale - Forky - got taken on an actual honeymoon at Walt Disney World with Knifey, since the two of them officially get married in this one. It’s another park-and-theatrical synergy post, but a nice one: you get the Cutlery-fan payoff of the pair together, it cuts to Tony Hale himself wandering the actual park taking photos of them with his own Lilypad, and then the toys scale up to full size across the various Toy Story rides. Synergy, again.

There’s also a very simple “move your thumb to the beat“ video. 483k likes for something that basic, which still leans on the characters being reanimated for the format, as one Aspen Animation comment put it: “it’s crazy to see Pixar adopt Instagram trends to promote their movies 👀 we’re in a new era.” Popculturebrain also did his usual “first reactions are in and they’re wild” round-up too, which - I’ll be honest - I have a lot of respect for. I’d genuinely love to put together content like that myself one day, but right now I’m just about at capacity.

Big Screen Berkan, another creator I follow closely, shared his Toy Story 5 PR merch package; simple unboxing, but a useful one if you’re after real examples of influencer PR in the wild, since it shows exactly what studios are sending, and to whom.

And then there’s tims.eye on Instagram, who projection-maps his own front door so it looks like a portal straight into Andy’s bedroom. The toys then just walk through it into the real world, which, I know, what does that even mean outside of 2M likes, lol. There’s clearly a lot of editing and probably AI involved, and he’s done the same trick for other IP too - Cars, Roblox, Scream, the lot - which makes me wonder what Disney and Pixar’s actual guidelines are here, because this one might toe the line more than most. It’s sitting at 2.7 million likes and doesn’t paint the characters in a bad light at all, so it’s worth thinking about as creators keep leaning on AI to work with IP they don’t own.

Last one: “Game on!“, which drops the toys-vs-tech framing into a basketball setting to tap the ESPN-adjacent sports audience; they’re tagged though, so not directly linked to an ESPN account. I can only imagine the animators looking at that brief were like what is this for, this wasn’t in the storyboard, lol!

Now, I really didn’t mean for this section to run this long - I’ll try to keep the next one tighter, no promises though ;) - but I think this pillar touches on something genuinely important for the wider marketing puzzle.

Disney is learning, and leaning hard, on social media. There’s a real lesson here about self-coverage, about leaning into UGC rather than ignoring it, about integrating your characters and IP into native formats, about pre-planning the content your animators and cast will actually need to produce, and about adapting to how modern audiences actually behave.

None of this was also really about targeting kids directly, but kids spend just as much time in these spaces as anyone else, so if you’re putting out quality organic content, you’ll land in their feed regardless.

I could’ve gone into the paid ads and influencer strategy properly too, but it’s nowhere near as interesting as what’s above, and I didn’t save examples as I went along; though the ad library will very likely still have them if you go digging. Paid social is still hugely important and cost-effective, so don’t take any of this as “don’t bother,” what I am saying though, is that modern audiences have gotten very good at ignoring ads, and if you actually want to reach them, you need to adapt, you need to educate a bit, and - maybe most importantly - you need to entertain them first.

Sounds strange, needing to entertain someone before you even get the chance to sit them down and entertain them properly with the actual film. But that’s the game now. It stopped being “social media” a while ago. It’s interest, and it’s fandom now.

In support of that whole self-coverage point, Pixar announced back on the 19th of April that they’d be dropping new products and collabs all week, which brings me perfectly onto my next pillar…

Commercialising Play (the credibility guardrail)

Okay, so having just covered off the whole ironic “toys vs tech” messaging on social media, we’re not straying too far from irony here either. This pillar looks at another one running through the Toy Story 5 campaign: is it selling more plastic while preaching against consumerist screen culture, and does evil win because they were clearly selling tech toys too?

To summarise for you, products and collabs go as wide as Porsche, MLB Ball Park giveaways, Westfield London, the Capital Summer Time Ball, a global Papa John’s partnership, EE cinema tie-ins and plenty more. This is by far my most evidenced pillar, and the channel spread is genuinely broad; it transcends retail and dives into experiential, sport, radio, OOH, automotive and beyond.

Before I get into the examples themselves, I’m going to preface that I’ll only dig deeper into a select few collabs that I found most interesting or that stood out for a particular reason, the rest will be summarised because I feel they’re much more self-explanatory. If you’d like a very topline, social-media-shaped recap of this kind of thing, check out how Pixelated Marj captures “Pixar x Everyone.” The video highlights a variety of the brands Pixar partnered with from the consumer-product angle, so you can actually go and buy a lot of what’s in it. The Papa John’s and EE campaigns for example, include a lot more from a marketing point of view though, and that’s what I’m actually interested in giving you insight on.

To summarise, I’ve managed to collect examples across a genuinely wide spread of consumer product categories:

• Blind boxes from Pop Mart, perfect for the blind-box lovers and feeding into a very large trend of similar products

• Pop! Funkos with some genuinely unique picks: Lilypad, Bullseye, Blaze’s Pet Pig among them

• Bag charms from Miniso, simple and capitalising on the whole Labubu/bag-charm phenomenon

• Suitcases and backpacks that should go perfectly with your new Porsche…

• Official Crocs | 275k likes tells me people absolutely love these, and why wouldn’t they, there’s an Alien-style pair and a brown Jessie style that comes with a denim and cow-print collar

• Pandora charms continuing their long-standing licensing partnership

• A Typo x Toy Story range of desk and home accessories

• Kids Foot Locker Adidas sneakers matching Buzz, Woody and Jessie’s colourways, epic

• A Burger King Jr. tie-in in Brazil | I do believe Pixar aligned themselves closer to healthier food options and lifestyle brands elsewhere, so it’s interesting this one came to life overseas

• The Belkin Lilypad iPad case, pairing perfectly with everything I flagged in Pillar 2

• Dr. Squatch soap, which I personally love - I use the Star Wars bars - and given they tend to align themselves with pop culture and IP generally this was somewhat expected, though I do wonder what smelling like a toy would actually be like

• Remasters of Toy Story: Retro Roundup! and the Toy Story 3 Complete Edition dropping October 15th, acting as a transmedia layer that already existed and is simply being revitalised for a modern audience

• A Fortnite LATAM tie-in adding the Pizza Planet Truck as a vehicle skin alongside Buzz Lightyear and Emperor Zurg skins and an Alien sidekick - see the Fandom page for the full set

• A Luckin Coffee collab in Singapore serving a Buddy Apple Butter Latte and a Pear Play Latte

• AMC popcorn buckets - did you seriously think this wouldn’t turn up? Shame on you ;) - included a Buzz bucket that matches his actual packaging, right down to him arriving inside it, much like the Shrek example I found for my Shrek at 25 post, plus the iconic yellow-and-blue Pixar Star Ball turned into a bucket with cups and toy toppers to match

• A free small popcorn for Disney+ Perks members via Regal Crown Club | synergy, again, and I love it, because it just asks members to connect one point to another and rewards them for essentially giving Disney another gateway into understanding their audience better

• Hey Dude shoes | not much to add outside of nice

• A LEGO Germany post for the wider range of Toy Story 5 sets

• Finally a genuinely impressive pop-up at Westfield Shepherd’s Bush, which took over a large chunk of one of the UK’s busiest shopping centres, complete with activities and free extras like smoothies and trading cards to take home.

Now that you’ve got the lay of the land, let’s get into the partnerships I think are actually worth reading into properly.

First up, the Porsche collab, which is worth a raised eyebrow given the film’s anti-consumerism message; somewhat hitting the same note as the TikTok event in the previous pillar. A luxury car brand partnership for a film about the value of simple, tangible toys is probably the sharpest single example of the campaign undermining its own positioning, and that’s because the two don’t often share the same marketing space. But as Born Licensing put it, Toy Story is one of the few franchises able to bridge those worlds - still doesn’t detract from when I first spotted it and how flabbergasted I was.

If you’re interested in the examples: there’s the teaser itself, sitting at 300k likes on Instagram; Complex entered the chat, which tells you how big a moment this was for luxury and entertainment, since the earned media potential basically sells itself; the official look from Porsche and Disney achieved over 1 million likes, showed off the three cars inspired by Buzz, Woody and Jessie, whilst letting us know this was done in the name of charity, with the one-of-a-kind Sonderwunsch builds sold to benefit the American Red Cross, Starlight Children’s Foundation and Big Brothers Big Sisters of America; and Forest Auto Reviews, which pulled in 738k likes for an in-person look at the actual cars - I’ll add they’re genuinely gorgeous, and personally I’d go for Buzz.

Up next, the Kellogg’s collab, which I personally find pretty epic, simply because I remember diving into a new cereal box trying to find a secret figure or lighstaber spoon; hopefully you can relate as well. From what I understand, Kellogg’s hadn’t put toys in their boxes for over a decade, so you can imagine this was likely a big deal for both companies.

The partnership wasn’t exclusive to one cereal as well, with Frosted Flakes, Froot Loops, Apple Jacks and Corn Pops all having their moment, offering up Toy Story trading cards, collectable spoons and movie ticket offers. It also turns out I’m not alone in remembering this fondly, because as One Pulse finds, 83% of Millennial parents remember finding a toy in a cereal box as a child, and 48% say the comeback makes them more likely to buy that brand; when asked what most often leads to an unplanned purchase, nostalgia (48%) actually beats discounts (38%).

Whilst that’s really interesting on its own, it also leaves me wondering whether we’ll see more of this kind of thing in future.

In an interesting move, Disney looked towards two major telecoms companies to tap directly into the screen-time plot point; AT&T for the US, EE for the UK.

Now, whilst you’re probably aware I’m not American, I still managed to come across this AT&T post, which reads “new toys, new tech, same reminder: the best connections are the ones that bring us closer together” over the bespoke animation made specifically for social above.

Again, One Pulse is genuinely brilliant for added context here. As they share, Disney positioned AT&T as the brand that helps families stay connected rather than pushing more consumption, and only 20% of people surveyed found the partnership hypocritical; 40% said it’s clever if AT&T positions itself as part of the solution, and a further 26% said it depends entirely on how the campaign handles it; indicating that the creative execution itself is really the primary risk if it isn’t handled well.

While again I’m not from the US, I found it genuinely interesting what else One Pulse had to say about the differences between the two markets, given Disney leveraged two different partners: UK consumers feel more personal anxiety about screen time (40% say it genuinely bothers them, versus 31% in the US) and are more likely to feel conflicted about their own tech use (43% vs 33%), yet, the US edges ahead on finding the anti-screen premise personally relevant, with 63% in the UK and 61% in the US saying the film’s message resonates with them, a smaller gap than the guilt numbers might suggest.

Which is where EE step in with their “Toy Story 5”-inspired DCM collaboration, helping families talk about online safety, blending entertainment with practical support so EE could play a meaningful role in how families navigate life online. As a co-created campaign, the headline was a 30-second film built to bring the characters into a modern family context around tech, trust and growing up in a connected world; essentially acting as a conversation starter for family life online, while connecting directly back to EE’s own offerings.

Interestingly, whilst I caught the 30-second ad myself, I didn’t spot any of the other media planning around it - influencer-led content, cinema-wide OOH formats, YouTube activity, foyer installations and more - but I guess I’m not the target audience, so that makes sense.

The Pizza Planet and Papa John’s collab has to be my absolute favourite partnership - the Porsche one is sick, don’t get me wrong - but for whatever reason this is one that’s never really been investigated properly before, and it deserved to be.

I, much like a lot of others, rewatched the Toy Story films in prep for 5, and let me just say Pizza Planet still looks just as cool to me now as it did twenty years ago. One Pulse yet again backs up that I’m not the only one who thinks this: 59% of consumers say they’d go out of their way to visit an immersive recreation of a fictional location from a film they loved growing up, and 62% say a brand doing so would make them feel more positive about it overall.

Whilst I sadly wasn’t able to make it to the London pop-up myself - a genuine shame - but let’s relive it through what I did catch: the immersive Pizza Planet locations themselves; a very cool “POV you just clocked out of your shift at Papa John’s Pizza Planet” UGC-style video, complete with a look at the pizza boxes and Pizza Planet-style truck; genuine UGC from a food influencer capturing the perfect Friday date night, with a lot more on the food collabs than the official content shows; the truck roaming the streets of Chile too, so people walking past could grab their own photos and videos; and a comic showing off the pizzas, which even Disney’s own CMO Asad Ayaz reshared to his Instagram.

We’re nearly there, I promise. This last one isn’t a single partnership so much as a look at Disney’s wider ties to sport - given Disney own ESPN, it’s no surprise Toy Story got tied into a Super Bowl moment I referenced earlier on in this post. However, what Disney also did was partner with Major League Baseball, to release bespoke content which featured Mookie Betts and his daughter starring in a TV spot, offered Ball Park Family giveaways, and ran themed MLB games across the summer.

Okay, so that’s the full commercial engine laid out for you. Now for the bit I’ve genuinely been looking forward to writing: did any of it actually work?

So, did it work?

Toy Story 5 has been an outright box office triumph, cementing itself as one of the most successful films of 2026. Following its theatrical premiere on 19 June 2026, the Pixar sequel shattered franchise records with a $300+ million global opening weekend, before charging past the $1.1 billion mark worldwide. Against a production budget of $250 million and estimated P&A costs of $100-150 million, industry analysts placed the theatrical break-even somewhere between $750 million and $800 million - meaning the film hasn’t just cleared that bar, it’s nearly tripled its combined costs, generating hundreds of millions in pure theatrical profit for Disney and pushing consumer toy merchandise sales to a five-year high in the process.

What I find genuinely satisfying, though, is how directly the actual audience data validates the argument I made back in Pillar 1.

Nearly 70% of opening-weekend ticket buyers attended as family groups, and adults over 25 made up 55% of the audience on their own; this was never really a kids’ film that adults tolerated, it was a family occasion that adults actively chose. And the clearest single shift from Toy Story 4 backs up exactly what I was arguing about parents being the real engine of this campaign: mothers went from 58% of parent attendees in 2019 to 72% for Toy Story 5. That’s a genuinely significant move, and it lines up almost perfectly with the generational-mirror argument I made right at the start of this piece.

The film also picked up an A CinemaScore but the detail I actually love is that parents scored it 5/5 against 4.5/5 from children. Usually you’d expect that gap to run the other way. Parents weren’t just tolerating this for their kids; they walked out more satisfied than the kids did, which is about as strong a word-of-mouth engine as a family film can hope for.

There’s also a genuinely useful answer buried in here to one of the questions I set myself before I even started writing this: how do you turn nostalgia into theatrical urgency?

The Toy Story catalogue had already racked up more than 60 million viewing hours on Disney+ before this film even came out, which could easily have talked people into just waiting for it to land at home. Instead, it opened to $160 million domestically and $312 million globally, with premium formats like PLF and IMAX making up around a third of ticket sales. Streaming familiarity, it turns out, isn’t a threat to theatrical if the campaign gives people an actual reason to see the next chapter now rather than later; reunion, scale, cultural relevance, and a reason to make it a shared, communal occasion.

The audience also widened in ways that matter for how you’d plan the next one of these: Hispanic/Latino viewers grew from 23% of the Toy Story 4 audience to 30% for Toy Story 5, while the under-25 share actually fell from 59% to 44% as older generations came back into the fold. This wasn’t a campaign chasing new, younger eyeballs. It was a campaign that reached backward into its own audience and asked them to bring their kids.

If I had to boil the whole campaign down to one sentence, it’d probably be this:

Toy Story 5 was marketed as a children’s adventure, purchased as a parent-approved family outing, and amplified as a nostalgia event by adults who’d grown up with Pixar themselves. One franchise, doing three completely different jobs for three completely different audiences, all at the same time.

Wrapping this one up

So, going right back to where I started - the questions I set myself after that Pixar 40 Years panel - how does the campaign actually hold up?

The “thirty years of cultural equity” question, and the “make the parents who grew up with Woody and Buzz want to take their own children” question, both get answered the same way: repeatedly, deliberately, and from a dozen different directions; traditional media, Taylor Swift, retail, OOH, sport, the lot. That’s Pillar 1, and if anything the performance data above makes that pillar look even stronger in hindsight than it did while I was writing it.

The “market toys vs. tech without it becoming a manufactured culture war” question is the one I think the campaign handled with the most self-awareness - Pillar 2 in particular is full of moments where Disney seems genuinely conscious of the irony it’s playing with, even when it doesn’t fully resolve it (see: the Lilypad tablet skin, or frankly this entire third pillar).

Which is honestly where I land on the “can a merch-heavy campaign avoid looking hypocritical” question too - it doesn’t, not completely. Porsche, blind boxes, AMC buckets and a tablet skin sit fairly awkwardly next to a film arguing that real toys beat screens. But I don’t think it fully undercuts Pillar 1 the way I worried it might going in, because the campaign never really pretended otherwise, and it closed this pillar out by donating 18,000 toys to children’s hospitals - now, I didn’t include it earlier on because I thought it was worth mentioning here, given it’s either a genuinely lovely piece of CSR or the smartest possible answer to its own hypocrisy problem, and I suspect it’s honestly a bit of both.

The one question I genuinely wasn’t sure the campaign had answered by the end of Pillar 2 was how you turn nostalgia into theatrical urgency. It turns out the answer wasn’t really in the creative at all. It was in the box office. Sixty million hours of Toy Story already sat on Disney+, and people still turned up in cinemas anyway, in premium formats, in the tens of millions.

If there’s one thing worth stealing from all of this for your own campaigns, it’s that “family audience” was never really one audience. Children supplied the desire, parents supplied the permission and the payment, and the adults who grew up on Pixar supplied the cultural heat that made the whole thing feel like an event rather than just another sequel. Get all three pulling in the same direction, and thirty years of cultural equity stops being a risk to manage and starts being the reason people actually show up.

That’s The Harperverse breakdown of Toy Story 5.

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Moana 2026 • The Mandalorian and Grogu • The Devil Wears Prada 2 • Hoppers • Pixar’s 40 Year Franchise Legacy

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~ most uncredited images will have been taken from the films TMDB page!

Monthsssss ago now, I found myself sitting in on the Pixar: A Celebration of 40 Years of Disney and Pixar’s Toy Story panel. And, honestly, I didn’t quite know what I was going to get from it.

I’d gone in with my marketing and transmedia brain switched on, was expecting to hear about franchises, sequels, merchandising, world-building and all the machinery that sits behind some of the biggest entertainment properties in the world.

Instead, I came away thinking more about story.

More importantly, I came away with a slightly different perspective on what actually makes a franchise last, because Pixar’s 40-year franchise legacy doesn’t appear to have come from having a master plan for a 40-year franchise - even though I imagine a master plan would look absolutely insane.

Instead, it comes from repeatedly asking something so simple; is there a story worth telling?

After listening to Andrew Stanton speak about the process behind these films and the wider Pixar picture, I couldn’t help but think about how different that philosophy feels from the way we increasingly talk about modern entertainment franchises.

Cinematic universes. Release roadmaps. Sequel pipelines. Interconnected stories. Merchandise opportunities. Spin-offs.

And, perhaps most importantly:

What comes next?

Pixar’s answer, at least from what I took away from the conversation, seemed much more straightforward.

Is there another story here?

And if there isn’t, don’t make one.

The people behind the pixels

Now, the panel actually featured Andrew Stanton alongside Pixar producer Lindsey Collins, and one of the immediate things that stood out was how candid and funny the conversation was; Stanton swearing probably shouldn’t have been particularly noteworthy, yet it was.

As the host joked, there was something funny about the audience realising that Pixar employees actually swear; a small thing, but I actually liked it and so did the room.

I find there’s something useful about being reminded that behind these enormous films, billion-dollar franchises and characters that have become part of popular culture, there are still groups of people sitting around trying to figure out whether a joke works.

They aren’t sitting there thinking about “the Pixar franchise ecosystem” every five minutes. Instead they’re making a film. And that became a recurring theme throughout the conversation, because although the films might eventually become enormous commercial and cultural properties, they start with people trying to solve creative problems.

Four years to make two hours

Another one of my biggest takeaways was the sheer amount of time and effort that goes into making a Pixar film, because as the panel went on to say, these projects are measured in years - not months - with around four years often being the minimum development and production timeline.

It’s easy to forget that, when audiences can then consume a film in two or so hours.

We see the finished product. The four years of development, experimentation, rewrites, animation, technical problem-solving and production largely disappear.

That makes the idea of “Pixar magic” slightly misleading because there is magic in what they create, obviously. The thing we eventually see is often only the final few percent of a much longer period of thinking, testing and failing. But there’s also an enormous amount of process behind it. And perhaps that’s something creatives across pretty much any industry can learn from; I’ll likely touch on this in my upcoming Spider-Man: Brand New Day breakdown, given paying homage to the crew was a pretty key part to the organic campaign.

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Toy Story was never really about toys

There were all these little titbits that you wouldn’t necessarily know unless you were actually in the room, but one idea in particular stuck with me: Toy Story is ultimately a story about growing up.

Now, you may have got to that conclusion yourself and if you did, go you - but for some of us the realisation that the toys themselves are only one part of the narrative. The real story is watching children grow, change, move on and pass things down to the next generation comes with some additional thinking.

However, once you get there it’s really easy to see. Butttt, if you look across the films, different children represent different stages of life, allowing audiences to see their own experiences reflected back at them.

Toy Story 1 → 2 → 3 → 4 → 5 / Andy → Bonnie

And suddenly, the longevity of Toy Story makes a little more sense.

The films haven’t really been asking us to care about toys for thirty years. They’re asking us to care about what toys mean to us. I find that distinction to be pretty thought provoking.

That’s because a toy can become a symbol of childhood, friendship, loss, growing up, moving on, or simply having somewhere safe to put your imagination; I might not play with toys anymore at big 25, but you best believe I have fond memories attached to certain toys I still have tucked away somewhere in my apartment. All in all, what this means for the franchise, is that it can change its characters, settings and conflicts while still returning to the same emotional truth.

And I think that’s one of the biggest reasons Toy Story can continue to evolve without completely losing itself.

There isn’t necessarily a Pixar Cinematic Universe

Interestingly, there wasn’t a huge amount of discussion around transmedia storytelling or long-term franchise planning; although you know I’d love that.

In fact, the conversation seemed to suggest almost the opposite, because the impression I got from Stanton was that a sequel isn’t simply the inevitable next stage of a successful property.

The story has to justify itself.

If the story is there, and it feels worth telling, then you make it.

If it isn’t? You don’t.

That was particularly interesting from a franchise perspective because it runs counter to how many modern entertainment brands operate. We’re used to thinking about franchises as ecosystems; I know I certainly am anyway, the thrill of plotting it out or discussing what could be next is most exciting!

What is the next film? What’s the spin-off? What characters can be introduced now that will become important later? What merchandise opportunities are there? What can eventually become a series, game, attraction or experience? Where can they possibly go next…

Pixar, at least from this conversation, seems to have approached it from the other direction.

Build something worth caring about first. Then see what it can become.

And I think that’s a really important distinction when we talk about transmedia.

Story first. Ecosystem second.

Pixar obviously have an enormous ecosystem around its films; supported by Disney too of course.

Merchandise. Sequels. Shorts. Attractions. Music. Games. Home entertainment. Theme parks. The list goes on. The most interesting thing I took away from the conversation is that the ecosystem doesn’t appear to be the reason the story exists.

Again, the story comes first.

The ecosystem grows because audiences genuinely connect with the story, and from a marketing and franchise-building perspective, I think that’s a really important lesson.

Successful franchises aren’t necessarily built by starting with the question: “How can we turn this into a franchise?”

Sometimes they’re built by asking: “Is this a story people are going to care about?”

The merchandise, sequels, spin-offs and brand extensions come afterwards.

Pixar may benefit enormously from the commercial opportunities attached to its characters, but the characters themselves still need to exist for a creative reason. And there’s something wonderfully ironic about that when we’re talking about Toy Story.

The franchise that has become one of the world’s biggest toy-selling machines is, at its creative foundation, a story about why toys matter.

That’s quite the full circle.

Passing the torch

Another part of the conversation that caught my attention was the development of Toy Story 5 itself; this panel was also largely focused on said release, of course.

Stanton spoke about co-directing with younger filmmakers (McKenna Harris) and described something resembling an apprenticeship process: bringing in the next generation of directors and allowing them to develop within the franchise.

There was also a degree of self-awareness in how he framed it, because part of the motivation is obviously succession planning; no creator wants to carry the pressure of returning to the same franchise forever.

So, by mentoring younger directors, Pixar can preserve institutional knowledge while allowing fresh perspectives to shape future stories. I think there’s something quite fitting about that happening within Toy Story of all franchises; a series so fundamentally concerned with growing up, letting go and passing things on, is now literally having its creative knowledge passed to a new generation.

This also connected with something I’ve been noticing across the entertainment industry more broadly; younger creatives being trusted with increasingly ambitious projects. A shift largely being heavily driven by traditional studios realising that digital native filmmakers possess an innate understanding of modern and typically young audiences; those that come to mind as I’m sure you’ll agree: Curry Barker & Texas Chainsaw, Jacksepticeye co-producing Bloodborne, Markiplier and Iron Lung, RackaRacka being offered Street Fighter, Kane Parsons becoming another highly sought-after young director after the success of Backrooms, and so on.

I do think there is something to be said for what youth can bring creatively.

When you’re younger, you’re generally more willing to experiment, fail and take risks. You have the energy to pursue multiple projects, try things that don’t work and learn through trial and error.

Later in your career, a larger portion of your time can end up being spent maintaining, managing or fixing the systems you’ve already built. So, maybe the best creative organisations aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest concentration of established talent.

Maybe they’re the ones that know when to pass the torch.

Forty years of Pixar

During the panel and exclusive clips we got to see, there was genuine excitement for Toy Story 5; including from people significantly older than me. That kept me thinking about their reactions afterwards - even as I write this now I remember - because these films aren’t just entertainment products.

For a lot of people, Pixar has been woven into their lives, and these films have acted as milestones that mark different stages of childhood, adolescence and adulthood. People grew up alongside these stories. They watched Andy grow up. They grew up themselves - I sure did.

And then, years later, they found themselves sitting in a room getting excited about another Toy Story film. Perhaps that’s the most powerful form of franchise longevity there is. Not simply making something that people remember. Making something that people pass on.

And now, Toy Story 5

Overall, the panel wasn’t necessarily a masterclass in marketing or transmedia strategy.

And I’m glad it wasn’t. Because what it gave me instead was something much more useful: a reminder that all of that stuff has to start somewhere.

Story.

Pixar’s 40-year franchise legacy doesn’t appear to have come from knowing exactly what the next forty years would look like, instead it came from repeatedly asking whether there was another story worth telling. And that’s why I’m particularly excited about bringing you my take on Toy Story 5.

Because I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about what happens after that creative decision:

• What happens when a franchise has thirty years of cultural equity behind it?

• How do you make a fifth film feel relevant to a child who wasn’t even alive when the first one came out?

• How do you make the parents who grew up with Woody and Buzz want to take their own children to see them?

• How do you turn nostalgia into theatrical urgency?

• And perhaps most importantly, how do you market a story about toys confronting technology without making the whole thing feel like a manufactured “toys vs. tablets” culture-war talking point?

Those are the questions I’ll be getting into on Monday.

Because if Pixar’s creative philosophy is story first and ecosystem second, then Toy Story 5 gives us a pretty fascinating opportunity to see what Disney did with that story once it entered the machinery of a modern global film campaign.

And, having listened to the people who made it, talk about why they believed there was another story worth telling...

I’m very interested in showing you how they convinced the rest of us to care.

Thanks for reading another post from The Harperverse!

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~ most uncredited images will have been taken from the films TMDB page!

If I asked you what The Sheep Detectives was, I’d probably get one of two responses: “no clue buddy” or “The Sheep Detectives is a 2026 mystery comedy-drama film directed by Kyle Balda and written by Craig Mazin, based on Leonie Swann’s 2005 novel Three Bags Full.”

Or maybe something a bit more straightforward:

It’s a film that caught me by surprise and had me so choked up I couldn’t see!

You see, The Sheep Detectives is a deceptive film.

On the surface, it’s a charming, absurd premise: a flock of sheep investigating their shepherd’s murder using lessons from the mystery novels he read to them.

Underneath that, though, it’s a film about grief, memory, faith and the choice to confront painful truths rather than live in ignorance.

And that makes marketing it rather difficult.

Because the first thing you need to sell is sheep solving a murder.

Then you need to convince audiences that this is actually a proper mystery.

And finally, you need to prove there’s something much more meaningful underneath all that wool.

So, for this Quick Take, I’m pulling apart the three things I think Amazon MGM and Sony had to get right to sell it.

From silly premise to real mystery

The campaign’s first job was pretty simple: make the premise instantly understandable without letting it become disposable. “Sheep solving a murder” is an incredibly memorable high concept, but it’s also a dangerous one. Lean too heavily into the sheep and you’ve got what looks like a lightweight children’s comedy; lean into the murder and suddenly you’ve got a cosy whodunnit where everyone is a suspect. The campaign therefore had to move audiences pretty quickly from “funny sheep” to “proper mystery.”

That’s why I think the line “It’s a herder mystery, and everyone is a suspect” works particularly well. The pun gives you the initial hook, but “mystery” gives the joke a recognisable genre framework. It’s not simply a film about talking animals; it’s a murder mystery with talking animals. That distinction matters because it gives audiences something more substantial to latch onto than the novelty of seeing a flock of sheep investigate their shepherd’s death.

The campaign’s video work was particularly important here because this is fundamentally a storytelling job. Audiences need to see the flock, the death, the human suspects and the clue-solving mechanics in order to understand that there is a legitimate investigation happening underneath the comedy. Given the campaign leveraged cinema trailers, alongside a range of video placements including 20-second TV spots carrying “See it first bank holiday weekend May 2-4” messaging across children-focused networks such as Nickelodeon and Boomerang, there was clearly a strong push towards reaching families and parents with children under 12.

However, I do wonder whether that focus also created a bit of a problem for everyone outside that primary audience. If you weren’t the parent being directly reached by those placements, the early campaign could quite easily have looked like a silly mystery film for kids.

The first poster is probably the clearest example of this. Whilst the star-studded cast is present, the visual is a flock of sheep and lambs staring down at you, with the caption leading with the Mother’s Day release. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that - the sheep are obviously the film’s most distinctive asset - but the immediate visual is very much “cute sheep movie”, rather than “murder mystery”.

The first trailer does a much better job of correcting that. It makes a pretty swift exit from the cutesy farm-film territory and establishes The Sheep Detectives as a whodunnit for the whole family: there’s a death, there are suspects, there’s Hugh Jackman, there are sheep and, importantly, there’s a mystery to solve. Given the relatively low engagement around some of these early social announcements, I imagine broader video and child-facing channels were doing more of the heavy lifting for awareness than organic social at this stage.

By March, another poster arrived with the human cast front and centre, and engagement looks to have improved. From April onwards, the organic social strategy also appears to ramp up, leaning more heavily into native social formats, text overlays, cross-posting with adjacent accounts and, naturally, a healthy supply of sheep puns like “un-baa-lievably”. The campaign was clearly finding more ways to keep the premise active once the basic proposition had been established.

So, I think the campaign did understand the first part of the problem: make “sheep solve a murder” easy to understand, then establish that there is a genuine whodunnit underneath the absurdity.

But that only gets you so far.

Because once you’ve understood what the film is, the next question is whether audiences have any reason to believe there’s more to it than the novelty of watching a bunch of sheep solve a crime.

Prove there’s something underneath the wool

The Sheep Detectives had genuine proof of emotional depth; reviews cited its treatment of grief, death, exclusion and belonging, and its PG classification reflected thematic material beyond a basic preschool adventure.

But the theatrical campaign did not appear to present this proof strongly enough. Its early creative prioritised whimsy and wordplay, so the more meaningful adult proposition was largely supplied later by critical response and word of mouth. The lesson here really then, is that “mature themes” should be shown through tone and stakes, not merely asserted in campaign copy.

To demonstrate - not claim - that the film has heart, consequence and adult appeal; PR, critic/creator partnerships, long-form social, CTV/BVOD, and cinema are channels that come to mind. Given emotional depth requires external proof and enough time for tone to land; reviews, cast interviews and longer video give adults permission to believe it is more than a novelty premise.

Reviews

Reviews did a lot of the proving. They’re the bit of the campaign the studios didn’t fully control, and arguably the bit that carried the most weight - critics cited the film’s treatment of grief, death, exclusion and belonging, and its PG classification signalled thematic material beyond a basic preschool adventure. That’s the proof. It just arrived later than I think it needed to.

Creators

Before I jump into cast interview examples, The Sheep Detectives leveraged an interesting ensemble of social media creators across a variety of backgrounds; film critics/news, family and even farmers!

• Farmer Mum - Maria gets her own sheep to check out the trailer and investigate where she’s gone!

• Farmer Will - “Trying to make my animals just like the sheep detectives, however they’re just not as good”

• Family creator - “We put Brody’s (Brotective) to the test with his own sheep detective trial today”

• Fred Asquith talks about the cinema experience - “When it comes to kids movies, I listen to the kids”

• Pop culture brain - “Review: The Sheep Detectives is the surprise of the year” (43k likes)

• Variety of notable filmfluencers review the film in a montage from Sony

• Bunch more - “Shear-iously overjoyed with all the love from our flock”

Now, clearly social media was an important channel - especially organic - to reach parents, but given the use of ‘filmfluencers’ was pretty rife, it makes sense that The Sheep Detectives would mimic the Criterion closet to show they know ball (they did it twice actually: example 2); granted they were posted later on in the campaign, but I think if the tone of the film had been identified earlier on as a serious selling point for film fans, Sony / Amazon MGM may have attracted even more bums to put in seats!

Onto the remaining examples of the cast and the press for organic content:

Now, onto the remaining examples of the cast and the press for organic content:

• Nick Braun w/sheep - high engagement at near 80k likes, but it’s a chaotic and cute video with Braun trying to answer questions about the film, whilst he’s surrounded by little lambs baah’ing and all that!

• A big hear me out for Braun - 138k likes on Cinemablend’s Insta account; but basically “The Sheep Detectives was a big hear me out pitch for Nicholas Braun”

• Nick & Nick - not press, but a social post from the sheep detectives official insta profile with 55k likes; light-hearted and comedic montage of the two Nicks in action

Molly Gordon

What I find interesting is that of course the cast did the rounds for their interviews with the press, but when I saw a clip of Molly Gordon literally speaking about the difficulties marketing this film, I had to pause. She raises good points, the movie is a difficult one to market because it is about so many different things, however, as she says, we’ve lost trust in our audiences being able to understand/deal with the fact it holds both good and evil; given the film has dark tones and comedic value. Suffice to say, even the cast knew it’d be a harder sell - but not impossible.

Hugh Jackman opens the door; the ensemble closes the sale

Whilst the wider cast strengthened the emotional depth sell and acted as clear interest signals for the adult audience (providing multiple recognisable names and a quality cue for parents). Hugh Jackman functioned as the campaign’s clearest adult-accessibility anchor. He’s like a Trojan Horse for this type of project; trusted by parents, adored by general theatregoers, and carries enough dramatic prestige from projects like Prisoners or The Greatest Showman to signal that the film possesses actual narrative stakes.

By positioning Jackman front-and-centre in early cinema trailers, the studios bought themselves immediate equity with older demographics who would have otherwise scrolled past a talking-animal thumbnail. Jackman acts as the safe entry point: audiences come for his live-action gravitas, but once they are in the door, the ensemble cast - who are great by the way: Nicholas Braun, Nicholas Galitzine, Molly Gordon, Sarah Snook and more - closes the sale.

The clever marketing pivot post-March was shifting the focus from Jackman’s solitary star power to the chaotic, charming dynamic of the wider human and vocal cast. This of course relates to my previous point about the organic social push, where content like Nicholas Braun’s “Hear Me Out” pitches or his chaotic lamb-filled interviews routinely outperformed the standard film promo. The campaign successfully shifted Jackman from being the entire hook to being the premium seal of approval on an ensemble piece.

The campaign could not depend on Jackman alone though. The real sell had to be the combination of a legitimate mystery, a distinctive world and emotional stakes. Star power attracts attention; genre clarity and proof of quality create intent.

Whilst I covered most of the cast examples previously, the lesson remains: use recognisable talent to attract adults, then make the cast/world feel like a quality event. Adult audiences often need a credibility cue before giving an unfamiliar family concept their time. Talent delivers reach and earned authority.

Crossover between the two pillars is natural, but given Jackman is part of the main pillar here, the following examples come to mind: BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 2 w/Jackman, Kidfluencer interviews Jackman and Your most searched - lots of radio and sheep content, plus Jackman front and centre of course, I love the variety!

Make cosy crime a cinema event

Amazon MGM backed the title with a full wide theatrical release, opening in 3,457 North American cinemas on 8 May. The $15.1m domestic opening and subsequent holds suggest it found an audience, while its eventual worldwide total of around $132m indicates a commercially meaningful result for an original family mystery.

However, the relatively fast Prime Video arrival weakened the theatrical “must-see now” case. The streaming campaign even repositioned the title directly as a home-viewing event - “The investigation begins in 2 days” and “The flock is coming home” - which was effective for Prime, reinforcing the impression that this was an ideal Sunday-at-home watch; and it really was!

Given the initial goal was to create urgency and make the cinema trip feel more rewarding than waiting for Prime Video; cinema, high-impact OOH/DOOH, retail/media partnerships, ticketing, local activations, paid social retargeting would’ve been the leading channels.

You see, cinema reaches people already in an outing mindset; OOH makes the title feel large, visible and culturally present; ticketing formats convert intent. Cinema is particularly effective at high-attention recall and emotional engagement.

OOH

When looking for examples, I found a variety that includes 6-sheets (bus stops, underground & malls), bus formats like t-sides in the UK and king sizes across LA Metro Buses, large national roadsides like this Sherman Oaks sign in LA, 20s radio spots. I even found this crazy furry bus stop; I think it’s in Hungarian which is pretty cool!

Partnerships

Partnerships always usually make an appearance during film campaigns as I’m sure you’re aware, that doesn’t stop with The Sheep Detectives, given I found the following consumer products examples:

• Biggby Coffee - limited themed drinks, social media moments and in-store activations; Detective Lily Lemonade, Fainting Sheep Latte, Woolly White Magic Milk and more. For more, see Yahoo!

• Farmer Boys food - partnered for a whodunnit themed competition; Farmer Boys’ Ranch Secret Recipe went missing, you could be in for the chance of winning 10 movie tickets.

• Airstream - “Airstream TOIbox experience is filled with fun games, trivia, and a murder mystery you can try to solve on your own.”

• Settlers of Catan - “play a game of CATAN this Mother’s Day weekend and go see The Sheep Detectives in theaters this Friday.”

• Serta - ran cross-promotions and hosted special private screenings tying the film’s release to the Perfect Sleeper mattress line.

Activations

Serta’s cross-promotion also came with special private screenings, which relates very well to this other Stitch and screen event example I found; great use of PR and event management I think.

Then there’s the more interactive side of things - although it doesn’t fit massively, it’s an audience-adjacent and smart use of game modes - gaming made an appearance; Roblox was brought onto the media plan so kids/gamers could play Hide or Die, Dreamville, and Chained (here’s a video of said games). The Happy Colour app also partnered with The Sheep Detectives to provide users with a collection of cosy, curious scenes!

All in all, it would appear Amazon MGM splashed out ever so slightly on their marketing, hitting the right primary audiences; sadly not enough to turn a profit at least theatrically, but a Prime hit which mopped up general audience interest once it landed at home!

Amazon Ecosystem

Given this pillar is really about urgency, and Amazon MGM‘s own Prime Video release is the thing working against that urgency, it made sense to see the studio lean on their own ecosystem for owned media and promotion too.

Although I’ve only got these two examples from social media: Clarkson Farm adjacent (94k likes) and Project Hail Mary (16k likes), I think it’s telling that they’re borrowing assets from their other IP/talent, and it suggests to me they would’ve used all of the various touch-points Amazon has access to; Alexa, Prime Video, storefront, targeting, IMDb and more!

All in all, it would appear Amazon MGM splashed out ever so slightly on their marketing, hitting the right primary audiences; sadly not enough to turn a profit at least theatrically!

So, did it work?

The campaign sold the sheep. It partially sold the film underneath them. The biggest unresolved challenge was selling the cinema trip.

Whilst The Sheep Detectives is considered a theatrical underperformer, that breakdown feels about right to me. It successfully marketed a difficult original proposition by turning “sheep solve a murder” into a clear, repeatable cosy-crime hook. It was less successful at communicating, in its early theatrical assets, that the film had sufficient emotional depth and mystery stakes to feel like a cinema-worthy experience for adults - not just a charming family title to catch later on Prime Video.

Three things I’d take from it, for what it’s worth:

• Lead with the hook, then prove the depth. The concept earned attention; reviews supplied the emotional credibility that trailer materials could have established earlier.

• Use stars as validation, not the proposition. Jackman helped adult consideration, but the mystery needed to drive the campaign.

• Theatrical urgency must be designed, not assumed. For a Prime-bound title, event screenings, “solve-the-case” activations, adult-cast content and social participation mechanics would have helped make the cinema trip feel more time-sensitive.

  ---

That’s The Harperverse breakdown of The Sheep Detectives.

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Masters of the Universe • Project Hail Mary • Moana 2026 • Hoppers • Shrek at 25

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~ most uncredited images will have been taken from the films TMDB page!

In June, Masters of the Universe made its way back onto the big screen, and honestly it’s one of those relaunches I went into with genuinely no prior attachment, because unlike my Dad, I’d never watched the cartoon or owned the toys growing up.

Now if you don’t know what Masters of the Universe is, here’s a quick synopsis: The Sword of Power leads Prince Adam back to Eternia, a world shattered under the fiendish rule of Skeletor. Joining forces with Teela and Man-At-Arms, Adam must embrace his true destiny as He-Man, the most powerful man in the universe.

Unlike most blockbusters, MOTU is a beloved campy 1980s toy property that was re-imagined for a 2026 audience, and that reimagining comes with a pretty specific core problem: make audiences care about a decades-old franchise by making it feel like a must-see event for both nostalgic fans and a new generation that may not care yet - simple right…

Going in, I had four questions I wanted answered, and each one became its own pillar for this breakdown:

1. Nostalgia vs. Novelty

2. Fan Service vs. Mainstream Accessibility

3. Mythic Fantasy vs. Modern Blockbuster Positioning

4. The Toy Mechanism as Both Engine and Liability

Let’s get into it.

Nostalgia vs. Novelty

So, the first question really is, how do you introduce He-Man to a cynical modern audience while still triggering the specific 1980s endorphins that older fans demand, all whilst avoiding looking like a product for existing fans only that limits reach - simple, right?

Given video formats are extremely important for showing off a film, the answer here was simple enough: dedicate real time to showing He-Man and the world of Masters of the Universe off. There are also other methods that are of course just as important too, like posters to showcase key art and character looks, as well as press release material - and I don’t just mean written articles with exclusives. Whilst physically, press is dying; digitally, it’s still thriving.

You see, exclusives nowadays aren’t just interviews with the filmmakers, rather they can be videos or static images like these examples from IMDb or Comic Book, showcasing a look BTS on MOTU Day (28th April) and a look at Skeletor’s henchmen respectively. Each serving as ways to reach audiences via social media, tapping into popular culture and giving fans/new audiences a look at what MOTU & He-Man have to offer.

Speaking of social media, here’s an example of using a trend to tease the official trailer drop; 129k likes on Insta alone, so clearly it was engaging enough. It’s also very basic content, giving a quick glimpse at what to expect, and it was posted a literal day before the Masters of The Universe – Official Trailer dropped. I can’t find the exact number of views it gained in the first 24 hours, but it currently sits at 30 million. However, where the original teaser trailer is concerned (currently 38 million views), it’s said that it achieved more than 13 million views in less than 24 hours after its release on January 22nd, also placing itself in the top 3 most popular videos on MGM’s YouTube channel over 3 days, per Reddit.

Suffice to say, the idea that this film didn’t have prior awareness to its theatrical release is silly - it clearly hit millions of eyeballs on YouTube alone, so I can only imagine what the overall social footprint looks like. That’s broader awareness though; I can’t tell you the exact audiences this wide release is targeting outside of MGM’s audience, MOTU fans, and wider cinema going audiences/families, but the job was simple: show off the product in the best way you can, with a trailer.

Now, if we return quickly back to the wider press releases, there were indeed releases later on in the year - closer to the June theatrical release - around April/May to build interest in the film, and essentially continue educating audiences on why they should pay up with their cash and return to theatres to then return to Eternia or even enter anew; a mouthful, I’m aware!

Now, I got my hands on my very own EMPIRE mag - the April issue - which offers a whole section on MOTU plus a magazine cover (and additional subscriber variants). This example ironically sets up my other following pillars too, because it doesn’t just include an on-set look BTS of the “barmiest blockbuster,” it includes “unhinged action figures” and interviews. Entertainment Weekly also offered a similar setup; magazine cover and a cover story. Lastly, you’ve also got THR who shared their first reactions from the premiere; following the world premiere at the TCL Chinese Theatre (more on this shortly), critics’ reviews were of course under embargo. However, as THR notes, Amazon MGM Studios allowed premiere attendees to release brief social media reactions after the screening - a simple and effective move to increase awareness by reaching various influencer audiences, acting basically as a reminder that Masters of the Universe releases soon.

Fan Service vs. Mainstream Accessibility

So, now we know how MOTU introduced itself, the next question is how did Amazon/MGM utilise its complex world-building without making the movie feel like homework for casual viewers, whilst making sure the campaign didn’t become too insider-coded to recruit casual moviegoers.

This is essentially examples that lie adjacent to audience interests and then align with them through partnerships, PR and media buys. Let’s kick it off with one of the more impressive media channels and one of my favourites for examples: Out-Of-Home.

So, from my research I found a bunch of pretty cool OOH activations in LA: Sunset Blvd. 3D OOH, and it’s pretty cool that Cami Mendes decided to pull over to show off the same placement, whilst also gaining 734k likes on Insta. Add on top the LA Metro and you’ve got yourself transport-focused OOH placements; perfect for masses of eyes. Hermosa Beach featured a unique sand castle - sick to say the least and exactly what films about toys and heroes should be doing, inviting play with a crazy sand Castle Grayskull!

It doesn’t stop there though, because in São Paulo, there was this “part art installation, part power move” stunt; a large He-Man lightning rod was placed on top of a building, somewhat reminiscent of the Superman stunt above the Shard I looked at last year.

Now, as you may expect I do like to capture examples from here in the UK. Sadly, I only have underground D6 poster examples on hand but can confirm there were other formats posted up around the UK - think buses, roadside, etc. However, the main attraction this time around for Amazon/MGM is that Eternia took over the LA skies and set a Guinness World Record for the most powerful drone show ever - don’t you just love a media/world first…

It doesn’t stop there though, because they also used drones to reach festival traffic; super interesting from a road safety POV because we can’t use moving images/video in our roadside OOH here in the UK, yet you can have drones flashing - cool work-around I suppose, and another one added to the Amazon/MGM record book. See what they did for Project Hail Mary here.

Staying on theme with OOH but focusing less on traditional placements, there was also an appearance for MOTU at CCXP - cool move from Sony Mexico for LATAM audiences. Now, as I briefly mentioned earlier, there was also this World Premiere video which showcases the Chinese Theatre build - here’s the special build under construction - and how for MOTU the iconic landmark was taken over by Castle Grayskull; essentially a real life play set, how epic!

Continuing on the trend of fandom adjacent environments to place MOTU’s universe into, I found out an AI app thing was released to allow audiences to become Eternian, and found this organic social post featuring Sir Brian May, which essentially captures BTS content of the soundtrack and music being made for the film; after all you can’t have MOTU without a cool soundtrack.

Moving over swiftly to sports, where MOTU could’ve really situated itself and shown off its high-impact action and comedy, for a heavily dominant male audience who may have remembered growing up on MOTU. I’m sure the examples are more extensive than what I’ve managed to collect below, but for what I did find, it includes an NBA crossover which saw Brook Lopez bring the MOTU Havoc Staff prop courtside; a standout prop no less, but still a finer detail that needs a little bit more context - it’s not quite a Mortal Kombat 2 themed WWE walkout…

Then there was also the Formula E adjacent activity, which saw a CUPRA KIRO partnership come to life through a variety of formats; a lot of social media as you’ll see below, but what’s really important to note is that at the time, the team were competing in the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship, plus Idris Elba himself was involved as a co-owner/investor of the team. Here are some examples I found:

• The car - a simple carousel showing off literally that, the car and its cool light blue and purple graphic featuring the characters

• Video from the race in Monaco, plus a poster for said race - “Legends aren’t born, they’re forged”

• Two Worlds, One Race Weekend - literally just a video mashup including high-octane moments from the sport and clips from the film

• The boss is happy - this is where I found out about Sir Elba’s involvement in the sport, really cool I must say

• By the power of He-Dan… - video sees Dan Ticktum (one of the racers) pose and transform into race gear!

Lastly, what better way to wrap up this pillar than by literally inviting audiences to play with MOTU in the modern environments they actually play in now with gaming. As usual, it appears on the plan but in a pretty limited capacity, however, with that being said I do think they made the right call with Fortnite.

Fortnite kicked off the announcement with a tease of He-Man on June 2nd, a caption reading “By the power of Grayskull” and gained 111k likes - great start. They then released another video on the 3rd, showcasing the character skins hitting the item shop on the 6th with their own emotes and amassed 391k likes; He-Man, She-Ra and Skeletor all appeared in a Fortnite setting but with a twist - Fortnite essentially looked to show them off in a nostalgic meme-like way to capture already existing resonance.

Continuing on that trend until the 6th, Fortnite released Evil beware. He-Man is here and Until Next Time, Skeletor, before finally announcing “The Power of Grayskull is here! He-Man, She-Ra, and Skeletor are now in the Shop!“ It’s not quite the season pass takeover we’ve seen the likes of Superman, The Simpsons, and Marvel or Star Wars do, but this integration still gained traction.

Finally, I thought this was a relic of the past, but it would appear RAID Shadow Legends made a bid to tap into the MOTU campaign, bringing Skeletor and HE-MAN back to the game as champions users can play with; talk about nostalgia, I remember RAID Shadow Legends appearing in practically every YouTube video I watched for a year or two as the key sponsor - I probably tried to play it once!

Mythic Fantasy vs. Modern Blockbuster Positioning

Another question Amazon/MGM would’ve likely asked in fewer words would’ve been, how do we frame a campy, sword-and-sorcery property so it competes with the serious, gritty weight of modern cinematic universes? Otherwise the film could feel tonally confused and fail to communicate a clear theatrical reason to show up.

So, how did Amazon/MGM look to do this; avoiding mistakes other recent films like They Will Kill You made and suffered from?

Social Media; leveraging multiple owned accounts in relation to the IP: the official Masters Insta brand account, home to a variety of content like MOTU memes to Mattel’s toy line and the absolute variety of figures and sets, plus movie-adjacent posts. There’s also a separate MastersMovie account which, as you can imagine, focused on all things MOTU movie, bringing forth various film clips, film-adjacent trendy content, press examples and even various partnership/marketing examples.

Something I think is innately MOTU and inherent to the IP is memes. The IP has been around longer than I have, so naturally fans remember funny moments and turn them into memes; in fact, as I mentioned previously, it’s essentially a content pillar for the social team and is even leveraged by other partners such as Fortnite to promote their MOTU-adjacent releases. Saying that, I thought it was funny that Nicholas Galitzine went viral after recreating the iconic “HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA” He-Man meme on The Tonight Show; I think that’s a great use of internet culture, star power and talk show PR.

Another example that stood out to me was the movie account using UGC/reviews to sell tickets. It’s a low-lift example yes, but it’s worth it because it leverages real reviews, and it’s also pretty telling of the movie itself because - spoiler alert - audiences genuinely enjoyed it, they essentially just didn’t show up to theatres for it.

Another example I came across was a paid social promo ad featuring Daws on Screen, a film and TV influencer who in this circumstance was aiming to sell the idea of going to a Cineworld here in the UK, to experience MOTU in ScreenX or 4DX. Then, carrying on the theme of leveraging influencers to promote MOTU via social media, Anatoly - a popular fitness influencer - went toe to toe with He-Man to raise the Sword of Power; I like the video a lot because it borrows Anatoly’s popular format, and it adds MOTU humour to it. Outside of the previously mentioned paid influencer activity, I did notice various paid ads on social alongside the addition of a Snapchat filter which turned me into Skeletor!

Speaking of, Skeletor also took to appearing in memetic formats, because after Mando lost IMAX, MOTU posted this, and then there was also a rendition of the ‘Absolute Cinema’ meme, captioned “Even Skeletor agrees. Masters of the Universe is an instant classic” - great usage of a recent meme format. Now, whilst this meme account on Insta claims MOTU “accidentally created the next generation of memes…“ I think it’s fair to say there are no accidents when it comes to MOTU - 229k likes though, you love to see it! Finally, what really says mythic like a BOSCH power washer giveaway, ay?

The Toy Mechanism as Both Engine and Liability

Given Skeletor made a short cameo appearance during the Super Bowl LX Commercial alongside a bunch of other beloved IP and characters, I think it’s fair to say that MOTU is a property that exists because it sold toys first, right?

So naturally, one of the questions I asked myself going into this was whether the campaign could make a Mattel-driven relaunch feel like a genuine epic rather than a 90-minute commercial, especially with audiences now primed by Barbie to scrutinise Mattel’s cinematic-universe ambitions.

The risk, simply put, is that the film reads as a commercial exactly when the other pillars I’ve just covered are trying to earn emotional and mythic credibility with audiences. And if that risk isn’t addressed head-on, it can actively undercut everything else this campaign is trying to do.

Mattel clearly had a lot riding on this film. Not only would they have loved a box office smash hit on their hands, but they would’ve loved a revitalisation and renewed interest in their MOTU toy line off the back of it, and honestly the extensive list of activity I’m about to run you through makes that pretty obvious. Mattel executed a massive, multi-tiered merchandising effort across more than 70 global partners.

Three Scales, Three Audiences

To capture both kids and collectors, Mattel rolled out toys across three distinct, parallel lines, each aimed at a completely different buyer:

• The “Core” Kids Line - budget-friendly 5.5-inch figures with simplified 14-point articulation, anchored by a standard Heroes & Villains 4-pack

• The “Origins” Movie Line - retro-style 5.5-inch figures aimed squarely at nostalgic adult collectors, including a Deluxe Laser Power He-Man and the iconic magenta Fright Fighter vehicle

• The “Chronicles” Collector Line - premium, highly articulated 6.5-inch figures with realistic sculpts, like the Movie Chronicles He-Man and a Battle Cat with glass-like eyes and a poseable jaw

That’s a genuinely smart way to hedge your bets across a wide age and spend range. Kids get something cheap and durable, collectors get something premium and shelf-worthy, and the nostalgia crowd gets something that looks and feels like what they remember owning as kids.

The Situation: Weak Box Office, Booming Merch

Here’s where it gets interesting though, because the film’s actual theatrical performance and the toy business told two completely different stories.

From Forbes: Mattel reported mixed second-quarter results, with sales up 10% but a net loss of $18 million due to inflation and higher costs. The Masters of the Universe movie, despite a weak box office, significantly boosted toy sales, tripling merchandise billings year-to-date and becoming a streaming hit. CEO Ynon Kreiz highlighted the film’s “halo effect” on the brand, proving IP ownership drives value beyond theatrical success. However, the doll category, led by Barbie, saw a 5% decline.

The quotes from Kreiz on the earnings call are doing a lot of work here, so I want to pull a few out directly:

“This is driven by the movie halo and energy and excitement and drive that the movie brought to the brand,” Mattel Chairman and CEO Ynon Kreiz said in a conference call with investors after the earnings release. “When we look at the success of the movie, box office is just one aspect,” he said.

“We’ve always said that not every movie will be the next Barbie,” “but we also said that you don’t need a movie to be that successful as Barbie to have real economic impact on the company, because we own the IP.”

“All we need is to ignite and delight fans and then we capture value across multiple verticals. And this is exactly the flywheel and the brand-centric operating model that we’ve been implementing,” Kreiz told investors.

I think that last quote is basically the whole thesis of this pillar in one sentence, honestly. Mattel doesn’t need the film to work the way a normal studio needs a film to work, because the flywheel absorbs a soft theatrical run. The movie is just one input into a system that was designed to profit regardless of how the box office shakes out.

Who Actually Showed Up

But that flywheel model runs headfirst into a different problem, which is that the marketing’s stated goal - expanding He-Man to a new generation - doesn’t seem to have actually happened.

Box office data showed that children under 12 made up only 4% of the audience. Cosmic Book News also added, that “According to Deadline, the audience was 68% male. Dads outnumbered moms 71% to 29%. Among kids under 12, boys led girls by a massive 82% to 18%. That is not a Barbie-style crossover. That is the core male He-Man audience showing up, while everyone else mostly stayed home.”

Matt continues to add, “Per Deadline, Masters of the Universe ran spots during the NBA, the Winter Olympics, SportsCenter, and La Casa de los Famosos. That is a traditional TV-heavy buy, and it helps explain the disconnect. The younger, cord-cutting moviegoers who turned out this year for Minecraft, Obsession, and Backrooms are not sitting around waiting for linear TV spots” - whilst I think Minecraft might be a typo from his side, the sentiment remains strong.

The Collab Machine

Outside of the toy lines themselves, Mattel leaned hard into social-first, meme-shaped content, which is honestly where a lot of the charm of this campaign lives even if it doesn’t move the needle on the demographic problem above.

There’s the 5.5 inch scale epic toy battle - pre-teen me would’ve absolutely eaten this up, it’s such a cool creative choice to show off the actual action figures, and having them move via stop-motion for a trailer recreation is genuinely epic (there’s a BTS look at the stop-motion trailer recreation too).

Then you’ve got the straightforward IP lift-and-shifts: UNO getting a MOTU movie tie-in (not even their first go at it, there was a UNO x MOTU collab back in 2024 too), Hot Wheels doing a real Bone Shaker car, and - today I learned - Mattel owns Pingu, so naturally there’s a Pingu has the power post floating around too.

Masters of the Universe Day also got its own moment with a MOTU Day & Save the Children tie-in, which is a genuinely nice pairing of brand and cause, alongside a brand new Chronicles stop-motion drop for the same day.

Additionally, even more products/brands released with the likes of a Monster High Skullector Skeletor doll, a Mattel Brick Shop activation (no LEGO though, sorry), and a fun BarbieStyle account crossover for the pre-sale. My personal favourite example has to be Barney the Dinosaur needing to teach Skeletor about the power of friendship - Barney is an OG and I love him, no more notes.

There’s also even a TMNT crossover which came equipped with a Turtles of Grayskull toy line (more images here), and on the experiential/cosplay side there’s a day spent exploring NYC with Skeletor, plus London premieres putting a call out for cosplayers. The toys even got their own purple carpet moment at the premiere, which is a nice little detail - there was just a hell of a lot going on.

Building the World Beyond the Toy Aisle

Outside of the toy and collab avalanche, there’s a genuine transmedia layer here too, which matters for the bigger question this pillar is asking; something you also best believe I was super interested in too.

There’s the Masters of the Universe: Revolution prequel comic series, plus Dark Horse doing a movie tie-in comic this summer. On the animation side there’s the Masters of the Universe: Revolution Netflix animated series, and on the collector/collab side there’s MOTU x VeeFriends - GaryVee the IP collector turned IP builder himself - which involves “The Skilled Skeleton / Skeletor” 2-pack collectible, complete with its own comic and genuinely sick packaging.

There’s a couch co-op game, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe: Dragon Pearl of Destruction, a tour of the rarest He-Man, Hot Wheels & Barbie pieces brought to you by Infiniti of all brands, and then - because the internet is the internet - gym bro Skeletor as its own little meme moment.

Pulling all of that together, I think the honest answer to this pillar’s core question is: both, depending on which side of the business you’re standing on.

The toy mechanism worked exactly as Mattel needed it to as a business - tripled merch billings, a streaming hit, a CEO on an earnings call telling investors the flywheel is working. But as a piece of audience-expansion strategy for the film itself, it’s a much murkier picture, because the marketing spend went toward reaching an audience that already owned the toys thirty years ago, and the kids who were supposed to inherit the property mostly weren’t in the room.

So, Did the Marketing Work?

Some really interesting insights here from The Hollywood Reporter: more than a decade after the last instalment, Scary Movie proved its staying power, landing at the top of the weekend box office with an estimated $55 million in domestic ticket sales for its debut. Coming in second was Masters of the Universe, earning $29.3 million domestically, followed by A24’s Backrooms with $25.9 million and Focus Features’ Obsession with $25.6 million. Internationally, Masters earned $25 million over 80-plus territories, for a global opening weekend of $54 million.

Masters, which had a Metacritic score of 54 and a B CinemaScore, opened in 3,677 screens with an audience that skewed heavily male (66% to 34% female). In a nod to nostalgia for the original animated series, the biggest age demographic for the weekend was 45-54 year-olds, making up 29% of the audience. Amazon MGM Studios head of domestic theatrical distribution Kevin Wilson pointed to the film’s future in his statement on the weekend, framing the opening as validation of the studio’s “holistic distribution strategy.”

So, whilst it had a decently strong start and was a film people genuinely enjoyed, Scary Movie outranked it and managed to outperform - ironic, because Scary Movie, as I broke down, was able to solve each of the resistances in front of it, whilst MOTU struggled to break free from its male-skewing nostalgia base.

If you add on top the context Forbes kindly shared on why He-Man’s history wasn’t helping the film’s opening weekend: despite strong brand recognition and positive critical and audience reviews, the film faced a projected “He-Meh” opening of $30-35 million against a $200 million budget. Unlike Barbie’s massive success, this He-Man origin story struggled to translate IP enthusiasm into mass appeal, with Jared Leto’s absence from promotion cited as a key marketing issue.

The broader question Forbes raises is who this movie is actually for, given it struggles to attract younger audiences while older fans aren’t typically major box office drivers - a trend contrasted against the success of original, low-budget films like Obsession and Backrooms.

To say that MOTU didn’t have the right effect theatrically is to say the least, but to say it performed exceptionally well on streaming is another point entirely; generally speaking, a lot can be said about this film really.

The marketing set out to bring MOTU back to a modern audience and ultimately it didn’t do its job theatrically.

Fans just like Luke, completely get why this is for them, yet they also know that even they alone are not enough to drive box office to the bank. Therefore, relying too heavily on a nostalgic audience turning up is not enough.

Now, whilst the general audience/consumer didn’t turn up - as Movieguide shares - a theatrical run was the perfect way to generate positive word-of-mouth, and continues to land on the idea that while Masters of the Universe might not have made a major mark at the box office, its performance on streaming shows Amazon MGM might have cracked the code when it comes to blending theatrical releases and streaming debuts.

I think that’s the biggest lesson here - the marketing did its job in one sense: splash and make it known MOTU exists.

What I don’t think it did was excite general audiences, but capture nostalgic audiences, and rely on them to commit to the uplift when it comes to streaming; the film was genuinely really enjoyable and a lot of fun, I had never watched or played with anything MOTU prior, but it had me recommending the film to friends who have since seen it at home - aware that’s a survey of one but that’s the point!

Therefore, I think Masters of the Universe lent too heavily into pretty much the former of every pillar I’ve run through; nostalgia, fan service, mythic fantasy, and the toy mechanism as a brand/IP halo effect. If it were to lean the other way, who knows what would’ve happened…

Now finally, will we see another Masters of the Universe?

Almost definitely, I’d say.

That’s The Harperverse breakdown of Masters of the Universe.

If this kind of breakdown is your thing - film marketing, transmedia storytelling, the business behind the stories - subscribe to The Harperverse.

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For related reading:

The Mandalorian & Grogu • Project Hail Mary • Scary Movie 6 • Backrooms • Superman

Browse by what you're in the mood for: deep-dive Tentpole Autopsies, shorter Documentary Reports, and reactive Quick Takes; filter by studio, genre, or media channel if you're after something specific.

~ most uncredited images will have been taken from the films TMDB page!

Hey again, this week I’ve lined up another Quick Take as I’ve recently cameback from my holiday to Italy, but it’s still a fun one!

Given I recently watched They Will Kill You on HBO Max, and how well the quicker format worked for the Horror Marketing 2026 breakdown I published back in March, I decided to add this title to my Notion workstation figuring it deserved its own space rather than being folded into something bigger.

For anyone who hasn’t come across They Will Kill You, this is a synopsis of sorts: a woman answers a help wanted ad to be a housekeeper in a mysterious New York high-rise, unaware she’s walking into a building that’s seen a number of disappearances over the years and may be under the grip of a Satanic cult. Kirill Sokolov directs, Zazie Beetz leads, and you’ve also got Myha’la, Paterson Joseph, Tom Felton, Heather Graham and Patricia Arquette rounding things out.

The positioning I imagine Warner Bros. went out with was pretty specific: for genre fans who crave high-octane thrills, an action-horror-comedy that turns a luxury Manhattan high-rise into a bloody battleground, where a working-class hero uses everyday cleaning tools and a shotgun to dismantle a wealthy, elite cult. Unlike traditional slow-burn horror, They Will Kill You is a relentless, grindhouse-style survival brawl. Hopefully you get the idea - it’s a film with a chip on its shoulder about modern horror-comedy going too soft.

Which is a fun thesis for a marketing campaign to have to prove.

So, did it?

The Numbers First

Because they tell you most of the story before we even get into the creative.

As The Numbers shows, They Will Kill You opened to $4.97 million domestically across 2,778 theatres, landing in third place. Weekend two fell 60%. Weekend three fell another 74%. It averaged just 2.4 weeks per theatre, which is exhibitor-speak for “this print isn’t earning its screen.” The domestic final came in at $10.88 million, international added $8.5 million, so $19.38 million worldwide against a reported $20 million budget - and no, that’s not break-even once you factor exhibitor splits and marketing spend on top. Interestingly, the UK contributed a pretty modest $802k.

Theatrically, this is a straightforward underperforming wide release. Not a slow-burn breakout, not really a “the marketing let it down” story on its own; more a “this arrived in a genuinely brutal release window” story, given They Will Kill You was sandwiched between Ready or Not: Here I Come and the juggernaut that was Project Hail Mary.

But then it hit HBO Max on June 12th and the story flips almost entirely. It shot to #1 on HBO Max in the US, was reported #1 globally on the platform during its early window, and FlixPatrol had it topping the charts in international markets HBO Max had access to. The UK and Ireland also saw it land at #2 on HBO/NOW. JustWatch had it at #3 in the US the week of June 21st, behind Project Hail Mary and one other major release.

But by early July it had settled to around #4 domestically on HBO Max - so a big spike followed by a normal cooling off, not sustained dominance, but still: a film that flopped in cinemas and then became one of the most-watched films on the platform within weeks. To me that reads a classic “I’ll wait for it at home” behaviour, and it’s honestly a pretty good case study in itself for how theatrical underperformance doesn’t always mean the underlying audience proposition was wrong.

Now looking at the marketing campaign itself, three things stood out to me digging through They Will Kill You…

The Tonal Bet Never Fully Landed

The core risk with any horror-comedy campaign is that mixed-genre marketing reads as hedging rather than confidence, and that’s basically what happened here.

One of the most talked-about pieces of the marketing was the “censored by emojis” trailer, which dropped on March 11th, racking up 10+ million views, with an in-video warning saying they couldn’t show the most violent parts, followed by a stylised montage of Beetz obliterating cultists with all the gore covered by cartoon emojis and skull icons. Genuinely funny, very reminiscent of the old Deadpool emoji billboards, and it did the job of teasing R-rated bloodshed without tripping platform filters.

Here’s the thing though - that trailer massively outperformed the original one, which dropped earlier back in January and currently sits around 2.3 million views on the Warner Bros. own channel (Discussing Film’s repost of it on X does have 6 million views though, if you enjoy reading comments I think it’s worth reading the discourse on this post). That gap reads to me like the trailer team had to pivot mid-campaign because the first attempt just wasn’t landing, and that pivot is basically the campaign admitting the tonal bet was wobbling from early on.

The organic social content I also found followed a similar pattern and struggled; a “Hide Quickly” video leaned on the same trend Scream 7 used to much better effect later, and a Rage Room activation acted as a fun stunt for attention but didn’t do very well to gain it; to me that says “maybe I should spend my money on going to a rage room and watch this when it release at home…”

The Class Warfare Hook Never Really Bit

For what it’s worth I liked this film, but the “working-class hero vs. wealthy cult” angle that was supposed to be doing satirical work felt like it mostly just sat there as set dressing.

Part of the problem is structural rather than creative, because They Will Kill You released one week after Ready or Not: Here I Come, which is - broadly speaking - the same film; sisters, enclosed space, Satanic cultists hunting them.

Fruitcake Enterprises’ review put it well, essentially asking whether one of these films should sue the other, and while that’s a post-release take, it echoes a larger problem the film faced theatrically. If you’re releasing directly against something this similar, going all-in on eat-the-rich messaging and character posters doesn’t differentiate you from anything. It just reminds people the other film exists too.

I think Warner Bros. should’ve leaned entirely into the action, the excitement, the fear factor - the stuff Ready or Not 2 couldn’t or wouldn’t lean into as hard - rather than fighting a satire battle nobody asked this film to fight. Essentially, They Will Kill You was fighting the wrong war entirely, because the real threat was never the eat-the-rich messaging landing right, it was Ready or Not: Here I Come sitting one week away, and I’m not convinced the campaign ever clocked how much of a bigger problem that was.

Even the poster tells you basically nothing beyond “there’s a lot of blood and some recognisable faces in this.” Zazie Beetz front and centre, bloody machete, five cult members outlined in red behind her. Fine as an image, does zero work explaining why this and not the other cult-horror movie out that same week.

When It Did Prove “Relentless,” It Actually Worked

Where the campaign found its footing was proving the action promise was real rather than just claiming it - because genre fans have been burned enough times by trailers cut around three good kills to not trust the word “relentless” on its own.

The stunt-led press push helped here - Beetz doing her own physical stunts, behind-the-scenes featurettes on the practical effects, and a “flaming axe” sequence that The Hollywood Reporter called a contender for the best action set piece of the year. Myha’la and Heather Graham doing press together talking about how ridiculous the rigging and prosthetics looked in person versus how slick it reads on screen is exactly the kind of access that builds credibility rather than just hype.

The SXSW closing-night premiere did a lot of heavy lifting too. They Will Kill You was positioned as the “eat the rich” climax to the festival, and this meant Warner Bros. could leverage various media placements like the billboard outside the Paramount, and use the EYEcon from Hell for social content.

That’s not all though as the Producer Andy Muschietti (director of IT), Barbara Muschietti, director Kirill Sokolov, and Zazie Beetz hosted a highly active Reddit AMA to engage directly with horror and action genre fans via the Movies subreddit months ahead of the release; personally I always love seeing an AMA pop up because it gives fans just that little bit more access, plus you really you get some interesting engagement - again, I recommend checking out some of the responses.

The OOH stayed fairly safe - mostly Underground placements in the UK from what I could find - and a DAZN partnership which highlights a ”fight for your life,” by mashing up film clips with various DAZN fighter clips; a partnership I understand the logic of, but an execution that doesn’t look like quite landed.

Where That Leaves They Will Kill You

Theatrically, a film caught in a bad release window that also picked a fight with a nearly identical movie the same week. On streaming, a genuine hit that proves the underlying appeal - stylised, gory, well-choreographed action - was there the whole time, it just needed a lower-commitment way in.

The lesson I keep coming back to: when your positioning is built on “we’re the antidote to horror-comedy gone soft,” the campaign has to spend its energy proving that claim, not decorating it with a satire angle that a genre-savvy audience will clock as borrowed. Prove the thing you promised. Everything else is optional.

If you’ve seen it, I’d genuinely love to know if you clocked the Ready or Not 2 overlap before or after watching - feels like a useful gut check for how much that release timing actually mattered to real audiences versus just industry watchers like me.

That’s The Harperverse breakdown of They Will Kill You.

If this kind of breakdown is your thing - film marketing, transmedia storytelling, the business behind the stories - subscribe to The Harperverse.

Subscribe now

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For related reading:

Horror Marketing in 2026 • Evil Dead Burn • Backrooms • Lee Cronin’s The Mummy • The Bride! • Scream 7

Browse by what you're in the mood for: deep-dive Tentpole Autopsies, shorter Documentary Reports, and reactive Quick Takes; filter by studio, genre, or media channel if you're after something specific.

~ most uncredited images will have been taken from the films TMDB page!

Evil Dead Burn came and went, and I think it’s worth digging into because the campaign genuinely had more going on under the hood than the box office numbers have let on. This is yet another Documentary Report, not a full playbook breakdown, so I’ll be trying to keep it tight; four pillars, what the evidence actually showed, and how it all landed. Onwards.

Quick scene-setting: After the loss of her husband, a woman seeks solace with her in-laws. One by one they transform into deadites, she comes to discover that the vows she took in life survive even in death. Sébastien Vaniček directs, Warner Bros. released domestically, Sony/Screen Gems took it international (minus the UK, France and Russia, which went to StudioCanal UK, Metropolitan Filmexport and Volga respectively; worth knowing before you go looking for a single global media plan, because there wasn’t one).

The core problem the marketing had to solve: convert horror-sequel fatigue into must-see urgency, with a bit of new-vision-new-director lift on top. Evil Dead has an overarching franchise story, technically, but it’s not linear - which is exactly where pillar one starts.

The Twist Nobody Was Allowed to Sell

Can a non-linear anthology, with no fixed “next chapter” stakes, still create urgency to see this one now? Risk if not met: it reads as “just another Evil Dead,” easy to skip or catch later.

Burn does bridge the gap between standalone anthology entry and connected franchise sequel; masking a direct continuation inside its own isolated setting. The film itself isn’t marketed as such, because doing so would spoil the fact it’s now connected. However, like the rest of the franchise, Burn stays self-contained: a secluded family home, a brand-new cast, extreme mean-spirited gore. So for an anthology entry that risks feeling skippable, the shift needed to be from plot continuity to immediate audience experience; a high-intensity survival game where anyone can die, with zero character plot armour.

That’s the smart part, but where this doesn’t quite land is that the previous film (Rise) didn’t have credit scenes, and the franchise hasn’t made that a standard. So, it’s genuinely interesting that Burn had them; I actually missed them, same as the people in this theatre apparently did too. Whilst Warner Bros. did tease the Grandfather connection in the trailer (15 million views on YouTube), nothing explicitly tied the franchise together beyond Hunter Doohan telling Out Magazine his character Joseph is working on a book about his grandfather’s research - and that his grandfather knew Professor Knowby. Outside of that, the connective tissue just isn’t there in the marketing.

By prioritising total secrecy to protect the opening-weekend twist, the campaign defaulted to a generic “trapped in a house with demons” pitch. For casuals dealing with franchise fatigue, that reads as entirely skippable; a safe, standard entry rather than a must-see event. I followed the chatter on X around the debut and a chunk of it calls the campaign rubbish outright. I think this is why, if the primary selling point is “more gore in a new house,” it doesn’t create a real itch for a theatrical-event. Instead, it reads more like content built for a streaming service and not a cinema trip; a real shame because the film was such a wild ride!

Scented Candles, an Evil Taxi, and a Sound Meter: Selling the Big Screen

What’s actually lost watching this on a couch vs. the practical effects and real fire the director’s been talking up? Risk: horror is the genre most comfortable waiting for VOD; if nothing’s demonstrably big-screen-only, audiences will wait.

I think this is where the campaign found its footing. Special screenings in Asia came with commemorative tickets and a scented candle (hitting a similar strand to what I caught on the Bring Her Back campaign), plus multi-media screenings in London at the PCC and Odeon.

Now for my favourite. OOH is where Evil Dead Burn really said “watch this in a cinema;” bigger, more stunt-worthy, more eyeballs. As for the examples, I found a simple roadside build in LA, Times Square billboards, and - this is a trend I keep clocking with horror titles lately - proper spectacle out of Southeast Asia, like the Bukit Bintang Inferno mall takeover in Kuala Lumpur; high footfall, high dwell time, a genuine standout piece for that market. WB Canada also had an evil taxi in Toronto - the same stunt format they used for Mortal Kombat 2, so clearly an activation they like. Here in the UK I only caught one bus T-side myself, though I know underground and other roadside formats ran too.

There was also PR-driven activity alongside the media buys, like Deadites spotted IRL and a manufactured moment at La Carne Asada meat market in Texas. Adding to that, Bloody Disgusting took a sound level meter into a screening and cut together audience reactions; a great “you had to be there” piece of content.

Now, I’d like to add an honest aside here. I saw this post from a fan saying Burn’s marketing is getting out of hand - 101-degree heat during a heatwave - and I honestly can’t stop thinking that selling a 4DX screening to hardcore fans as a challenge - heat bonus included - would’ve been a brilliant PR stunt (think The Long Walk & treadmill screenings). Although it’s a very unlikely and costly activation, I think specialised screenings or maybe even theme park tie-ins down the line, fit perfectly into theatrical-decline-fighting territory. The only other thing outside of IRL deadites appearing in cinemas that I could find was the popcorn bucket - a miniature dishwasher with the cutlery rack pointing up, because that’s apparently how mental cases pack a dishwasher - which was only a promotional prototype and not for sale. It’s cool, sure, but not cool enough. Fans would’ve loved that and paid top dollar I imagine just to own it!

Vaniček’s Evil Dead, On His Own Terms

Does new directorial vision read as reinvention worth trusting, or dilution of what deadite fans already love? Risk: the campaign hedges between “fresh take” and “same DNA” and lands neither.

Sébastien Vaniček, best known for Infested (Vermines) in 2023, and fresh enough to the horror genre that driving awareness for him mattered almost as much as driving awareness for the film. Something worth flagging: Evil Dead Wrath got its announcement around the same time as Burn, rather than after, so it ended up pulling some of its own awareness out of Burn’s promotional window. From a pure messaging standpoint, I think it reads a bit like a boxer glancing past their current opponent to the next fight. Not necessarily a mistake, just something I noticed sitting inside this pillar.

There’s a growing trend of directors bringing their own built-in audiences - Markiplier, Kane Parsons - and while that’s not typically been the Evil Dead model, some BTS content did let Vaniček’s presence come through; mostly posted via WB’s own channels closer to the release window. Add a Fangoria cover to that - Fango notes every Evil Dead film has landed its own cover, a record no other horror franchise has matched - and you’ve got real leverage for reaching a niche genre audience.

The most interesting material came post-release, in Variety’s interview with Vaniček. He knew the dog-death scene would upset people going in - “I can’t have limits,” as he put it - and, unlike the last two instalments, wasn’t chasing buckets of blood just for the sake of it; he said the fake stuff doesn’t disturb him, but something like the teeth-on-the-sidewalk shot in American History X does. That to me shows a director with actual preferences, which is rarer than it sounds in franchise filmmaking. He also confirmed Ghost House and Raimi gave him full creative freedom on tone and violence as long as he understood the DNA of Evil Dead going in - and that the Ellie post-credits scene (Alyssa Sutherland’s character, killed off in Rise) was a studio ask, not his. He was clear, too, that he doesn’t want to direct another Evil Dead himself: “the only one who can do two is Sam Raimi.” Fresh vision every time is the point, in his words.

Discord Quests, Fortnite Lobbies, and a Zillow Joke

How do you serve people who know the mythology inside out while still recruiting someone who’s never seen an Evil Dead film? Risk: drowning casuals in lore, or feeling thin to the hardcore crowd.

Honestly, pillars one through three had mostly done the “this is for you” work for existing fans already - include a fan event with Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell’s approval too because why not - so this section is really about the reach plays.

There was a standard TV spot, plus a nice partnership-adjacent lever in MUBI Go naming it film of the week for their cinephile subscribers. On the gaming side - horror always overlaps with gaming audiences, and it’s a comparatively cheap way in if you’re tactical about it - there was a Discord “Deadite Rush” quest game that fans on Reddit described the controls for as, frankly poor, though it did include easter eggs for those paying attention (Marcus Littleton’s vinyl records from Rise show up on the floor for example). There was also a Fortnite Finishers mode takeover - WB’s done bigger Fortnite integrations before for titles like One Battle After Another, Sinners and The Bride! - but this one included commandeering an existing game mode and dropping a video in it. Low effort sure, the mode doesn’t really match the tone as well, but at least it delivers the impressions they wanted…

The social output aiming at casual reach is where I’ll be honest and say it didn’t always land; a Zillow jab showing off the film’s house locations, weapon posters styled like a Fortnite inventory labelled “Price family heirlooms.” Clearly they were chasing trending formats, and it shows, because none of it quite matches the film’s tone. What did work though, CTV. I caught both a YouTube Masthead and a 30 second Prime Video ad myself, and reaching audiences on their biggest screen at home - with whoever else happens to be in the room - is still one of the strongest channels going.

How It Actually Performed

Evil Dead Burn opened to $13.7 million domestically and $27 million worldwide; a softer theatrical run than the franchise’s recent high point, well behind Evil Dead Rise. The production budget was relatively modest though, so this isn’t a catastrophic position, just a quieter one.

The bigger story now is the post-theatrical runway. PVOD, streaming and catalogue discovery should give it a longer tail, especially with HBO Max’s built in horror-first, genre-driven, highly conversion-prone audience sitting right there waiting for it. And regardless of where the theatrical ceiling landed, the brand itself still has real transmedia value - the iconography, the cult audience, a long history of officially licensed games and ancillary media all make Evil Dead a strong candidate for further crossover and licensing activity well past this one release.

Pillar one is really the thesis of the whole post, in hindsight: the secrecy protecting the twist is exactly what made the film look skippable to the people who most needed convincing. Everything else in the campaign - the theatrical spectacle, the director story, the reach plays - was strong enough to hold up the fans who were already coming. It just didn’t do enough to pull the casual audience off the fence.

Evil Dead Wrath is next, slated for April 2028, with Raimi promising it’ll be “the most terrifying” one yet. Plenty of time to see if that credits-scene lesson gets learned.

That’s The Harperverse breakdown of Evil Dead Burn.

If this kind of breakdown is your thing - film marketing, transmedia storytelling, the business behind the stories - subscribe to The Harperverse.

Subscribe now

The Harperverse is a free publication, if you want to support what I’m building here, a paid subscription is £4 a month, less than a coffee in London!

For related reading:

Horror Marketing in 2026 • Lee Cronin’s The Mummy • Scream 7 • Weapons • Bring Her Back: How RackaRacka are Building Universes and Redefining Horror

Browse by what you're in the mood for: deep-dive Tentpole Autopsies, shorter Documentary Reports, and reactive Quick Takes; filter by studio, genre, or media channel if you're after something specific.

~ most uncredited images will have been taken from the films TMDB page!

Right, so this one’s a bit different from a Backrooms and Superman post.

Where those pieces were playbooks - “here’s how you do it” breakdowns of campaigns firing on every cylinder - this one’s a documentary report. Whilst Moana didn’t have a bad campaign exactly, it didn’t have the campaign it needed, and I think that gap is genuinely more useful to study than another success story would’ve been.

Before I even opened my Notion workspace, I wrote myself a simple brief: Disney has a visually breathtaking live-action remake of one of its most replayed modern classics. The job isn’t introducing Moana. It’s convincing audiences they need to experience her again.

The actual marketing challenge sitting underneath that though, was much harder. You see, for millions of families, Moana isn’t an event. It’s wallpaper. It’s the film quietly playing in the background on a Saturday morning while breakfast gets made. So how do you take that comfortable, background-noise familiarity and turn it into a “no, we need to see this in a cinema” urgency? How do you make it feel irreplaceable, not just bigger?

That’s the core problem statement I sat with. And out of asking “why might audiences resist believing this positioning,” three pillars fell out pretty naturally; rather than starting with trailers or posters, I wanted to start with resistance. What would stop someone buying a ticket for example? Because that’s what every marketing campaign is really trying to overcome:

Maui Becomes Real - leaning on Dwayne Johnson’s transition from animated voice actor to a physically transformed, live-action Maui, to bridge old fans and new global audiences.

From Screen to Shore - prioritising tangible practical effects, real oceanic location shooting and authentic Polynesian heritage elements, so this reads as a grounded, immersive adventure and not a green-screen copy.

Passing The Oar - positioning newcomer Catherine Laga’aia’s casting as Moana as a real, star-is-born moment that mirrors Moana’s own journey of self-discovery.

Let’s go through them one at a time, and then get into what actually happened at the box office, because that’s where this gets genuinely interesting.

Pillar 1: The Star-Driven Metamorphosis

Given The Rock holds the title of the world’s highest-paid actor, it likely comes with a lot of perks, and that’s not just for him either. The films he’s attached to will also likely benefit, given he can leverage his production companies, massive social media reach, and lucrative franchise roles to support marketing efforts and more.

Naturally, because this pillar is all about Dwayne Johnson’s leap from voicing Maui to actually becoming him in live action, most of the examples here centre on his role in the campaign and the different ways Disney had him step into Maui’s shoes.

Kicking it off, there was a genuinely funny interaction between The Rock and a woman called Katy online. Katy joked “go for it, don’t give up on your dreams, The Rock sells shampoo and he’s bald” in relation to his Papa Tui haircare line; a stitched video that pulled 1.6 million likes as The Rock, in full Maui costume, looks down at his phone with a smile and replies that sometimes a demigod’s radiant hair needs shampoo and conditioner, before adding that a gift is on its way to her.

That gift turned out to be flying Katy and her family out for the LA premiere from the Hollywood Bowl, and then - because of course - a Maui-branded truck rolled up outside her house with a year’s supply of the shampoo. I find it funny the truck essentially “rocked” up on this lady lol; genuinely a great use of a moving OOH billboard when you think about it.

Then there’s the more sincere stuff. On Instagram, The Rock talked about mimicking the look of his own grandfather for Maui, calling Moana “more than just a movie,” adding “it’s our culture. It’s our ancestors. It’s our mana.” He covered Esquire’s summer issue as an established Hollywood and Disney fixture (also worth a look: the carousel version, 128k likes). He performed “You’re Welcome” live at a pop-up nearby London’s Tower Bridge; yet again a pop-up event I’ve missed. He did the full press tour circuit, including Good Morning America, where - in full Polynesian dress for the world premiere - he got visibly emotional sharing the stage with his two daughters.

What’s interesting from a social perspective is that much of this content clearly wasn’t aimed at children. It was aimed at parents and young adults instead, relying less on the classic “pester power” dynamic and choosing to speak directly to the people actually buying the tickets.

I’m sure other parts of the media plan were designed to tap into that same pester power tension, though. YouTube on Connected TV, for example.

My favourite example of that comes from Jeremy Lynch - a creator who’s popped up in basically every tentpole breakdown I’ve written at this point - doing an organic, confrontational-but-funny bit with The Rock that pulled 662k likes; it showed some great chemistry between them. Then there’s the dance video with Brooke and Jess (952k likes), where The Rock jumps straight into performing “You’re Welcome” while his co-stars dance around him.

Pillar 2: From Screen to Shore

Given this film is a live-action remake of a hugely successful animated Disney film, what absolutely had to translate in the marketing was a prioritisation of stunning, tangible practical effects, combined with real oceanic location shooting, and authentic Polynesian heritage elements; rendering as a grounded and immersive adventure rather than a green-screen carbon copy. If that isn’t made a priority, in my opinion it risks feeling no different, which undermines the entire “you need to see this in a cinema” argument.

I caught the official trailer on The Rock’s Instagram (1.7 million likes) back on the 23rd of March, like a lot of people did, and got the immediate sense this would be a very direct remake. I didn’t personally see the need for a live-action version two years after the animated sequel, but I understand the commercial logic.

The reception was mixed, with genuine praise for Catherine Laga’aia’s authentic casting, sitting right alongside fairly widespread mockery of Dwayne Johnson’s wig and criticism of the muted colour grading. Audiences really do pay attention to those aspects, and given the context of this film, it matters.

A second trailer followed on the 10th of June (541k likes), released as a collab post with The Rock’s production company Seven Bucks. The colour grading didn’t seem to shift much, but we did get more of The Rock in action, some sharper CGI monster and transformation effects, including our first proper look at creatures like Tamatoa and Te Kā, and “You’re Welcome” playing underneath it all.

Past the trailers, though, is where this pillar actually gets interesting, because Disney went pretty wide on tangible, real-world tie-ins to bring Moana into everyday life. Hawaiian Airlines unveiled three special aircraft liveries featuring Maui, Kakamora, Heihei and Pua across the fuselage and overhead bins; a genuinely unmissable move for those travelling!

Alongside that, a full round-up of collaborations includes: Coppertone (a properly contextual SPF tie-in), Govee’s smart lights with their own hero video, Joyburst’s special-edition hydration drink, Marriott Bonvoy’s Moana holiday packages (they also partnered with creators on it), Pandora’s jewellery collection, and Subway’s meal deal offering $15 off tickets (press release here).

There’s also sport adjacent media buys/collabs like the NBA collab; a “From Milwaukee to Motunui” carousel with The Rock and Giannis Antetokounmpo that pulled 769k likes, including a bit where The Rock pushes Giannis off a cliff with Maui’s hook and tells him to think of an animal to transform into. He then bounces off the floor as a walrus, lol. There was also an MLB drone show right after a Dodgers game; I’m loving the drone show film promos at the moment, they’re really having a moment!

There was an actual real outrigger canoe, built and sailed from Marina del Rey to Santa Monica by an experiential supply company (there’s also this Orlando event with the same canoe, fireworks and all). There was a Global Tour asset (286k likes) tracking the locations across ten cities; Hawaii, Shanghai, Sydney, London, Rio, Miami, Puerto Rico, LA, New York, Tokyo. The scale of the tour alone speaks to Disney’s ambitions, with almost every stop tying back to the film’s warm, tropical identity.

There was a Hawaiian food and culture celebration with a BBQ creator that felt like a true honouring of Polynesian cuisine rather than a token nod. There was even a Magic FM radio competition for a family trip to Honolulu, showing Disney ran radio activity alongside the wider campaign; more importantly, it shows how the campaign wasn’t just selling a film, it was selling a family experience, turning Moana from something to watch together into something to potentially live out together.

My favourite example overall, though, has to be the bus driver at Dublin Airport who got caught on video trolling photographers by slowly crawling past, directly blocking their sightline of the runway; the bus had a full Moana T-Side wrapped on it. Perfect, completely unintentional OOH, and genuinely beneficial for me because I didn’t manage to capture any images of buses myself!

On the more traditional side, I can confirm the UK media mix ran across radio, OOH, print, and even included both SVOD & digital (social/display), with National Geographic carrying a full-page print spread for Moana, alongside Toy Story 5 which also appeared in the same issue. In the US there were street-side bus wraps and OOH across the LA Metro and an AMC wall vinyl installation, plus Disney World’s “Cool Kids Summer” activations; lamppost banners with Coppertone branding and a large standee alongside them.

What’s interesting, looking at all of this together, is that although this pillar was meant to be about the tangible, practical, real-world quality of the film, it’s actually The Rock who clearly spearheaded most of the attraction and awareness. He’s got that old-school star power that most actors and actresses wish they still had, so it makes sense that in-person events were built around him as the selling point, with the paid media sitting underneath as more of a wider-awareness necessity than the headline. I imagine budget has something to do with that, and possibly The Rock having more creative say than a typical actor might.

The bigger reflection for me is that even though the visuals did show up in the real world, the trailer’s colour grading alongside the recasting discourse, invited a lot of online noise that pulled attention away from the visuals themselves.

This means a much bigger job had to be done on the media-buying and real-world-presence side to land the “world of Moana in your everyday life,” and I’m not convinced it fully succeeded.

Pillar 3: The “Next-Generation” Discovery

Onto the final pillar! How do you position the introduction of newcomer Catherine Laga’aia as a real-life, star-is-born moment that mirrors Moana’s own journey of self-discovery? Because if you don’t, the risk is simple: new Moana, different voice, and audiences left wishing for a return to the original.

So what is this pillar really tackling, and whose job is it to solve?

Honestly, it’s a PR challenge.

You’re replacing a beloved voice performance with a new, younger actor. The question was never whether audiences would feel some level of voice shock - they would - the challenge was getting ahead of that reaction and making Catherine Laga’aia feel like the obvious choice, not a risky one.

Because audiences naturally resist change. Whether it’s a new actor, a reboot, or even something like AI, nostalgia creates a powerful attachment to what came before. When people love something, they protect it.

That’s why Disney needed to shift the conversation. Catherine wasn’t replacing Moana; she was continuing her journey. Her own career breakthrough mirrors the character’s story; a young woman leaving her island, stepping into the unknown and discovering her place in the world. The campaign wasn’t asking audiences to forget the Moana they knew, but to believe they were witnessing the next chapter of her story. And crucially, with Auli’i Cravalho’s support, it came with the blessing of the person who started it all.

The important thing here is that Disney didn’t just tell audiences Catherine was the next Moana; they built a story around why she was the next Moana. The transition became part of the narrative itself, with Auli’i Cravalho playing a key role in making that handover feel authentic rather than forced.

Which is where Auli’i Cravalho’s advice comes in. As Teen Vogue reported it, Laga’aia - who is of Samoan descent - was told she could make the role her own rather than trying to replicate what came before. Cravalho’s guidance was to take her own approach - feel out who she wanted the character to be, develop her own creative independence and just do her own thing. The piece also frames the significance of the role to the Pasifika community as bigger than any “did we need this remake” debate; it’s pride in seeing your culture represented on screen by an all-Pacific Islander cast, and Laga’aia clearly understands that.

In the interview, Laga’aia talked about recording a new song for the film alongside Cravalho, her first reaction being disbelief that Lin-Manuel Miranda had written another one, let alone with her voice and story in mind. She described being nervous that Cravalho would hear her rough vocal take first, half-joking that she wanted to be edited in last because “that woman sounds like an angel.” It was director Tommy Kail’s idea to have a new song as a way of celebrating both Moana’s together, and Laga’aia described the experience of contributing something of her own within the franchise as genuinely exciting.

So really, the sentiment behind this pillar existed long before PR had to manufacture anything. The importance was ensuring both Moana’s got their moment to shine and metaphorically pass the torch, highlighting how much it means to the culture the film depicts, both Moana’s and the fans watching.

Some of the examples that carried this through into the marketing: a BTS piece on finding Catherine, built around Dwayne Johnson, Tommy Kail and Auli’i Cravalho describing her as “unafraid” and “fearless,” with emotive language throughout such as “globally beloved” and “an incredible honor to step into this legacy” - genuinely doing a good job of capturing the on-set energy and the significance of who “our Moana” is, in the director’s words.

There’s a sweet clip of The Rock sending a voice note to the new Moana; he’s just great at being an encouraging, dad-energy co-star, and always has something lovely to say. There’s also the release of “Along The Way,” the new song, framed by The Rock on Instagram as Auli’i and Catherine’s two Moana’s in “musical conversation,” Lin-Manuel Miranda raising the bar again; another addition to Disney’s already vast, near-perfect transmedia flywheel of music, except this one was explicitly built to bridge the animated generation and the new live-action one. Worth a look too: the Instagram Close Friends speed-round with Catherine and The Rock, 315k likes.

I’ll also say: audiences and critics do genuinely seem to rate Catherine Laga’aia’s performance highly, even when they’re lukewarm on the film overall. Rotten Tomatoes’ critics consensus is pretty unforgiving about the film feeling underwhelming next to the original, but the audience side reads differently, with reviewers repeatedly singling her performance out as phenomenal, and more than one review saying their kids rated it a 10/10. The examples above aren’t exhaustive, what matters is that the production team clearly did try to communicate an appreciation for what came before, whilst adding a new lens on top. Despite most reviews stating the film itself ends up close to a carbon copy.

What Actually Happened

So, with all three pillars laid out, how did this actually perform, and what can this tell us?

The Hollywood Reporter’s numbers on July 12th: $43 million domestic from 3,900 screens, well short of the $60 million-plus target Disney was tracking toward (some early tracking had suggested up to $75 million), plus $52 million overseas. A- CinemaScore overall, A+ from under-18s. 66% female audience, 56% parents with children; higher than most Disney live-action remakes. And a “verified hot” 90% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, against a much rougher 34% from critics, making it one of the worst-reviewed live-action Disney updates to date, even if fans responded warmly.

So, it fell short of projections even with the intended audience showing up. Why?

Part of it is simple timing. Toy Story 5 released June 19th, Moana followed July 10th; 21 days apart - inside a theatrical window that typically runs 45 to 90 days - meaning families currently have the option to see both.

Pricing wise, a standard family-of-four cinema trip - two adults, two kids, plus the practically mandatory popcorn and drinks - can run as high as $108 in pricier US markets according to MoviePass estimates. That’s a substantial amount of money for one outing, let alone two inside a three week window. It’s simply not enough to smell what The Rock’s cooking in this case, as this alone fails to make Moana feel worth that spend - especially when you’ve already dropped a hefty chunk of change getting the family to Toy Story 5.

’s LinkedIn breakdown adds useful context here, with his point being that Moana’s opening showed that franchise familiarity can still deliver a strong floor - reinforcing how hard it is to convince audiences a remake offers enough new value to justify leaving the house for it.

More than half of the positive demand, by his estimate, existed before the live-action campaign even began, meaning Disney activated a powerful existing base without the campaign creating an equally strong new reason to attend. He also points to Disney+ as a genuine headwind, with the constant availability of the original and Moana 2 gives households an easy and free alternative. This emphasises that the question was never whether families liked Moana, it was whether this version justified the cost and effort of an actual trip out.

A review from - who I’ve collaborated with before on Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man - put the creative side of that same argument sharply, describing the film as recreating familiar moments almost shot-for-shot, to the point that it constantly reminds you how much livelier the original was, without much evidence of genuine passion.

And then there’s the money side of it, which Variety laid out plainly: Moana carried a reported $250 million production budget, plus around $120 million in global promotion. Using the usual Hollywood rule of thumb that a film needs to earn roughly twice its combined production and marketing costs to break even, the film likely needs somewhere in the $600-740 million range at the global box office to turn a profit.

The challenge? As of writing, Box Office Mojo has Moana at $120 million worldwide; $68 million domestic and $52 million international, with France currently leading overseas markets. Whatever the creative ambition, those numbers show just how difficult the commercial mountain was.

That’s a long way from the break-even line, however Disney has always viewed Moana as more than a one-off theatrical release. The film sits inside a much larger ecosystem, with the franchise already generating value through other revenue streams - 22 million toys sold since 2016, more than 1.5 billion Disney+ streaming hours and 26 billion music streams. Those existing touchpoints give Disney more breathing room, allowing the company to justify the investment based on the long-term value of the IP rather than the box office alone.

What This Means for You

Here are a few things I think are worth pulling out of this piece, separate from whether the film itself was any good:

First, Star power gets you attention, not urgency. The Rock’s presence carried a huge amount of the campaign’s actual reach, but Chris Colombo’s point stands; that demand was tied to Maui and the wider franchise more than pure star power. Attention isn’t the same as a reason to leave the house.

Next, practical execution has to actually land, not just exist. Disney went wide on real-world activations here - the canoe, the airline livery, the global tour - but a wig that got mocked and colour grading that got criticised in the very first trailer meant a chunk of the “this is a grounded and immersive adventure, not a green-screen copy” argument had to be fought uphill from day one. Perception set early is hard to unwind later, however, it can be done.

Furthermore, existing streaming availability is now a genuine competitor to your own theatrical release. This isn’t unique to Moana, but it’s a clean example; when the thing you’re trying to get people to pay for is already freely available on the platform you own, the marketing has to answer “why now, why in a cinema” far more directly than it did here.

Lastly, a well-executed pillar doesn’t guarantee commercial success, and that’s fine. Catherine Laga’aia’s introduction was genuinely well-handled; thoughtful, culturally grounded, and it clearly worked on its own terms. Critics and audiences both landing on her as the strongest part of the film. Emphasising that the pillar succeeding didn’t save the film’s opening weekend. I think that’s an important distinction to sit with: good marketing execution and commercial outcome aren’t the same conversation, even if we often talk about them like they are.

Anyway, this one’s still playing out in theatres as I write this, so there is potential for the numbers to shift before/after this goes live - but I don’t think the underlying story changes much. This is a genuine positioning problem; a campaign that solved parts of it really well, left other parts exposed, and a box office result that’s forcing Disney to lean on everything else the franchise has built instead. This issue provides us with a strong learning opportunity - the role of a remake isn’t a reintroduction, it’s convincing audiences they want to experience the story once more from a new perspective.

That’s The Harperverse breakdown of Moana.

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For related reading:

The Mandalorian and Grogu • The Devil Wears Prada 2 • The Hoppers Playbook • A Stitch In The System • A Minecraft Movie: How To Build A Blockbuster With Brand Partnerships • Shrek at 25

Browse by what you're in the mood for: deep-dive Tentpole Autopsies, shorter Documentary Reports, and reactive Quick Takes; filter by studio, genre, or media channel if you're after something specific.

~ most uncredited images will have been taken from the films TMDB page!

Which as you can imagine I’m very happy about, because not only is this an achievement in itself given I’ve not been this consistent with a passion project/hobby, since I road stunt scooters over a decade ago, but it’s also the marking of a turning point in my career…

I began writing The Harperverse on the 1st of August 2024, and then a month later I started a new job; working for an agency on the Universal Pictures Home Entertainment account in London. It’s been a dream and since then I’ve been promoted to a senior role, becoming a senior media planner!

Now, with that additional context being said, this posts a bit different and it’s going to be pinned; if you’re new here - Hey, welcome, this is essentially the front door 👋

As previously mentioned, I’ve been writing The Harperverse for a while now without ever really stopping to explain what it actually is - outside of my first post which is slightly dated - which in hindsight is a bit of a mad way to run a publication, lol! People just sort of arrive via the Superman post or the horror marketing breakdown and have to reverse-engineer what they’ve signed up for. So, consider this the proper intro.

Save it, skip it, whatever, this’ll be here if you ever need it!

What this actually is

The Harperverse is about how stories become worlds and brands become universes; specifically through the lens of film marketing, which is both my biggest interest and, conveniently, my actual job. As I mentioned, I’m now a senior media planner, so when I break down a campaign I’m not guessing at the strategy from the outside, I’ve sat in rooms with my team doing versions of this work myself. I try my best to bring that into the writing more now than I used to, partly because I realised I’d been underselling that angle for ages out of habit; more on that another time, maybe…

I write long, dig into the receipts, and I try not to write like I’m presenting a report. If it reads like I’m thinking out loud, tangent and all, that’s intentional. That’s the voice.

Who this is for

Creators, marketers, cinephiles, world-builders who care about IP and legacy, filmmakers, and a hello specifically to the Filmstack crowd; you lot already get it, this was basically built for you as much as anyone.

What’s changed

I’ve gone back through and properly tagged everything, so you can actually filter by what you’re in the mood for rather than scrolling blind. A few examples of how that works in practice:

Want everything I’ve written on a specific genre or studio’s playbook? They’re both there now.

And this is probably the bit I’m most excited about. If you scroll down ever so slightly, you’ll notice posts are now tagged by how much of a commitment they are, not just what they’re about:

• Tentpole Autopsy - the full forensic breakdown, deep dives you can sink your teeth into

• Documentary Report - still a breakdown, just shorter and hits more niches

• Field Report - short and supposed to capture more of my own personal takes from the ‘field’

• Quick Take - reactive, closer to “here’s a thought I had reading the trades this morning” than a proper essay

That last one’s newer, and it’s the one I’m most nervous about and most looking forward to. I’ve always had a habit of reading industry press and firing off takes to my team at work, and I rarely document that publicly because I default to over-explaining everything until it’s a 12-minute essay. Quick Takes are me trying to break that habit; shorter, rougher, more “reacting in real time” than “full autopsy.”

Why now

When I started The Harperverse I was about a month away from starting a new job - I didn’t know that yet, obviously - and somewhere between then and now it’s quietly become a running document of how I think about this industry. Which is a weird thing to realise, that you’ve been building something without entirely meaning to. The promotion to senior media planner helped clarify it too, because suddenly the gap between “what I write about publicly” and “what I actually do for a living” felt smaller and more worth closing than it used to.

So this isn’t really about fixing a framework. It’s more that the publication had outgrown its original shape and I’d been too busy writing posts to notice. The tagging, the new content types, the Quick Takes, it’s all just me trying to make The Harperverse reflect where I actually am now, rather than where I started.

Nothing about the long-form stuff is changing. I’m still going to disappear down a rabbit hole for all of the campaigns and titles I cover. I just want it to sit inside something a bit more navigable, and I want to get better at meeting you all somewhere between the big essays too!

That’s The Harperverse reintroduction!

If you’d like to stick around and be the first to know about future posts, breakdowns, and takes then please do subscribe:

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The Harperverse is a free publication, if you want to support what I’m building here, a paid subscription is £4 a month, less than a coffee in London!

Browse by what you're in the mood for: deep-dive Tentpole Autopsies, shorter Documentary Reports, and reactive Quick Takes; filter by studio, genre, or media channel if you're after something specific.

Okay, so I did not expect to spend a week researching a Ghostface-branded cannabis vaporizer for this newsletter, but here we are, and honestly I’ve had worse weeks lol.

Twenty-six years after Shorty, Ray, Cindy and Brenda first outran a suspiciously familiar masked killer, they’re back, targeted by another mad slasher, and the marketing around this one has genuinely been some of the most fun I’ve had breaking down a campaign in a while. That’s because the problem Paramount was actually solving here wasn’t really “how do we market a horror comedy,” it was something a bit more existential than that: studio-backed, R-rated theatrical spoof comedies are functionally dead. They haven’t existed in mainstream cinema in over a decade.

So the real brief was getting old and new fans alike to essentially give a f*ck and come back to a cinema for one.

I’ve broken this down into three pillars, because that’s how I found myself naturally sorting everything I was collecting: getting audiences to believe this thing has the real DNA of the originals, pivoting the satire from 90s slashers to whatever’s actually scaring people now, and proving the franchise hasn’t gone soft. Let’s get into it.

Who Actually Showed Up?

Before any of the marketing stuff, I want to sit with the audience data for a second because I think it’s genuinely more interesting than most of what I usually lead with.

Deadline had reported ahead of release that this was expected to hinge on walk-up business, pulling a diverse crowd; women under and over 25 and men over 25 all rated as strong first choices. Then afterwards I found a demographic breakdown doing the rounds on r/boxoffice: 75% of the audience came in under 35, and within that, 40% Hispanic/Latino, 28% Black, 24% Caucasian, 4% Asian American. Super helpful, and genuinely lucky that I stumbled on it, because while that’s demographic data and doesn’t tell us much about psychographics or interest, it does confirm younger audiences turned up for Scary Movie the same way they’ve been turning up for Backrooms and Obsession lately; Gen Z are back at the cinema, alongside millennials. My read is they were pulled back in by that original creator nostalgia, and the film gave them enough dumb, nostalgic fun once they got there, which lines up with what Rotten Tomatoes’ own audience-review roundup found too.

The Hispanic and Latino lead demo is the bit I actually want to flag hardest though, because it’s not a one-off, it’s a massive, well-documented trend: Hispanic and Latino audiences are consistently the single most influential demographic driving modern horror and parody at the box office. The UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report has Latino audiences making up close to 1 in 3 moviegoers for horror as a genre generally, which makes that 40% turnout for Scary Movie less of a surprise and more of a peak expression of buying power that’s been building for years.

As an aside: I’d genuinely love to run my own little reader survey at some point, just favourite genre, that kind of thing, to get a proper read on who’s actually in The Harperverse. Filing that away for a future post; please consider subscribing so I can send that out!

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Pillar 1: Restorative Legacy

Here’s where to begin, I suppose. There are five other films in the Scary Movie “Spoof Empire,” and this one doesn’t have a number in its title; that’s not an accident, it’s basically a protest. The Wayans family essentially disowned the last three films, and they’re notably absent from them, which makes them the actual subject of this sixth one. Filmmaker Magazine put it well, describing this as sitting firmly in the tradition of a proper Wayans spoof, a horror-comedy legacy sequel that’s laughing at its own genre while landing real critique on the industry, still carrying the offensive humour their core fans love and their critics can’t stand, and doing it, in their words, by “pissing and farting on genre conventions all the way to the bank.”

And that’s really the thing about the Wayans and their Scary Movies: they’ve always been reflecting their own worldview and commenting on the industry through them, that was always the actual point. The second corporate got more creative control, that genuine perspective got lost, and the marketing suffered right alongside it, becoming more about parody-for-parody’s-sake and manufacturing chaos on the surface rather than actually channelling the Wayans’ perspective; the Black viewpoint, the cultural exclusion, the genre history all baked in. Basically, the marketing itself became the exact thing Scary Movie used to mock.

So for number 6, the whole job was convincing audiences this reboot has the real, authentic, hilarious DNA of the originals, because the alternative is getting dismissed as a cheap, cynical cash-grab, the same way Scary Movie 5 was. And to its credit, the campaign leaned hard into a return to theatre-set imagery and character-led nostalgia, mirroring the original poster’s whole concept and centring the “core-four” reunion with public appearances, clearly designed to remind the core audience what made the originals cult classics in the first place.

@bravotvGirls' night in at the #SummerHouse...but make it Scary Movie! @Paramount Pictures #Ad. Don't miss @Scary Movie in theaters June 5th!

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And honestly, once you see a poster doing that kind of work, you start noticing the same trick running through the entire campaign: take something real that audiences already have an opinion on, and run it back through the Scary Movie filter. Case in point: Ciara Miller from Summer House teamed up with Anna Faris and Regina Hall for a viral, meta promotional video that spoofed the Hamptons drama and dropped right before the reality show’s summer reunion. Bravo fans on Reddit loved it, with the top comment reading “Oh my god this is actually amazing. So many little inside jokes. I love this for herrrrr!!!”

Before that though, there’s the poster I actually want to spend a second on: the Amy Madigan/Aunt Gladys poster drop, riffing on her Weapons Oscar win, which was really the first highly coordinated signal that the marketing machine was properly back. It bridges real-world awards season politics with classic Scary Movie shock humour, and when you pair this with the marketing tagline “The Wayans are back to cancel Cancel Culture,” you get this genuinely great contrast between a high-brow, prestigious awards-season aesthetic and the raw, lowbrow, politically incorrect humour the tagline is promising underneath it.

Paramount then rolled out a proper multi-channel TV and digital blitz explicitly mocking the whole “legacy sequel/requel” trend, all quick-hitting, meta TV spots. There was the “Guess” spot, Ghostface calling the characters while a voiceover teases fans to guess who’s back to finish the job. “Stop Smiling,” entirely dedicated to mocking the unblinking grins from Smile. “Finish Her,” a high-energy teaser leaning into action-horror fight-scene parody. And “I Can’t Feel My Face,” leaning fully into the physical comedy and drug/party tropes the franchise has always been known for. There was also a Wayans Family Featurette, plus, and I’m sure I’m missing other bits of AV honestly, the cast recreating the iconic streetball court sequence from Love & Basketball, doubling as a nod to that hugely popular 2001 Nike Freestyle ad.

There were localised promo clips too, starring reality icon Nabilla Benattia parodying her own famous “Non mais allô quoi” catchphrase, cult media figure Affida Turner also appearing in France, and, this one’s a bit of an odd one out but stay with me, a sports partnership buy landing them on the ring canvas for Usyk vs Verhoeven, when the two literally boxed each other in front of the Pyramids in Giza.

Before I get into OOH, one more transmedia layer I want to flag: “Hoes,” the Lizzo and Sexyy Red track, released ahead of the Paramount revival, using music, nostalgia and meta-commentary to essentially help launch the reboot. It could be argued this belongs in pillar 3 given the politically-incorrect humour running through it, but I think it earns its place here instead, because having two 2026 pop icons re-enact a parody from 2000 is layering meta-irony the exact same way the original films always layered jokes on top of existing media tropes; it’s a bridge between older millennials wanting a proper revival and Gen Z’s attention, and I feel like a broken record mentioning audio and transmedia for the third post running now, but if you missed how I covered it for Mortal Kombat II, The Devil Wears Prada 2, or The Mandalorian and Grogu, go give those a read too.

Then there’s OOH, which needs no introduction as the channel that reaches the masses regardless of budget. From what I could tell, the UK plan leaned on high-reach national placements, D6s across bus shelters, the Underground, mall environments, plus a genuinely impressive 3D/immersive build outside Westfield Shepherd’s Bush featuring a Ghostface tube man. Bus supersides too, and at least one taxi, though I’d be very surprised if it was actually singular. Sadly I couldn’t track down any UK roadside billboards beyond one FOOH example an influencer posted on TikTok, and there were radio spots too, though offline media pretty much stops there for us. The US is where the campaign really got to flex though; “Call Jacof” billboards mimicking America’s sketchier personal injury lawyers, an “Accidentes” billboard on El Paseo, a rather promiscuous looking ghostface billboard, and a much larger version of that tube man creative on Sunset Blvd. I genuinely wish the UK and global markets had gotten the same treatment.

Where I’ll actually close out pillar 1 is the Arsenal Parade Bus, because it’s just such a clean, expensive, reactive execution of everything this pillar is about. Essentially they ambushed Arsenal’s long-awaited Premier League victory parade with a giant red bus full of people dressed as Ghostface on the roof, plus “Wazzzuuuppp Gooners!” and “Gooner party!” plastered down the side. What makes it land isn’t just the stunt itself, it’s the timing echo: both the film and the club were ending genuinely long droughts, 20-plus years for each, and they managed to spin that overlap into a short-window, high-turnaround creative moment that clearly paid off once social media picked it up for the world to see. Shoutout to Aunty Bemi, whose post in collaboration sits at nearly 400k likes!

Pillar 2: Elevated Horror Inversion

Right, so once you’ve convinced people the DNA’s genuine, the next problem is staying current, because pivoting the satire from outdated 90s slasher references to whatever modern audiences actually find scary and funny is a completely different skill, and getting it wrong makes the whole thing feel dated and out of touch fast.

Put simply, the campaign needed to parody recent horror while staying reactive enough to swap creative at short notice. Director Michael Tiddes told The Hollywood Reporter that every Scary Movie chapter goes after a different era of genre film, and one of the earliest calls on this one was realigning with the Scream franchise, particularly Scream 5, using the Wayans’ own real-life dismissal from the franchise as fuel for the new Ghostface killer’s motivation, which is a properly meta bit of writing given how self-aware the Scream films already are.

What I found more interesting though is how far they baked reactivity into production itself. They scheduled additional photography for late March specifically so the creative team could keep parodying whatever was topical right up to the wire. Teyana Taylor shot her opening scene, which addresses her Oscar loss directly, only a week after she actually lost Best Supporting Actress for One Battle After Another. Tiddes said he wished the timing had lined up to spoof Obsession and Backrooms too, joking there’s always Scary Movie 7. But the bit that stuck with me most was him describing the whole strategy:

Build in time to fix or add things late, because the news cycle moves too fast otherwise, and the goal is always for the audience to ask “how did they do this so quickly.”

He pointed out they parodied Scream in front of Scream 7, did a Jermaine Jackson gag in front of Michael, and ran a Backrooms joke in front of Backrooms itself, live, as those films were actually coming out, which as far as he knows no one’s done before.

Which brings me to the Michael parody and the run of spoof posters, and honestly I think these are genius. Eleven spoof posters went out in total, hitting recent blockbusters, indie horror hits and pop-culture phenomena, Backrooms, Michael, Weapons, Sinners, Ma, The Substance, and more. But true to form, they didn’t stop at posters, because Regina Hall’s character - Brenda Meeks - got her own Letterboxd account.

It’s a genuine little transmedia moment, and I couldn’t not look into it. You could argue it fits pillar 3, but I think it’s less about edge and more about commentary, targeting a very modern horror-fan platform. Brenda’s always been memorable for chaotic in-theatre commentary, so giving her that same chaotic energy on Letterboxd is both a nostalgic callback and a way of proving they’re plugged into how people actually talk about horror now. Her reviews are properly funny too and very on-brand for the platform, mostly one-liners built to farm likes. My favourites: “Just stop going in there wtf” for Backrooms, “maika monroe always be in scurry shit” for Longlegs, and “I put this on thinking it was saturday night fever and couldn’t turn it off. I’m mad” for Boogie Nights.

The organic social content could also genuinely be its own listicle. Since this whole pillar is about staying reactive and on-trend, the social arm had to move the same way. A few examples that stood out: the Artemis II bit, which is shockingly simple, a “Breaking Update” red banner over real Artemis II door-opening footage, cut with Marlon and Shawn Wayans doing their Ghostface “Wazzzuuuppp,” ending on the “Every line will be crossed” card. Quick lift-and-shift, capitalising on the news cycle while it was hot, and it did 23k likes for the effort.

As showcased above, Jeremy Lynch showed up too, making a repeat appearance in my examples after Project Hail Mary, this time in the Ghostface costume stalking Marlon around a hotel room for a delayed jump-scare payoff, 162k likes, which honestly just proves how consistently Lynch performs regardless of format.

And there was a Fallon Tonight appearance, dead simple, just Marlon announcing they’re back, bouncing a basketball into what looks like the Backrooms, then saying “Oh Hell No,” before running off, 56k likes and counting. None of these are reinventing anything, but each one’s doing something slightly different, trend-jacking, influencer, press-tour content; there’s something to be said for how much heavy lifting organic social does across every campaign now.

Of course, I also caught a handful of other examples too, less essential but worth a mention if you’re curious: pulling up to Coachella, the front of Caesar’s Palace at CinemaCon, a Cineworld paid ad, a GQ interview clip where they insist it’s not a “six,” it’s a “reboot-equel,” and finally a Wireless x Kanye-cancellation-adjacent bit introducing Ghostface as the new festival headliner. All part of the same reactive muscle.

Then there’s paid, which of course sits alongside organic to widen reach into target segments properly. I only caught a couple of examples myself, a Snapchat filter that puts Ghostface right behind you in-frame, and the tail end of an unskippable YouTube CTV ad, which is a genuinely smart format choice, it puts you on the biggest screen in the house in front of usually more than one person right as they’re settling in. It’s also cheaper than a live TV buy and lets you target properly instead of going broad, which matters more and more given how many of us, myself included, barely watch live TV anymore and mostly live on SVOD or YouTube-on-the-big-screen instead.

Pillar 3: Counter-Cultural Edge

Once authenticity and relevance are sorted, this is where the campaign gets to have its fun, because this pillar is really about proving Scary Movie hasn’t gone soft. It’s the fame placements and stunts built to get people actually talking. Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans and Anna Faris stopped by CinemaCon to pre-emptively apologise to a fairly long list of people who “may or may not get their feelings hurt,” and while reactive content could arguably sit here too, I’ve kept that in pillar 2 because that argument’s really about staying current, not about pushing boundaries. Pillar 3 is about doing things that would normally take a mountain of sign-off; permission is theoretically off the table here, even if, in practice, someone definitely still signed off.

The Times Square Hotbox is probably the one example here I don’t need to oversell, it went viral enough that half the trade press covered it themselves. Muse by Clios described it as a full Gen Z bedroom set-up dropped into Times Square with a crowd in Ghostface masks screaming “Wazzuuuppp,” timed to land right after the Knicks’ Eastern Conference win, one of the happiest moments New York had going. The stunt was a direct riff on the Severance glass cube activation in Grand Central, except where that one went cold and corporate, this one flipped it hot and smokey, on brand for the most irreverent franchise in the genre. Creative director Ollie Williams put the thinking simply: “without stoners, there is no Scary Movie.” The numbers backed the bet too, north of 900k likes, 300k+ shares and tens of millions of views within 24 hours just on Pubity’s own channels, plus global press pickup on top, all timed to build earned media ahead of the June 5 release. Paired with additional Scary Movie takeovers dotted around Times Square, it’s a proper reminder of the message.

Not to lean too hard on the stoner framing again, but you do have to know who you’re actually selling to, especially when you’re making the film and marketing it. So Scary Movie leaned into stoner-adjacent merch on purpose, both riding the current popcorn bucket trend and dropping a proper co-branded limited-edition product alongside it. I don’t think the popcorn bucket trend itself needs explaining at this point, it shows up in basically every campaign now, but the difference here is it’s in the hands of comedians you already know are going to push it as far as it’ll go, bong-shaped buckets in a few sizes that I have to assume are fully functional, plus the usual cups and tins. I don’t believe the bong buckets made it to the UK, could be wrong, but we do seem to have the same cups AMC ran in the States. Beyond cinema merch, there’s an official Scary Movie x PAX collab too, a limited-edition PAX FOUR dry-herb vaporizer wrapped in Ghostface art and Scary Movie packaging, backed by “green-friendly” screenings and its own four-part web series, Don’t Kill, Just Chill.

And closing pillar 3 out is Subservient Ghostface, which isn’t really marketing so much as it’s just entertainment. Think Talking Tom but for a spoof serial killer, explicitly inspired by Burger King’s Subservient Chicken, the landmark 2004 viral campaign from Crispin Porter + Bogusky that predates YouTube and modern social entirely. Beyond the nostalgic parody of that early-2000s gimmick, it’s doing something sharper for 2026: it’s gamified, giving users direct control over the villain in a way that easily beats a two-minute trailer most people skip after five seconds, and it quietly mocks the current AI moment by using none of it, leaning fully into old-school, pre-recorded human silliness right when social feeds are drowning in AI slop. It’ll do 67s and Ronaldo’s siuuu if you ask nicely, you can go try it yourself.

What Actually Happened At The Box Office

The Hollywood Reporter’s opening weekend numbers had Scary Movie landing top of the box office with roughly $55 million domestic for its debut, plus $50.5 million from over 50 international territories, $105.5 million worldwide in that first weekend alone, more than a decade after the last instalment. The audience split was close to even by gender, 55/45 male to female, but skewed heavily young, 62% of ticket buyers under 30.

By June 6th, The Numbers had it at $106 million domestic and $210 million worldwide, against a reported $30 million production budget, which puts the worldwide multiple at roughly 7x before P&A even enters the conversation. Running the standard 100-150% marketing-spend rule against that production budget lands you a baseline of somewhere between $30-45 million for marketing, and thinking like a media planner for a second, buying TV during major June sporting moments like the NBA Finals, funding a proper TikTok/social push, and printing physical materials for close to 3,500 domestic locations plus international, there’s genuinely no version of this where a studio spends under $35-40 million. All told, a combined production-plus-marketing spend somewhere around $75 million against a $210 million worldwide gross is a lopsided win by any measure.

Reception is where it gets genuinely interesting though, because it’s properly split. Critics were brutal, 24% on Rotten Tomatoes and a C+ CinemaScore, with reviewers calling the humour dated and overly reliant on cheap meta-jokes. Audiences disagreed hard, 65% on the audience score, with early-2000s nostalgia and the original cast clearly driving strong, packed-out crowd engagement. Which, honestly, kind of proves the entire pillar 1 argument on its own: this was never a campaign built to win critics over, it was built to convince the specific audience who grew up on these films that the DNA was real, and by that measure, it worked exactly as intended.

Final Thoughts

Looking at this whole thing together, what stands out most isn’t any single stunt, it’s how deliberately each pillar was solving a different, specific kind of audience resistance rather than just generating noise. Restorative Legacy convinced people this wasn’t a cash-grab. Elevated Horror Inversion kept it from feeling like a museum piece. Counter-Cultural Edge proved it still had teeth. And you can genuinely see all three working in tandem in something like the Times Square Hotbox; it’s current, boundary-pushing, and unmistakably, nostalgically Scary Movie all at once.

For anyone building a marketing plan for a legacy comedy or horror title off the back of this: the lesson isn’t “do a viral stunt,” everyone already knows that. It’s that a comeback campaign needs its own version of these three pressure points, proof of authenticity, proof of relevance, and proof of nerve, and if you’re only hitting one or two of them, audiences will find the gap.

That’s The Harperverse breakdown of Scary Movie.

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For related reading:

Horror Marketing in 2026 • Mortal Kombat II • Backrooms • Scream 7 • Until Dawn • Weapons • Bring Her Back • HORROCTOBER 2025 Halloween-O-Thon

~ most uncredited images will have been taken from the films TMDB page!

The Mandalorian and Grogu is, when you strip it all back, a side story.

Not a saga film. Not a universe-shaker.

A self-contained adventure that lives in the margins of the wider Star Wars timeline.

And yet here we are: $300 million in production & marketing spend, IMAX screens, global spectacle stunts, and a campaign explicitly designed to manufacture the kind of cultural moment usually reserved for the event film, not a film in a franchise. That gap - between what this film actually is and what the campaign was asking audiences to feel about it - is what makes this campaign worth pulling apart.

You see, there’s been no shortage of people writing about the stunts - the floating popcorn in Times Square stands out for sure - and don’t get me wrong, I love a stunt and documenting them all. However, this time around I’ve decided to shift my focus on something a little different. What I wanted to understand is why Disney made the choices they made, where the logic held, and where it didn’t. Because I think this campaign has a lot to say, and most of the coverage has stopped at “here’s what Disney did,” which is a starting point, not an ending one. Nobody’s really asked the harder question sitting underneath all of it.

Instead of only documenting the campaign this time around (as I’ve been doing for nearly a year), I’ve decided to level up so to speak, and provide you with more strategic thinking. But, just before we jump in, the usual bits of housekeeping and context do still apply:

The Mandalorian and Grogu is the first live-action Star Wars theatrical release since The Rise of Skywalker in 2019. A significant gap carrying a significant weight of expectation in both directions. It’s built on the Disney+ series that ran three seasons, built a genuinely passionate fanbase, and turned Grogu into one of the most recognisable characters in modern pop culture.

The production budget is estimated around $165 million, with wider reporting placing the combined production and marketing investment around $300 million overall; a full tentpole commitment from Disney and Lucasfilm rather than a cautious test run.

Now, into the actual stuff because this is where the fun begins ;)

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The Headache: Manufacturing Event-Status in a World That’s Moved On From Manufactured Events

This is the way that I’ve come to think about this campaign, Disney wasn’t just trying to sell a film, they were trying to solve a specific and genuinely hard cultural problem:

How do you recreate the feeling that going to see Star Wars is a moment - something you have to be part of, something that marks time - when audiences can already access everything these characters have to offer from their sofa, for the price of a Disney+ subscription they probably already have?

Star Wars used to win that fight just by existing. There was a time when a new Star Wars theatrical release came unquestioned, because it literally moved culture like it had it’s own gravity.

You went. Everyone went. It was the thing.

That’s no longer automatic, and I don’t think it’s because people love Star Wars less, it’s just that the relationship between audiences and the IP has fundamentally shifted.

Three seasons of streaming content mean that Mando and Grogu now live in people’s living rooms in a way that Han Solo didn’t before A New Hope hit cinemas in 1977. The familiarity is a gift - you don’t need to build awareness, the characters are already loved - but it’s also a trap. ‘Comfortable and familiar’ and ‘urgent event I need to leave the house for’ are not the same emotional trigger, and moving an audience from one to the other is a harder brief than it looks on paper.

What’s more, audiences are smarter and savvier than they’ve ever been about this kind of thing. They’ve seen and know the “you have to be in the cinema” messaging well, having seen it so many times. They know a streaming window is coming. They know word of mouth will tell them whether the trip is worth it.

The campaign therefore had one primary job above everything else: make this feel like a moment that couldn’t be held at arm’s length, at a time when holding things at arm’s length has become second nature.

Who Was This Actually For?

Before getting to how Disney went about solving that, it’s worth being honest about who the “moment” was being manufactured for, because this is where the campaign gets complicated.

The obvious answer is “Star Wars fans,” and yes, of course. But Star Wars fans in 2026 are not one audience. There are the people who watched all three seasons on Disney+, who know what the Darksaber storyline meant, who can tell you exactly why an appearance from Zeb Orrelios/Rotta/Embo matters; then there are the people who know Grogu as “Baby Yoda” from the internet, who’ve just sort of absorbed the show without necessarily sitting down and watching it. And then there are families with young children who see that little green face on a poster and immediately want to go regardless of any other context - any bets on where I sit or where you sit, feel free to:

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The Nielsen data published around May the 4th this year is actually fascinating and fits perfectly here. In 2025, U.S. viewers watched 33 billion minutes of Star Wars content across linear TV and streaming. The generational breakdown is the really interesting bit though; The Mandalorian specifically is the most popular Star Wars property among Gen Alpha and Baby Boomers. Gen Z is mostly into The Clone Wars animated series. Millennials and Gen X enjoyed Andor the most:

So, you’ve got a show that skews toward the youngest and oldest audiences simultaneously, which is a specific challenge for theatrical conversion. The audience that typically drives theatrical urgency, Millennials and Gen X, the demographic with disposable income and established cinema habits who grew up with the original trilogy, isn’t the audience that loves this show most. That’s worth remembering before looking at any of the campaign choices.

The secondary audience the campaign was trying to recruit was casual family audiences: people who know Grogu, who’d take a partner or kid to see it, who don’t need deep lore investment as the price of entry. Which is a real and worthwhile audience, but one that as we’ll get to, comes with its own complications.

How It Performed

The film ultimately underperformed by almost every theatrical measure that matters for a modern Star Wars release. While its opening initially looked respectable on paper - pulling in $103 million across the four-day Memorial Day frame and $165 million globally - the real story was what happened afterwards.

Put simply, The legs simply weren’t there.

As of the 4th of July, The Numbers has the film sat at around $176 million domestically and $336 million worldwide, making it the lowest-grossing live-action Star Wars film to date and significantly below the estimated $500-600 million range generally believed necessary for profitability.

The more revealing signal came in week two. The film dropped a historic 69%, an unusually steep fall for a franchise built around repeat viewing and audience momentum. Internationally, trade reports suggested strong weather in the U.K. and parts of Europe may have contributed to softer attendance, but that explanation only stretches so far. Sunshine doesn’t explain a collapse of that scale; plus I know this is a survey of one, but I wanted out of the sun, sitting in my apartment was genuinely horrendous!

More importantly, it doesn’t explain what happened next.

After only two weeks, the film suffered an unprecedented programming blow when IMAX cut its exclusive run short after just two weeks. Originally booked for a three weekend premium large format (PLF) window, IMAX unexpectedly transferred its global screen allocation to Amazon MGM’s reboot Masters of the Universe for early June; adding on top of that, 53% of global ticket sales were initially driven by premium formats, IMAX accounted for 15% ($24 million) for the four days, it’s third-best showing ever for Memorial Day.

This serves as a massive market signal. Theatre exhibitors and IMAX executives completely lost confidence in the leggy potential of Star Wars. Exhibitors scrambled to minimise losses by changing lanes to a film with stronger positive tracking. It proved that the “Star Wars” brand name alone is no longer an automatic guarantee for keeping PLF real estate.

The Mandalorian and Grogu didn’t lose those screens because of weather, instead it lost them because the market stopped behaving like this was an event.

The Big Spectacle Bet: Stunts You Had to Actually Be There For

Right, this is the bit that genuinely impressed me about the campaign, and I want to be clear that what I’m about to describe isn’t just “Disney spent a lot on OOH.” That’s not the interesting thing. The interesting thing is how they spent it, and what they were actually trying to achieve.

Disney wasn’t just buying visibility with their OOH, instead they were trying to recreate something that streaming gradually erodes: the feeling that something is happening somewhere, and that if you aren’t there, you’re missing it; FOMO for short I guess.

The Times Square Force-floating popcorn stunt is probably the clearest example; 211k+ likes on Instagram alone + the residual content that came from it. This wasn’t a single billboard and it wasn’t a piece of social-first CGI wizardry or FOOH (Fake Out-of-Home) designed to look impressive on your phone. It was a giant physical object appearing to float above people’s heads using “the Force,” in one specific place, at one specific time.

If you were in Times Square, you experienced it. If you weren’t, you saw somebody else experience it; like Pedro Pascal.

That second-hand version still has value of course; it creates reach and feeds the social cycle. But it’s fundamentally different from physically being there. The stunt wasn’t really selling popcorn or even the film itself as much as it was selling participation. Something happened, and you either caught it or you didn’t.

The same logic applies to the Grogu Café in Shoreditch. You had to actually go there. You had to queue - no surprise, it’s England - get your themed cup, take your photo, post it, and become part of the event itself.

The deal being made with audiences was surprisingly simple: show up and you get to be in it.

And what’s interesting is that the reward isn’t really the coffee, or Grogu, or merchandise. The reward is presence itself. You were there. If you missed it, you missed it. That sounds almost trivial written down, but emotionally it does a lot of work because streaming cannot recreate the feeling of existing in a specific place with other people while something is actively happening around you; unless your living room is a zoo I guess!

The Xochimilco activation in Mexico operates on exactly the same principle. Grogu appearing on the iconic trajineras wasn’t just advertising dropped into public space; it was part of Grogu’s world tour and felt more like the world of the film briefly colliding with a real-world cultural experience people already travel to see. You couldn’t experience that from your sofa.

The giant inflatable Grogu at Australia’s Southern Cross Station worked similarly. It transformed a normal public space into a temporary event. You either stumbled into it or you didn’t, and that distinction is kind of the entire point; feels like I haven’t touched on Inflatables in forever, and that’s because I haven’t! The last time I touched on any was in the following post, crazy to see how far we’ve come since then:

The Disney After Dark event at Disneyland did something similar again, taking a familiar environment and reframing it as something temporary and exclusive. Even the sports integrations - WrestleMania, MLB games, NBA appearances - were functioning in the same way. These are already emotionally heightened environments where crowd energy exists before the campaign arrives. Grogu appearing at WrestleMania isn’t just generating impressions on a media report somewhere; for people in that arena it becomes an actual memory.

Even the Super Bowl spot fits into this broader idea, although in a much messier way.

Rather than simply dropping a conventional trailer during one of the largest advertising stages of the year, Disney ran a parody of the classic Budweiser Clydesdale commercials, replacing horses with tauntauns and bringing in Sam Elliott narration. And honestly, I understand the instinct. The Super Bowl is one of the few places left where advertising itself becomes part of the entertainment. Making people remember the ad rather than simply pushing footage at them isn’t a bad strategy.

The issue is that audiences seemed to come away asking a different question: why are we getting a joke instead of a reason to see the film?

And that criticism matters because it runs into the wider challenge the campaign kept wrestling with. The marketing consistently prioritised feeling over information; atmosphere over explanation. That’s exactly how The Mandalorian television series was always sold and it worked brilliantly there. But a theatrical release carries a different burden. People weren’t simply asking whether they liked Mando and Grogu; they were asking why this specifically needed to be a cinema experience.

Now, that distinction never entirely disappeared.

But taken collectively, I think this is still the most genuinely innovative aspect of the campaign: the deliberate engineering of location-specific presence as the spectacle itself, rather than relying purely on scale or technical complexity.

You couldn’t screenshot your way into having been at Shoreditch. You couldn’t recreate bumping into a giant inflatable Grogu in Australia. You couldn’t manufacture being in a WrestleMania crowd after the fact; try if you must, I’d be impressed.

In a media environment where almost everything is available to everyone instantly, that kind of scarcity is actually pretty rare.

Where things do become more complicated is the broader OOH footprint: Vegas screens, Sunset Boulevard and The Grove in LA, JFK, London’s Leicester Square, Westfield Vue, Holland Park roundabout and so on.

Some of this is straightforward reach. Keeping the film unavoidable during the campaign window, making sure audiences repeatedly encounter it during everyday life; completely legitimate, completely necessary.

But some of it is doing something more interesting too.

Large-format placements in high-dwell environments aren’t really operating on frequency alone. They’re operating on stature. There’s a meaningful difference between a D6 poster at a bus stop and taking over Piccadilly Lights, because one is asking for attention and the other is performing importance.

And I think that distinction matters because not all OOH is doing the same job. Some placements are trying to reach people. Others are trying to signal that what they’re looking at matters.

The Grogu Problem: Cute Sells, But Cute Sells to Whom?

Grogu is everywhere in this campaign. He was the face of the Shoreditch café, the Times Square stunt, the merchandise lines, the CapCut templates, the Miniso collab figures, the Sideshow life-size collectible, and even made live appearances. He’s doing the audience acquisition work by pulling in anyone who’s just picked up on “Baby Yoda” from having the internet, and particularly families with young children who see that little face on a poster and immediately want to be involved.

That’s completely intentional, and it’s the right strategic instinct in terms of widening the door. Like James Gunn leaning on Krypto in the Superman campaign, or any franchise lead using its most broadly-appealing character to do top-of-funnel work, Grogu is emotionally accessible in a way that “first Star Wars theatrical release since 2019” simply isn’t for someone who hasn’t been watching the series.

But. The film is a PG-13 space western. It’s got proper action sequences, genuine stakes, monsters, violence. I’ve seen it mentioned more than once that younger kids going in expecting Grogu got a Star Wars film instead; and those aren’t the same thing. Although, to be fair, if you’d watched all the trailers carefully those elements were baked in there - the action, the scale, the tone - so it’s not as though Disney hid what it was. But trailers don’t always reach the decision-makers in a family context, and “Baby Yoda is in it” absolutely does.

The comparison I keep coming back to is Logan because it sold the same father-son emotional DNA. Not “here’s the cute one,” but “this relationship is going to cost both of them something, and that might break your heart,” and it recruited an adult action-drama audience that doesn’t think of themselves as superhero fans. That pitch works regardless of whether you know the lore. And here’s the thing, the elements were already there in the Mando trailers. The action, the scale, the weight of the relationship, the monsters. The information existed in the campaign. It just wasn’t being sold as the primary feeling.

Grogu was the hook, which makes total sense for reach and I’m not saying bury him - Grogu is the most marketable thing about this film, that’s just a fact - but I think there was a version of this campaign that got audiences in the door with Grogu and then made them feel something about what was waiting behind it. The dad-core angle, the stakes-driven action, the “this will actually move you” pitch. I’m just not sure that second layer landed strongly enough to do the conversion work it needed to do.

Cinema or Very Expensive TV? The IMAX Question

Okay so the IMAX situation…

I keep coming back to this one because it’s the most concrete, unavoidable signal in the whole campaign, and I want to be clear it’s not me being negative about the film. It’s a market verdict, not a vibe. The Mandalorian and Grogu lost its IMAX screens significantly earlier than anticipated to Masters of the Universe, which was absent from the 2026 slate Imax shared with investors as per IGN, and that’s not a small thing. Exhibitors don’t make that call lightly, they reallocate screens when the returns don’t justify holding them, full stop.

The IMAX positioning was present in the campaign - the language was there, the “experience this in IMAX” messaging was there - but there’s a difference between positioning a film as an IMAX event and convincing an audience that the IMAX experience is meaningfully, viscerally different to seeing it on any other screen. The second thing requires a specific kind of footage and a specific editing sensibility that says, essentially, “this was made for scale and you will feel it in your chest.” The trailers and promo materials had moments of it, but not enough to sustain premium positioning through a full theatrical window.

Part of this is a genuine production challenge that no marketing campaign can fully solve. Three seasons of streaming television create a visual grammar - a shooting style, a pacing rhythm, a particular approach to scale - that’s genuinely hard to shake entirely in one film. The Mandalorian is a great-looking show, but it’s lit, shot, and cut as television. Making a film that looks different enough from that to justify the IMAX premium is hard. And if the film itself doesn’t quite land that distinction, the marketing is fighting against the audience’s existing mental model of what these characters look like.

And the interesting thing is that I don’t think this was just me over-reading the campaign after the fact either, because a lot of the early reaction to the marketing landed in almost exactly the same place.

When the first teaser arrived, the conversation around it wasn’t really “this looks huge.” It was almost the opposite. Multiple outlets kept circling back to a similar feeling: the vibe felt oddly small. The Verge saw a mix of classic Star Wars adventure and Grogu’s familiar cuteness, Polygon highlighted the action, while The Hollywood Reporter described it as unusually light and family-friendly. None of that is inherently bad - The Mandalorian has always balanced warmth with spectacle - but collectively the reaction starts pointing toward something more structural.

The recurring question underneath the coverage wasn’t whether people liked what they saw; it was whether it felt different enough from the Disney+ series people already had at home.

Richard Newby at The Hollywood Reporter made what I think is probably the most revealing observation of the lot: the early marketing hadn’t really answered why this was a theatrical film rather than simply season four of The Mandalorian. That’s a brutal question for any campaign to inherit because once audiences start asking it, marketing suddenly isn’t selling excitement anymore, it’s selling justification.

And I think that lands directly on the same problem we’ve been circling throughout this entire piece: cinema and streaming have different emotional contracts. A theatrical release needs to feel bigger, rarer, more singular. If audiences struggle to see the distinction, you’re no longer asking “do I want to watch this?” You’re asking “why shouldn’t I just wait?”

The supporting campaign around this pillar was doing real work, it just wasn’t specifically making the “you need a cinema for this” argument. And the Boys Noize remix is worth spending more time on than one sentence, because it’s actually the most strategically interesting piece of all of it; and something I wrote a whole chunk about in my Mortal Kombat 2 breakdown that applies here just as neatly.

Walt Disney Records don’t commission a remix for the hell of it. They hired Boys Noize - Alex Ridha, who’s made records with Frank Ocean, ASAP Rocky, and Trent Reznor - specifically to target electronic, indie, and club-culture audiences who’d otherwise not engage with a traditional Star Wars orchestral release.

The track dropped on May 1st, timed deliberately ahead of the May 4th streaming spike Disney knows is coming every year without fail. And that spike is real: as mentioned earlier 33 billion minutes of Star Wars content consumed on streaming in 2025 alone, 545,000 user-generated Star Wars playlists on Spotify; mind you that was in 2015 so it’s probably higher now. Disney has learned to weaponise May the 4th as a launch window for trailers, merchandise drops, and music singles; the Boys Noize release landing three days before it is not an accident.

The remix itself preserves Göransson’s cinematic topline (you know immediately what it is) but heavy-loads the low-end sequencing for DJ play, festival sets, club environments. It’s not moving away from the theme; it’s translating it for a different room entirely.

Worth noting too that this is the first Star Wars theatrical feature ever scored without a single John Williams leitmotif. The sonic identity of the film lives entirely within what Göransson built across the series, and the remix was a deliberate attempt to push that identity into spaces a traditional orchestral score simply can’t go. Göransson’s theme was apparently engineered by him and Favreau to mimic the catchy, repetitive, intimate quality of 1960s TV space-westerns; built for digital repetition and short-form shareability in a way that Williams’ sweeping opera was never designed to be. The Boys Noize remix takes that inherent stickiness and drags it into a completely different demographic context.

And as I argued in the MK2 piece when I was writing about Techno Syndrome, music is the emotional and cohesive glue of transmedia and brand universes. Sound bypasses conscious analysis to trigger instant feelings, which makes it the most flexible tool for real-world and digital lifestyle immersion you’ve got. MIDiA Research make the same point in a piece on transmedia storytelling: in fragmented digital markets, cross-platform storyworld music is vital for building what they call “fandom equity,” keeping an IP culturally relevant in spaces where a traditional cinematic campaign can’t reach.

Disney pushing Göransson’s theme into electronic sub-genres is exactly that play.
It’s good transmedia thinking. The question - and this is where it connects back to the pillar - is whether it’s making the case for cinema or just for the IP. And I think the honest answer is the second one. The Boys Noize remix is expanding the world of the franchise in audio form; it’s not doing the “you need to see this on an IMAX screen” job. Which brings us back to the same conclusion as everything else in this section.

The Spotify presence also extended the musical footprint further outside the trailer window and kept the film culturally present. Empire Magazine’s coverage went deep on the production and gave the kind of long-read access that core fans actually seek out and share. The BTS content from Favreau and Savage showed the creative intent behind the choices, which matters for the audience that wants to understand how it was made, not just what it looks like. And lastly, Grogu had a moment at the Oscars which was genuinely sweet; a quick, warm cultural cameo that reminded a very specific, influential audience that this thing was coming.

All good work. But none of it is specifically arguing that you need to be in a cinema rather than anywhere else. It’s doing cultural presence, not theatrical urgency, and those are different briefs.

Commercial Activation vs. Actually Building the World

As we already established, the film performed poorly, however as The Hollywood Reporter shared that was somewhat besides the point because:

“Disney continues to point out that Mando began its life on the small screen, so it is an entirely different proposition from previous titles in the Star Wars pantheon, and introduces new characters not tied to the saga movies or stand-alone features. The studio says the movie will drive significant value across the broader Disney ecosystem, including consumer products and Disney+. The Mandalorian is the most-watched original series in the history of the service, with more than 1.3 billion hours streamed globally. Star Wars attractions at Disney’s parks are also in on the action, including a new Mandalorian and Grogu mission within Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run that debuted day-and-date with the film, a first-ever for the company. There is also a major integration with Fortnite.”

Therefore, whilst the theatrical campaign was meant to drive home and capture a moment that fans & audiences alike would have wanted to be a part of. The wider marketing strategy was not solely about getting bums in seats - doing so would’ve helped out a lot with these wider plans - but it was instead meant to drive value to the rest of the business and milk the IP for what it’s essentially worth.

Which is what this section is essentially about. Looking into whether Disney were focusing on hyper-commercial tie-ins that sell merchandise, or whether they were adding in additional transmedia layers that would’ve actually deepened the story, and reward the core fans keeping the IP alive.

Now, I’m sure you’re aware of how significant May the 4th is for Star Wars and the fandom; if you’re not as clued up it’s essentially a day celebrated by fans as Star Wars Day. An informal holiday originating from the iconic jedi phrase “May the force be with you,” becoming a clever play on words with “May the Fourth be with you.”

To say May the 4th this year was a cultural moment is to say the least, because it usually is every year! But, this time around here’s what I was able to pick up on: the official Star Wars Instagram post celebrating the day pulled 370k likes, with Meta, Hot Wheels, AT&T and more brands piling into the comments. Natalie Portman sharing an image from The Phantom Menace hit 900k likes. The Obama Presidential Center and Mark Hamill celebrating got 749k. Essentially, Disney know how to use their own cultural holidays, and they used this one well yet again.

But most of it was commercial celebration dressed as fan celebration. The exception - and it’s a genuinely good one - was the Galaxy’s Edge/Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run announcement: “A new adventure awaits on Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run, debuting May 22, 2026 at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge.” That’s different. That’s the park experience expanding the world of the film in a way that actually adds something to the story of what it means to engage with this IP. You can go and be in the world, not just consume it.

The Hertz partnership - “Space and adventure. The perfect pair” - was a fine commercial tie-in. The Rotten Tomatoes/Funko Pop homepage takeover that I screenshotted and added to the collage above is fine. The Miniso vinyl figures are genuinely well made and I understand entirely why hardcore fans will buy them. The Sideshow Life-Size Grogu is the kind of thing that exists because some people simply need to own it, and fair enough. None of this is wrong, but it is all doing one thing: monetising the characters rather than deepening the world they live in.

The interesting thing is that the film itself is doing a lot of genuine transmedia storytelling that the marketing barely touched. Rotta the Hutt - “Stinky” from The Clone Wars series, grown up - is central to the plot. Zeb Orrelios from Rebels shows up in live action in a meaningful way. Embo, a fan-favourite bounty hunter from Clone Wars, gets a live-action role that was clearly spotted immediately by people who knew who he was and produced genuine excitement in those circles. These aren’t Easter eggs, these are actual narrative bridges across a decade of Star Wars storytelling across multiple mediums.

And the marketing didn’t really lean into them. I get it, to market those connections is to add homework to an already hard sell. If the casual audience sees “Embo from Clone Wars” in a trailer, the immediate question is “who?” and suddenly the film feels less like a standalone event and more like an assignment. The characters themselves are the star attraction for the wider audience; the lore is for the fans who already did the reading. That’s a real strategic call, and I’m not sure there’s one right answer.

But here’s what I think was left on the table: there were ways to bridge that gap without explicitly demanding homework. A Disney+ campaign highlighting pivotal episodes in a Mando-themed playlist - the Clone Wars episodes where Rotta or Embo appears, the Rebels episodes that set up Zeb’s live-action arc - could have quietly done the pre-watch work for casual audiences without making the film feel like an assignment. Small things honestly, but the kind that help audiences feel rewarded for going deeper rather than punished for not already knowing everything.

Because the challenge isn’t simply giving people more lore. It’s giving them context without making them feel like they’re revising for an exam before buying a cinema ticket.

And this is where things become interesting, because whilst the campaign struggled to surface some of those deeper narrative connections, it absolutely wasn’t short on broader transmedia thinking.

In fact, Fortnite might be the most interesting contradiction in the entire campaign because on paper it’s excellent transmedia strategy.

And I mean that genuinely.

There was a lot going on here beyond simply dropping a Mandalorian skin into a shop and calling it a day. Across May there was a rolling release of Star Wars content: account-link rewards, Clone Wars cosmetics, LEGO Fortnite integrations, dedicated experiences, Mando-themed content drops, a Jon Favreau Q&A, and even a watch-party environment built around the film itself. Players could explore Nevarro, complete quests, fight waves of Stormtroopers and even watch the opening ten minutes of The Mandalorian and Grogu inside Fortnite.

From a reach perspective, it’s difficult to argue with any of this.

Fortnite gives Disney younger audiences, enormous session times, social participation, repeat engagement and something traditional film campaigns dream about: people actively choosing to spend hours inside your world rather than briefly consuming an advert before moving on. Escape Vader was probably my favourite example because it genuinely worked. Vader felt scary, powerful and oppressive in a way that immediately made me think, “I’d actually play a full game of this.” Surprisingly, they one upped themselves with Escape Darth JarJar on June 12th for a limited time, that’s meme mentality right there.

And importantly, this isn’t just marketing anymore. It’s world participation.

You’re not watching Star Wars; you’re inside it and that’s what the fans really want.

But this is where I kept getting stuck, because the more I looked at it, the more I felt like it was quietly pulling against one of the campaign’s larger goals.

Throughout this entire article I’ve basically argued that Disney was trying to rebuild theatrical urgency; trying to recreate the feeling that Star Wars is an event you physically go and participate in. The Shoreditch café asks you to show up. The Times Square stunt asks you to show up. Disneyland asks you to show up.

Fortnite does the opposite.

Fortnite meets audiences where they already are.

And that sounds like a tiny distinction but I don’t think it is.

Because meeting audiences where they are and convincing audiences to come to you are fundamentally different behaviours. One reduces friction. The other creates intentionality.

Watching the first ten minutes of The Mandalorian and Grogu from your bedroom, on your monitor, sitting in your gaming chair while moving around a Fortnite island is immersive, clever and probably extremely effective for engagement metrics. Disney will almost certainly have hard data showing meaningful value here that I’ll never get access to.

But it still reinforces an at-home behaviour pattern.

It’s still saying: stay here, we’ll bring Star Wars to you.

And I don’t necessarily think that’s wrong. In fact, I’d argue it’s probably brilliant ecosystem strategy because Disney isn’t only trying to sell cinema tickets anymore; it’s trying to keep audiences inside a much larger Disney machine spanning games, streaming, merchandise and parks.

I just wonder whether there’s a larger question underneath all of this: can you simultaneously train audiences to expect entertainment to come to them while also asking them to get up, leave the house and treat certain releases as destination events?

Because those aren’t automatically the same habit.

And I think that tension quietly sits underneath this entire campaign.

Because Disney became exceptionally good at expanding where Star Wars can live.

The harder question is whether expanding where it lives is always the same thing as making people leave home to experience it.

What I Actually Thought

Interestingly, my own reaction ended up sitting fairly close to where broader audience sentiment eventually landed.

I had a really good time with it.

The introduction absolutely rips, there are some genuinely great action sequences, the creature work is fun, the score works, and the Mando/Grogu relationship remains the emotional core carrying everything forward. There’s a Batman Arkham-style energy to parts of the action that honestly made me leave wanting a Mandalorian game more than anything else.

But that lingering “so what?” feeling never fully disappeared either.

Because when you strip everything back, this is still a side story. It’s fun, self-contained and enjoyable, but it doesn’t really push the larger Star Wars universe forward in a way that feels urgent. And I think the audience response that gradually settled around the film - it’s fun, I’ll catch it on streaming - was probably a more accurate reflection of the film’s positioning problem than people initially wanted to admit.

The interesting thing is that this may not actually be a flaw at all. Filoni and Favreau increasingly seem to be building Star Wars through smaller anthology-style adventures filling in the timeline rather than traditional trilogy storytelling. Maybe these aren’t supposed to feel like The Force Awakens. Maybe they’re connective tissue, accumulating characters and stories until something larger eventually emerges.

That’s still a hunch. But if that’s the direction, then The Mandalorian and Grogu may end up making more sense in hindsight than it did in the moment.

What This Tells Us

A few things I keep coming back to:

The souvenir-spectacle approach - engineering location-specific, physically unrepeatable experiences rather than just scale - is genuinely worth stealing. The question for any campaign should shift from “how do we make a bigger billboard” to “how do we make something that only exists in a specific place at a specific time, and makes not-being-there feel like missing something.” The Shoreditch café and the Times Square stunt did that, albeit on different levels. More campaigns should do this deliberately rather than stumbling into it.

The character-acquisition trap is real. Using your broadest-appeal character to do your audience acquisition work is logical, but it recruits people whose expectation of the experience doesn’t always match what the film actually is. The smarter version is probably to use the broad character as the entry point, and then sell the film’s actual emotional register - the father-son stakes, the weight, the genre - alongside it. Get them looking with Grogu; close the ticket with Mando.

The IMAX situation is worth naming plainly rather than smoothing over. Losing premium screens early is a market verdict on whether the event-status work succeeded, and for this campaign it suggests the “unmissable cinematic event” argument didn’t fully land with enough of the right audience. That’s not a reflection of whether the film is good, it’s a reflection of whether the campaign cleared the specific hurdle it was set. And I think the honest answer is: partly, not fully.

The transmedia potential was genuinely underexploited. Rotta, Zeb, Embo, these in-film narrative bridges are extraordinary pieces of world-building for the audience that knows what they mean. The campaign choosing not to lean into them reflects a real strategic tension between depth and accessibility, and I’m not sure there’s one right answer to that, but it’s worth naming as a choice rather than an accident.

That’s The Harperverse breakdown of The Mandalorian and Grogu.

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For related reading:

The Devil Wears Prada 2 • Daredevil: Born Again • The Hoppers Playbook • Fantastic Four: First Steps • Predator: Badlands • Project Hail Mary

~ most uncredited images will have been taken from the films TMDB page!

Okay so, this one’s been a long time coming, and honestly I kept pushing the deadline back on myself because every week I’d find three more brand partnerships I hadn’t logged yet!

Tiffany & Co showed up after I thought I was done. So did the Kardashians. So did the TJ Maxx spot and the Runway pop-up stalls. If I’m being fully honest, I had to go back in and add those after a first pass nearly missed them entirely.

But then again, at some point you have to just say “right, this is going out now” or you’ll be writing about The Devil Wears Prada 2’s marketing until Christmas; no one wants to do that!

Now, whilst this film has been covered to death by basically every publisher with a movies desk, I’m not going to pretend I’m breaking some exclusive here. Instead, what I want to do is bridge all of it together properly:

What this actually is, who it’s for, how it performed, how it got there (partnerships, influencers, media buying, all of it), how it connects to the wider Disney-verse, the transmedia layer underneath all of it, and what’s actually worth stealing from it.

Whilst individually, every single one of these partnerships has had its own little write-up somewhere. Nobody’s really sat down and looked at the whole machine at once.

So let’s do that.

What this actually is, and who it’s for

Quick scene-setting in case you’ve been living under a rock; if you have, fair enough, the original came out in 2006, two decades is a long ass gap.

But to catch you up to speed real quickly, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is the sequel to the 2006 Meryl Streep/Anne Hathaway fashion-industry comedy, picking the story back up roughly twenty years on, with Streep’s Miranda Priestly now fighting to keep Runway magazine relevant as print journalism collapses around her. Emily Blunt plays Emily Charlton, all grown up and means business. The budget was around $100 million to make, with roughly $80 million spent marketing it (Variety).

Who was this for?

Overwhelmingly, women. Specifically, the millennials who watched the original as teenagers and are now in their thirties and forties, running teams, raising kids, deciding what to spend money on.

As Will Posket put it in his own breakdown of the comms strategy, and I’m going to lean on his piece a fair bit here because honestly he nailed a few things I want to build on, that’s an obvious demographic prize for Disney to want to win back. But you can’t just lean on nostalgia without making the whole thing feel like a reunion that Gen Z scrolls past.

So the smart move - and I do think it was smart - was dressing the world in nostalgia rather than the marketing itself. Cerulean came back as a smartwater bottle. The coffee orders came back as four Starbucks drinks. None of it required you to have seen the original to land; if you had seen it, you got rewarded for it, and if you hadn’t, you just got a coffee or a lipstick or a TikTok.

The Hollywood Reporter actually got pretty deep access on this one, with Disney’s marketing leads Martha Morrison and Lylle Breier (who both report to Asad Ayaz, now chief brand and marketing officer for the whole conglomerate) walking through how they thought about audience.

Morrison said the biggest challenge from day one was winning over Gen Z and younger millennials specifically, since those two groups make up the most important moviegoing demos right now.

And it worked.

On opening Friday, the largest single quadrant of ticket buyers, 29%, was the 25-34 bracket, split roughly evenly between older Gen Z and younger millennials. The 18-24 group was 11%. That’s not nothing for a sequel to a film that’s old enough to vote.

How it performed

This is the bit that genuinely shocked me a little.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 has crossed $676 million globally, which pushes the franchise total (combined with the original’s $326 million unadjusted lifetime) past the $1 billion mark. On a $100 million production budget and $80 million marketing spend, that’s an enormous return, and Disney will absolutely turn a tidy profit on it.

The film also beat Mortal Kombat II domestically in its second weekend, falling only 43% week-on-week domestically (46% overseas), which in box office terms is the actual signal that a film is becoming a “water-cooler” hit rather than a one-weekend curiosity, because the second-weekend drop is always the real indicator.

It’s also been talked about, fairly explicitly, as the biggest female-led hit since Barbie. THR’s headline practically says as much. And I think it’s worth sitting with that for a second, because there’s a structural reason cinema skews male as a default audience; the “Peter Pan Syndrome” in marketing circles holds that young men dictate group viewing choices because boys won’t watch anything coded “girly,” whereas girls and mixed groups are more willing to go along with male-driven content.

Studios lean into four-quadrant action and adventure because it’s the safest bet for reaching everyone. So when something like this - or Barbie, or “Wuthering Heights”, or The Drama (the latter 2 I’ve written at length about) - manages to pull a predominantly female audience into cinemas in real numbers, that’s a genuinely harder marketing problem to solve than another action tentpole, and it’s worth recognising as its own skill rather than a fluke.

Adding on top of that a side note, because I can’t help myself: I can count on two hands how many times my girlfriend has come to the cinema with me this year, The Devil Wears Prada 2 was one of the films we saw together; Mortal Kombat II, The Drama, Hamnet, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, “Wuthering Heights”, Toy Story 5, Obsession and we’ve literally just seen Supergirl. That’s it for 2026 so far, and that is impressive. So when a film pulls her off the sofa and into another seat, the marketing clearly did something right, even if - more on this in a minute - the film itself didn’t quite land for either of us.

The partnership ecosystem (and there is SO much of it)

Right, this is the part of the post that’s going to begin to get long, because the partnership list for this film is genuinely one of the most extensive I’ve ever tracked for a single release. THR exclusively reported that the official brand partnerships alone are valued at $250 million; separate from the $80 million Disney spent on its own marketing mind you.

Breier told THR:

“The partnership campaigns are incomparable to anything we’ve done before... We set out to have it be the best marketing partnership program that’s ever launched.”

That’s a bold claim from a studio that also owns Marvel, Lucasfilm, Pixar, and Avatar. But her reasoning made sense to me: unlike The Avengers or Avatar, Prada lives in the current world, at the literal intersection of fashion, media and pop culture, which gives a marketing team way more real-world surfaces to play with.

Now before I try to group this sensibly - because there’s a lot - please do consider subscribing to The Harperverse which is a free publication!

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Tech: Samsung and Google going head to head (sort of)

Samsung’s partnership is probably the most narratively clever of the bunch. Instead of the front-facing consumer “try-on” angle Google went for, Samsung targeted the frantic backend of the fashion industry; positioning its Galaxy S26 Ultra and Bespoke AI Laundry Combo as survival tools for surviving Miranda’s impossible demands.

The ad above (30 million views) captures Helen J. Shen reprising her role as Jin, a Runway staffer handed an impossible last-minute task, who pulls out the S26 Ultra and uses Circle to Search to instantly locate an obscure vintage garment; explicitly framed as a narrative “cheat code” to avoid getting fired.

It’s a genuinely smart transmedia move too: in the original 2006 film, the frantic communication was visually defined by characters clicking open T-Mobile Sidekicks. Swapping that for a Galaxy phone is an organic way of saying “time has passed” without anyone having to say it out loud.

Samsung also ran the official “Runway Cam” at the Lincoln Center premiere, replacing standard broadcast gear with the S26 Ultra on a custom robotic rig, and took over Piccadilly Circus with a 3D anamorphic billboard for the laundry machine angle (the pitch: an AI machine that senses a coffee stain on a red silk dress and self-adjusts to save it; high fashion problems solved by a washing machine, basically).

Google went for the more consumer-facing “Try On in Search” angle, with Stanley Tucci (back as Nigel) and Simone Ashley starring in a short film where a styling emergency gets solved via Google’s AI outfit-try-on tool.

They also built a full physical “Runway Closet” experiential activation at the premiere, and - this is the bit I genuinely love - when you Google “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” an interactive red stiletto heel pops up, and clicking it makes Miranda’s iconic shoes strut across the screen:

Ironically, I came across this intentionally, because Google didn’t hide even try to hide this easter egg the way most studios do (like the Spider-Noir one I found a while back); they actually told people to go look for it. Posting to Instagram “Have you searched ‘the devil wears prada 2’ yet? That wasn’t a question,” doing a pitch-perfect Streep impression in text form.

Drinks: I hope you’re thirsty for some ‘partnersips’

Diet Coke and smartwater both made what Coca-Cola itself called their “Runway debut.” Diet Coke’s campaign, via Ogilvy, centred on a short film called “That’s All” where Miranda leaving the office triggers a much-needed Diet Coke break for the Runway staff; the genuinely funny detail is “The Canny Pack,” a silver fanny pack purpose-built to hold a single can.

Lylle Breier’s quote on this one stuck with me: “In The Devil Wears Prada 2, taste is everything,” paired with the line that Diet Coke and smartwater “embody the kind of style and confidence our audience - and Miranda Priestly herself - expect.”

The media buy on this was enormous: Piccadilly Lights deep screen, London Underground 48-sheets, Sainsbury’s entrance wraps, bus wraps, in-store packaging promos, cinema ads, a 3D billboard build in Leeds (above a Chicko’s, somewhat undercutting the high fashion energy, but still) and Open Media’s ABC Cinema Banner Wrap opposite Liverpool Limes Street. I also found the Value Pack in my local Morrisons, which felt like a nice full-circle moment for tracking this thing; haven’t included just because it’s less glamorous!

Grey Goose became the official global vodka partner, tapping Heidi Klum to push “The Devil’s Roast,” an espresso martini riff on Miranda’s coffee order:

1.5oz Grey Goose, 1oz espresso, 0.75oz coffee liqueur, a pinch of salt, gold-dusted coffee beans on top, if you’re interested in making one at home.

There were pop-up trucks in Zuccotti Park and Manhattan West, limited-edition co-branded bottles, and a whole menu of other drinks (The Scarlet Step, The Cerulean Goose) for anyone who doesn’t fancy the signature one. I don’t drink myself - stopped about a year ago now - but I’m still a sucker for the collectible angle, I’ve actually still got my Game of Thrones whisky bottle sitting in my kitchen doing nothing; in fact it’s this White Walker one and I reckon I’ll hold onto it for a while longer!

And then Starbucks, who I think had the most fun of anyone. A secret menu with four character drinks (119k likes on Insta; The Miranda: nonfat caffè latte, no foam, extra hot, extra shot. Obviously), a limited-edition Runway magazine handed out at the Empire State Building Starbucks, and - another favourite stunt from this campaign - they sent interns and assistants on coffee runs around NYC wearing bespoke jackets that could hold 18 cups of coffee each (16k likes on Insta), then surprised them with premiere invitations (see brand innovators for more details on this).

That’s how you stunt on an otherwise glamorous red carpet and actually stand out. They also brought back Adrian Grenier as Nate (191k likes on Insta; Andy’s ex from the first film) for a Starbucks Energy Refresher ad that leaned into the joke that he didn’t get cast in the sequel; self-aware enough that I actually liked it, despite never really rooting for Nate’s character to begin with.

Beauty: Lancôme, L’Oréal, TRESemmé, Tangle Teezer

Lancôme became the official skincare brand - its first ever official Hollywood film partnership - with products supplied to cast and crew during production. Notably, per Lancôme’s GM Ramzy Burns, product placement wasn’t even guaranteed in the contract; what mattered to them was access to the IP itself, the characters, the culture, the ability to film on set.

TRESemmé announced as the “signature hair brand” at the Oscars, with a campaign starring Christian Siriano and Paige DeSorbo set backstage at New York Fashion Week.

L’Oréal ran a spot during the Oscars with Kendall Jenner and Simone Ashley in an “awkward mix-up” at the Runway offices; also how the Kardashians cross-promo happened, since Kendall’s L’Oréal spot and Kris Jenner dressing up as Miranda for the Kardashians’ Hulu-on-Disney+ promo both landed in the same window.

And Tangle Teezer released a red-and-black detangling brush as a tie-in, which also shows up as a prop in the actual film.

Fashion and luxury: the part that’s actually closest to the film’s DNA

Continuing the trend of partnerships that feel less like ads and more like the film extending itself into the world. Tiffany & Co. put its Blue Book high jewellery and Elsa Peretti® Bone Cuffs on screen, plus the striped eyewear Streep wears as Miranda; the Instagram spot above pans from the cerulean sweater script scene straight into the actual Tiffany necklace, which is a clean piece of “diegetic prop” marketing if I’ve ever seen one; add on top that some Tiffany Windows were framed to incorporate a silk-draped 2 as a backdrop for their jewellery, and you essentially bridge the gap between digital and physical!

Mercedes-Maybach is maybe the cleanest case study in the whole campaign for why studios and automakers partner the way they do; it was also the first piece I dove into for this title. THR has again got the real quotes here worth sitting with: Mercedes CMO Melody Lee said flatly that the original cast returning meant a near-guaranteed box office hit, and that the original film’s audience “have grown up and become our target customers,” meaning the demographic alignment wasn’t a coincidence, it was the entire pitch.

Disney’s VP of marketing partnerships, Ty Ervin, made a point that’s stuck with me since reading it: “Cars aren’t just background. They tell us just as much about a character as their costume and environment.” Mercedes seem to me like they’re having a moment, having acted as the in-film sponsor for Brad Pitt’s fictional team in last year’s F1 movie, and even working two cars into the animated film GOAT; “you wouldn’t think Mercedes-Benz would be in an animated movie, but it’s part of our strategy to reach the next generation,” per Lee.

And the insight that really got me: Lee adds that in “one study, three-quarters of viewers searched for a brand after seeing a placement, and more than half went on to buy a product from that brand.” The GM/Barbie partnership also reportedly got 10x the social engagement of any other post in the company’s history. Its these kinds of numbers that explain why every major studio release now comes with an automaker glued to it.

There was also “A Night with Runway” at the National Gallery. A one-night British fashion event with looks from Vivienne Westwood, Stella McCartney, Richard Quinn, Zandra Rhodes and others, all hand-selected by costume designer Molly Rogers. British Fashion Council CEO Laura Weir made the point that while the world of Prada is set in New York, its sharpest edge is “undeniably influenced by British fashion, its wit, its tailoring, its fearless point of view.” I only found out about it via an Instagram post, which after nearly two years living in London still feels like the way I find out about literally everything happening here.

And then there’s Crocs, who weren’t an official partner at all but became the funniest unpaid storyline of the entire press tour purely through talk show appearances; Colbert wearing bright red Crocs to Streep’s deadpan, top-to-bottom Miranda once-over (a clip that hit a million likes on its own), and Hathaway doing the same bit with Jimmy Fallon, reenacting the Chanel boots scene from the original film with “Cerulean Crocs? For spring? Groundbreaking” (581k likes). I’ll be honest, I love my own Crocs and the charms I got for them - not for work, mostly the gym or travelling - so this whole bit landed for me on a personal level too.

Toys, merch, and the Disney machine doing what it does

Fisher-Price (under Mattel) released a Little People Collector set with all four leads in the chunky 2.5-inch format, clearly aimed at adult collectors rather than kids, which made me laugh more than it probably should have; when I say I was so confused I mean it on this one, I just so happened to stumble across it when I was scrolling through - would you believe it - Instagram.

Disney parks went full crossover too; Daisy Duck strutting around Epcot’s Flower & Garden Festival in a spring outfit, a “Fashion Emergency” vending machine at the Disney Springs AMC, purse-shaped popcorn buckets, Funko Pops, Little Words Project bracelets. None of this needs to make sense on its own; it just needs to exist across enough Disney-owned touchpoints that the brand reach compounds.

Travel: United and Zillow, two very different angles on “moving on”

United Airlines cast one of its own flight attendants, Tanya Hutchison, in a scene opposite Streep, Hathaway and Tucci (her character tells Miranda there’s no champagne in economy), swapped its seatback flight-tracker plane icon for a red stiletto during the promotional window, and ran a “Fly the Cerulean Skies” campaign.

Zillow’s angle was smarter than I expected going in, their hero spot is set inside the Runway offices, with editors scrambling to find Miranda a new apartment after she declares she’s “sick of the skyline,” using Zillow Rentals to filter for impossibly specific criteria. It’s another example of borrowing the “impossible task” trope from the original film, repurposed as a real-estate ad. Given Andy’s actual arc in the sequel involves an apartment search and a new love interest, I do wonder how early this partnership got baked into the script; Zillow’s VP of brand Beverly Jackson added to the conversation with: “Renting is a huge, emotional decision, and we want Zillow to be the first place people think of when that moment hits.”

In essentially what is another in-link opportunity here, I just wanted to say that whilst I am from the UK and Zillow is pretty much alien to me, the last time I saw it in a films marketing campaign was for:

Ironically, it’s the first example I reference because I absolutely loved it and remember it to this day; getting that behind-the-scenes access has always been an interest of mine for Marvel - and comic books for that matter - because it shows you more about the story, characters and how they realistically live day-to-day for example; food for thought: where can you replicate that desire with your own film?

Got a house you only show one room of? Why not explore what the rest of the house looks like in an interactive webpage (like the one Amazon did for Project Hail Mary) or even a simple single drawn out blueprints; digital or physical. Take this X-Mansion Floor plan as a simple example.

Music: Gaga, Doechii, and the sonic layer nobody talks about enough

“Runway,” the Lady Gaga and Doechii single that soundtracks the final trailer (with Gaga also cameoing in the film), is exactly the kind of transmedia layer that outlives the marketing window.

Much like my Mortal Kombat II piece showcased with audio and music, this is a layer that will live alongside the film and the wider IP forever; once a song like this exists, hearing it anywhere, a gym playlist, a car radio, pulls your brain straight back to the film, the same way 2 Fast 2 Furious is permanently fused to “Act a Fool” in my head, or how Spider-Verse and “Sunflower” are basically the same memory now; survey of one for sure, but I bet you can also come up with an example for yourself, be it a soundtrack, song or score, there’s bound to be some sort of connection!

Get a big enough artist to make a genuinely good song for your film, and they become a permanent extension of the brand whether they intend to stick around or not.

Press and culture: the Vogue play is the one I think people will study for years

If I had to pick the single cleverest piece of this entire campaign, it’s the Vogue partnership, and full credit to Will Posket again for laying this out clearer than I’d seen anywhere else: the anchor was a May 2026 cover with Meryl Streep and Anna Wintour photographed together, in conversation led by Greta Gerwig.

Think about what that actually is for a second; the actress who plays the fictional editor everyone compares to Wintour, photographed with Wintour, hosted by a third major cultural figure.

Variety covered it as a cultural event in its own right, not a celebrity booking, which is exactly the point. Around that cover, Vogue built out a book club reread of the original novel, a subscriber-only advance screening at Metrograph, a live Run-Through podcast episode, a written recap pulling in former Vogue assistants as an oral-history chorus, more podcast episodes with the costume designer and former magazine assistants.

As Will put it, when you add it all up - cover, book club, screening, podcast, recap, oral history, more podcasts - every piece extends the launch in a way that feels editorial rather than promotional. The fictional Runway magazine gets treated by the actual fashion press as if it’s a real, living thing, which deepens immersion in a way no straightforward ad campaign could.

And speaking of Runway-as-a-real-thing: a genuine 96-page collector’s edition of Runway magazine was published as a marketing object, featuring Emily Blunt as Emily Charlton on the cover, complete with an Editor’s Letter “from” Miranda Priestly and contributions from Andy Sachs and Nigel.

UK fans could only get it online via a dedicated Runway Online site (resale copies are going for £20-30 on eBay), and that site itself is a small transmedia ecosystem on its own; blog posts “written” by Andrea Sachs, partner-brand content (Mercedes-Maybach has its own blog section on there), sections for Fashion, Beauty, Travel, and a ticket-buying CTA at the bottom. It’s connective tissue for the whole IP, dressed up as a magazine website.

There’s also a genuinely fun run of social clips of Streep, Tucci, and various critics receiving copies of the physical magazine on camera; Stanley Tucci reading it before being called back to set, Streep visibly unimpressed with the cover (in character, obviously).

As I mentioned, this magazine is a physical object, so naturally it didn’t just live online. In fact, there were physical pop-up stalls to ‘sell’ it, kitted out with a giant red heel as set dressing and a TV looping content on the wall; one creator’s Instagram carousel from a visit to one of these makes it look genuinely like a little newsstand experience rather than a marketing booth.

There was also a separate, bigger version too - the “Runway Magazine HQ” separate to Google’s ‘Runway Closet’ I mentioned earlier - a full experiential exhibition with outfits from the films, a layout modelled on the magazine’s actual office, and a photo-op section built to make you feel like you’re walking the runway yourself. The only catch: it never made it to Europe. One commenter summed it up pretty well: “This pop up was absolutely wonderful. They played Vogue. Everyone loved it. Everyone except Europe… because, sadly, it was not there.”

Fair point really, but I imagine moving an experiential build like that across continents isn’t cheap, so it makes sense that they picked their markets carefully.

It’s also worth flagging: the cast leaned into this press cycle with a level of self-awareness that a lot of franchise press tours don’t bother with. Stanley Tucci did a TJ Maxx spot where he breaks character entirely to address backlash over a line his character delivers - “It has come to my attention that a line delivered by a character I portray has created a bit of a kerfuffle” - before TJ Maxx “helps him stand corrected and well dressed.” It’s a different move to the other partnerships, but it’s the same instinct: let the actors comment on the discourse around the film rather than just promote it, and the promotion ends up feeling a lot less like promotion.

And then there’s the sheer cameo density, which deserves its own mention. There’s a clip going around - “LAWranda Priestley,” a Law Roach edit - that ties back to a wider point about just how many people are crammed into this film’s background. One Instagram account captured the “Holy Grail” scene specifically to call out who’s actually in the room: Marc Jacobs, Lucy Liu, Calum Harper (no relation), Wisdom Kaye, Heidi Klum, Amelia Dimoldenberg, who literally shouts out her own Chicken Shop Date format and more!

The videos overlayed text put it well: “the budget for this movie was beyond the stars.” There’s even a creator who posted about exactly how much he got paid for his three seconds of screen time in the Met Gala scene - $239, for the curious - which is a fun, slightly absurd bit of transparency content that a film this stacked with cameos was always going to generate.

The cross-promo cluster: Rivals and the Kardashians

This is the cluster that only really makes sense once you remember Disney owns both halves of it. Because Rivals Season 2 lives on Disney+ and Prada 2 came out of 20th Century, the studio could run a coordinated push across both at once; dominating the theatrical box office and streaming numbers simultaneously, with the same media spend doing double duty.

Antoine Chapuy, the UK&I Marketing Director for Disney+, actually posted images of the above placements on LinkedIn, and the sheer scale of it is wild once you see it laid out: a Piccadilly Lights takeover, a BFI takeover, segmented Lights ad space that put a Diet Coke x Prada 2 spot directly above the Rivals one, plus Ocean Outdoor banners, London Underground DEPs, and JCDecaux roadside billboards.

His caption flagged “Don’t miss Episode 4 of Rivals Season 2, streaming this Friday on Disney+,” which is a strange beat to push mid-season rather than at the premiere; or so I thought at first.

You see, episode 4 dropped on the 22nd of May, three weeks after Prada 2 hit cinemas on the 1st, so this reads less like an odd choice and more like budget pacing, spreading the spend out to sustain awareness rather than blowing it all in premiere week and hoping it coasts.

Then there’s the one I actually managed to photograph myself: a 3D special-build billboard at Canary Wharf - courtesy of Ocean Outdoor, linked is their much better video - pairing the two titles directly; one giant red shoe, captioned “When two cultural hits collide… Endless drama.” I went past it more times than I’d like to admit before actually getting a usable photo; missing it entirely on the way to and from the cinema a few times, got it on the Tube with terrible lighting once, and only really clocked how big a deal it was after my girlfriend pointed it out to me once we tubed past it the first time!

The Kardashians got pulled into the same orbit, on the same Disney+ logic; you’re already promoting that you can stream The Kardashians on Hulu via Disney+, so why not dress it up as a Prada 2 tie-in too. Kris Jenner did exactly that, as the clip captures, she’s styled as Miranda Priestly and pulls in 80k Instagram likes: demanding four looks for Milan instead of two, complaining that 7am is “practically lunchtime,” and insisting the family watch the movie with her grandchildren.

It’s a small thing, but it’s the same trick as the Kendall Jenner/L’Oréal spot from the beauty section above; once a brand or a personality has any plausible reason to gesture at Miranda Priestly, apparently nobody can resist taking the shot.

Media planning and the bits that aren’t glamorous but matter

Outside of all the bespoke creative, there was a genuinely substantial UK media plan running underneath everything, and whilst I didn’t get a chance to capture these examples myself I can confirm this is what I saw at a minimum: bus T-sides, London Underground 48-sheets and digital six-sheets, roadside 98-sheets, 20-second radio spots, and pasted walls in shopping centre (I spotted one in Westfield Shepherd’s Bush, conveniently near to the Vue and including seeing it there in the messaging).

I’ll also flag a fun bit of self-correction: I initially thought a Tattu London dining collaboration was tied to the film, since the timing lined up with a work lunch I had there. Turns out it’s actually paired with The Devil Wears Prada: The Musical at the Dominion Theatre, which is literally across the road from Tattu’s Now Building Rooftop location; contextual, not filmic. Easy mistake given how much this name has been flying around this year, but worth correcting myself here rather than letting it muddy the marketing picture!

The transmedia layer, properly broken down

Strip away the brand logos and what you’re actually looking at is a fictional magazine being treated, almost everywhere, as if it’s real. That’s the connective tissue holding this entire campaign together, not Miranda, not even the cast, but Runway itself as an object you can hold, subscribe to, and read blog posts from.

There’s a great Instagram post from New York Feature that mapped the actual “Devil Wears Prada Universe” as a chart: the original novel and 2006 film, Revenge Wears Prada (the 2013 book, set about ten years later), The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026, jumping roughly twenty years on), and When Life Gives You Lululemons (the 2018 book centred on Emily Charlton, with no film adaptation), plus a question mark hovering over the Runway magazine itself given how heavily it’s been used promotionally; raking in 26k Instagram likes purely off people being interested in how the timeline hangs together.

The one thing missing from that “universe” diagram, as far as I can tell, is the West End stage musical; a separate, fully original-score adaptation that expands the IP into theatre entirely. Funnily enough whilst we’re talking about both films, 20th Century also just re-released both films as a 20th-anniversary double feature in cinemas, which reads pretty clearly as a way to squeeze a bit more box office out of the franchise while the cultural conversation is still warm.

What makes the whole campaign function as transmedia rather than just heavy advertising is that the brand objects are mostly diegetic. Essentially they’re props the characters would plausibly use, not just logos slapped on a poster. Samsung’s phone replaces a Sidekick. The Starbucks order is the same order Andy ran in 2006. None of it requires you to suspend disbelief about why a brand showed up; it’s just dressing the world Miranda already lives in.

What I actually thought of the film (and why the marketing matters more than the movie does)

Right, here’s the part I’ve been building towards the whole post, and it’s lifted largely from my own Letterboxd review, because I don’t think I can say it better a second time:

My girlfriend wasn’t a big fan of this one, although there were parts we both enjoyed - I had a genuinely decent time at the cinema - but the sequel doesn’t quite land the same way the first one did. The story feels a bit shallow, and it’s hard not to notice how much screen time goes to ad placements and partnerships rather than plot, which, given everything you’ve just read, isn’t exactly a shock.

Miranda still slays, but she’s noticeably held back this time; her old sense of total autocratic control is softened, which tracks given how much workplace culture has shifted in twenty years, even if it costs the central dynamic a bit of its old bite. Andy fares a bit worse too, she’s supposed to be the relatable everywoman so many people loved in the first film, and this time round she comes across a touch more self-absorbed than expected.

None of that seems to have put audiences off though, the numbers speak for themselves. But there is something almost too neat about a film whose actual plot is about the death of print media and AI replacing creative jobs, marketed by monetising every available surface of that exact same dying media landscape to sell tickets. It’s a stark little mirror of the consumerist culture it’s depicting, and credit to Disney either way, they’ve done a genuinely impressive job cultivating that for a specifically female audience. I find it fascinating enough that I wanted to write all of this down.

For what it’s worth, I’ve since watched Toy Story 5 too, which shares some of the same DNA (brand partnerships everywhere, a plot also about change) but tells its actual story without leaning on its partners quite as hard, using its platform to sell the idea of imaginative play rather than just product. Different campaign, similar bones; stay tuned and that’ll land in your inbox in the coming very soon!

What’s worth stealing for your own playbook

Pulling this all together, here’s what I think holds up if you’re building a campaign of your own, regardless of category:

Dress the world, not the marketing, in nostalgia.

If your audience has aged up since the original, give them a tap on the shoulder rather than a full reunion. Let new audiences experience the references as aesthetic rather than homage.

Treat your partners as props, not sponsors.

The strongest activations here weren’t “Brand X paid to appear,” they were objects the characters would plausibly use anyway. That’s the difference between borrowing attention from the IP and becoming part of its world.

Build an aspiration-to-access ladder.

This campaign ran from Anna Wintour and a Lincoln Center premiere at the top down to a Walmart capsule and a £4 detangling brush at the bottom, and none of those entry points felt like a downgrade. Most brands collapse this choice by picking one lane; this one refused to.

Partners can fund your media dominance, not just your reach.

Paying for the Piccadilly Lights alone is eye-wateringly expensive, but when Samsung, Diet Coke, and the Rivals cross-promo are all paying to be on or near that same screen, the studio gets to dominate the most expensive inventory in the country without footing the bill solo. Picked right, partnerships aren’t just a creative add-on; they’re a way to buy media presence you couldn’t otherwise afford, freeing up your own budget for everything else.

Let your fictional object become a real one.

The actual Runway magazine - printed, sold, resold on eBay - did more for the believability of this universe than any amount of trailer footage could have. If your story has a fictional brand, product, or publication inside it, ask whether it could exist in the real world too.

The marketing can outshine the film, and that’s a risk worth sitting with.

It happened here. The campaign is, by a fair margin, more interesting and more thoughtfully executed than the film it’s selling. That’s not necessarily a failure on Disney’s part - clearly it worked, financially - but it’s worth sitting with as a creator or marketer: at what point does the promotional machine become the actual product?

Anyway. That’s everything I’ve got on this one, and I think it’s the most thoroughly I’ve ever tracked a single campaign in real time. If you spot something I’ve missed - and given how much kept surfacing while I was writing this, I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s more - let me know!

That’s The Harperverse breakdown of The Devil Wears Prada 2.

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The Drama • “Wuthering Heights” • The Bride! • Romeo + Juliet & Moulin Rouge!

~ most uncredited images will have been taken from the films TMDB page!

I’ve been sitting on this one for weeks now, purely because there’s just so much to it. Mortal Kombat II released back in May, and between the WWE crossovers, the car cut clean in half in Toronto, and a dragon billboard with an LED backdrop, I genuinely couldn’t bring myself to rush this out. I wanted to do it justice.

Now, as I typically try to do with all of the films I now write about, I will see it in cinemas. This time around I was lucky enough to catch it with my girlfriend, front row at our local cinema, on opening weekend!

I must say, it was such an improvement when compared to the first, although the standards weren’t that high to begin with. But since then, I’ve just been pondering the MKCU (oh yes, we are bound to get a Mortal Kombat Cinematic Universe) and putting my thoughts down on paper, capturing various examples to pull from and provide you with, and even play more fighting & co-op games with at home with my girlfriend.

Now that I’ve covered my own personal experience, let’s get this thing going; here’s the plan for this one: a quick recap of what Mortal Kombat actually is as a piece of IP (because it’s a genuinely underrated transmedia case study), then jump head first into the marketing, media plan, partnerships and audiences, before segueing into the transmedia layer properly, and wrapping with takeaways.

Let’s get into it.

A Very Quick Recap: What Mortal Kombat Actually Is

Before I get into the campaign itself, it’s worth zooming out for a second on just how stacked Mortal Kombat is as an IP, because I don’t think people give it enough credit as a transmedia case study.

Mortal Kombat is one of the most successful, durable, and structurally fascinating “world-building” franchises in media history. Originally designed as a 1992 arcade game, it’s spent over three decades fluidly migrating across video games, comic books, feature films, television, and music, proving how a simple premise can expand into a massive, multi-platform narrative universe.

The current cinematic flagship, Mortal Kombat II, released in theatres in May 2026, directed by Simon McQuoid. It works both as a direct sequel to the 2021 reboot and as a piece of fan-service media designed to reconcile the narrative split between the films and the games:

• Course-correcting the canon. The 2021 film introduced a movie-exclusive protagonist, Cole Young, which alienated some core game purists (side note: I’m so glad his character was killed off, I genuinely laughed my ass off after seeing that). The sequel side-lines Cole and shifts focus to definitive game icons: Johnny Cage (Karl Urban) and Kitana (Adeline Rudolph).

• Adapting the visual lore. Reviews highlight that MKII thrives on translating character skins and ultra-violent Fatalities directly into live action. It operates like an apology tour for the gamers, leaning on interdimensional portals, ancient amulets, and tournament structures that mirror the game logic over standard cinematic pacing.

• Theatrical to digital windowing. Showing how modern media companies actually manage transmedia assets, Warner Bros. moved the film to Premium VOD on June 9th, just four weeks after a soft theatrical run. It quickly topped digital charts, proving the modern MK audience consumes media fluidly across physical and digital storefronts.

Mortal Kombat as a whole is a textbook example of what you’d call a “radical intertext”. That just means it’s a franchise where you have to engage with multiple types of media to get the complete picture. You see, you’ve got the games as the mothership (25+ titles dictating the grand narrative), the campy 1995 original film and its critically disastrous sequel, an animated series + animated films, a live-action prequel, a gritty web series, original Malibu and DC comics, and - I’ll come back to this properly later - one of the most recognisable sonic identities in gaming history.

Why does the mythos work transmedially though?

Two reasons, really.

First, the realm system: the universe is split into separate dimensions (Earthrealm, Outworld, Netherrealm, etc.) governed by the Elder Gods, and because a realm has to win 10 consecutive tournaments to invade another, creators essentially get a modular framework; they can insert prequels, spin-offs, or character vignettes into different eras or realms without breaking the core continuity.

Second, character archetypes over fixed plots: the colour-coded ninja palette swaps of Scorpion and Sub-Zero, the distinct motivations (revenge, honour, Hollywood vanity), these characters are incredibly elastic and can move from a 2D fighting game grid to live-action film to comic book page, and somehow still look like themselves the whole way through.

From an industry standpoint, MK succeeds because it doesn’t just adapt a story from one medium to another, instead it extends an experience. And while MKII occasionally struggles to balance traditional cinematic screenplays with game mechanics, it successfully satisfies the transmedia consumer’s desire to see interactive gaming imagery brought to life in a shared, passive viewing space.

The Marketing Engine: Where MKII Actually Showed Up

Right, this is the bulk of it. I’ve collected a genuinely stupid number of examples for this campaign, so let me try and group it sensibly…

Fight Fans, Sports Crossovers, and Why This Was Always Going to Work

If you’re marketing a fighting franchise, fight culture environments are basically a free audience match, and Warner Bros. clearly knew this.

The headline one for me is the WWE. Mortal Kombat 2 heavily partnered with WWE at WrestleMania 42 in April, featuring a major cross-promotion: the MKII logo on the ring canvas, televised promo trailers during commercial breaks, and sponsored merchandise. At the event, WWE superstar Penta delivered a highly memorable, Shao Kahn-inspired entrance where he donned the armour set during his ring walk, before defending his Intercontinental Championship in a six-pack ladder match.

Uncanny Carlos shared a video POV from Wrestlemania Vegas capturing the spot on the jumbotron screens, and I’ll be honest, I’m not a WWE fan myself, I didn’t see any of this outside of researching it, but it hits a very similar strand to the one I was pulling on for the boxing and UFC bits to follow: WWE is for the fight fans, albeit way more performative, but fight fans nonetheless. WWE in itself is a behemoth with its own transmedia storytelling, so adding MK on top is a pretty simple move a lot of other IPs and franchises would’ve done in the past and will continue to do in future.

The video above of Penta’s entrance is basically a costume change scene out of the Arkham games; it opens with him putting on the armour and Shao Khan mask, then walking out to the ring in full character. It’s two minutes long and I genuinely might become a WWE fan now lol because it’s honestly so cool! He’s even shared additional photos to his own Instagram account too, 78k likes and a couple of ‘tough’ aura-filled photos worthy of wall space, even if it was for a film marketing campaign. Someone at WB/MK wanted this to happen and made it work; I absolutely love that for them!

Going back to my point though, that still stands:

Fight fans + fighting-adjacent media = a likely crossover of audiences and appeal, and continued, renewed, or brand new fandom.

Then there’s boxing, which I partially-caught live; I don’t have a DAZN subscription, but I was watching the Chisora vs Wilder pre-fights on YouTube and could see video banners, ring logos, and what looked like a partnership, because when Wilder won, the image shared to the official DAZN Instagram was of him wearing a Scorpion-inspired outfit plus MK typography reading “Wilder Wins.”

It’s worth saying Warner Bros. does own TNT Sports, so I’m pretty confident they’d have had more sports programming to play across, especially UFC, since that’s the place you can watch it internationally outside the US (where Paramount hold the primary streaming rights). The MKII sports promo itself would’ve been an integrated cross-promotion between Warner Bros. and TNT Sports, aimed towards highlighting Karl Urban’s Johnny Cage stepping up to the plate, blending tournament footage with high-energy sports advertising aesthetics; one example I found even came from the Chile TNT channel, which really backs up the international reach and sports audience targeting.

I shouldn’t have to explain to most why MKII fits so perfectly within martial arts and sports targeting, but for anyone who isn’t sure:

Fighting movie based on fighting game, plus fighting in real life, equals fighting fans who like to see fighting and watch fighting.

You catch my drift?

This doesn’t guarantee an audience on its own of course, you’ve still got to sell the idea that MKII is worth fight fans’ while, but that’s where your fans, your fight scenes, and your iconic characters come in. The reason fight fans like boxing or MMA and the UFC, for example, is because they’re invested in the fighters, their storylines, their skills, and want to see the best against the best. The colosseum exists for this exact same reason and has stood the test of time as a testament to this idea.

While I was searching for UFC and MKII examples, I actually found a brilliant BBC piece from 2022 on How Mortal Kombat helped shape the UFC, and the history is genuinely fascinating. UFC co-creator Campbell McLaren has said the franchise had a real influence on the UFC’s creation. He visualised a real-life version of Mortal Kombat after hearing Rorion Gracie’s idea for a “War of the Worlds” competition, and made the first event look like Mortal Kombat (just without yelling “Finish Him!”).

The octagon itself was also born partly from a suggestion for Greek pillars and columns, which McLaren rejected in favour of a “modern, techie, urban-looking setting” using chain-link fence and a steel gate, specifically chasing that MK look. Even the marketing taglines mirrored each other - “Two Men Enter. One Man Leaves,” “So Real It Hurts” - similar enough that Senator John McCain led a campaign against the UFC shortly after the first event, and the MMA ban in New York wasn’t lifted until 2016.

The roles have since reversed, with MMA now influencing Mortal Kombat. Cole Young from the 2021 film was reportedly based largely on Jorge Masvidal, which is interesting because I genuinely did not get that connection watching it. Fighters like Max Holloway have said they’ve developed more as fighters by playing fight games, and honestly, I get that. Even when I train and do light boxing bag work myself, I’ll find myself moving more fluidly and practising techniques better after playing UFC 5, which has become somewhat a ritual for me. I’ve been a fan of the sport, the fighters, and training for a long time now, but I’m sure like many can relate, I just struggle to remain consistent with it; it would appear, writing things like this is more my style ;)

This doesn’t just apply to Mortal Kombat either, mind you. Street Fighter (which I’ll be writing about later this year, keep your inboxes ready) and even anime like Naruto fit the same mould, you only have to look at someone like Israel Adesanya, who’s built half his persona on anime references and walkout entrances, to see fighters borrowing the theatre of it right back. “Fighting as a medium” would be a great study and breakdown in itself, because it truly transcends all media and is, in itself, transmedia. The Greeks, the Olympics, survival and wars, movie stars, sports stars, games, films, manga, comics, all of it.

Which is sort of the point I keep circling back to with Chisora and Wilder too. It’s a great bit of tactical media buying to reach a contextual audience, sure, but it’s so much more than that, and I’m glad DAZN partnered with Warner for Mortal Kombat 2 for that additional step. It’s not just a media buy. Philosophically it’s about fight culture, branding and IP, and tapping into that innate, centuries-old desire for combat. I suppose It’s raw, authentic, and entertainment at its best.

Out-of-Home: From an LED Dragon in LA to a Car Cut in Half in Toronto

Whilst the campaign overall got pretty creative, this is a staple media channel that deserves real creativity and comes with a bunch of examples, so I want to give it proper room.

Starting close to LA; Outfront Media built a Sunset Blvd billboard that, again, I’ve got to say is simple but incredible. Simply put, it’s the giant Mortal Kombat Logo’s Dragon, front and centre, with 3D text above the billboard plus “Only in theatres May 8” to the left with “filmed for IMAX” of course, but it’s the day-to-night variation that makes it stand out. During the day there’s a slight green tinge, mostly around the eye but with some on the silver scales too. At night that green tinge becomes completely visible because those parts are LEDs; the whole dragon is enveloped by a green background LED, the eye pops more, and so does the whole icon. It’s brilliant and a perfect way to make your roadside billboard stand out that little bit more.

Producer Todd Garner and MK co-creator Ed Boon both shared it on their socials too earning additional media coverage; outside of the vast amount of people passing by whom may have also shared photos or videos too!

There’s a great fan layer attached to this one too. An Instagram cosplayer called Uncanny Carlos shared a post of himself in front of it dressed as Shao Khan, in a post shared between him, Outfront, Martyn Ford, and an MK fan page called MK Arcade Collection (with both Martyn Ford and Mehcad Brooks commenting; Shao Kahn & Jax) it capitalised on wider awareness from all profiles audiences. Carlos’ bio describes him as a “World traveler. Cosplayer. Kollector.” (’Kollector’ referring to how he collects MK memorabilia, with the franchise’s habit of swapping in a ‘K’ wherever it can), and he’s also an official MK Ambassador; so there’s really no other perfect choice for this post!

His account is genuinely stacked with other examples too, in fact he was really helpful for that and I owe him props: he attended the premiere as Khan in a photo alongside Boon, Tobias, and Brian Glynn (the original Shao Khan), he somehow managed to bag an actual MK2 theatrical promotional pillar (a 3D rectangular pillar with four character faces, one per side) to keep in his own MK Room, and he also re-attended the TCL Chinese Theatre for an IMAX screening on Mother’s Day with his family; complete with an absolutely massive banner ad promoting the IMAX experience. Honestly just in these examples alone, Mortal Kombat shows me it’s one of those franchise IPs that’s brilliant for Warner, just because it transcends so many mediums and really brings that fighting spirit home!

Then there’s London. Old Brompton Road got two 2D cut-out, backlit billboards from WB and JCDecaux, relying heavily on the fight at hand rather than going lowkey. One side is icy blue, focusing on Kung Lao vs Liu Kang (the best fight outside of Shao Khan vs Cole, for my money), the other fiery red with Kitana vs Johnny Cage. Both have lighting attached so they pop at night too, characters breaking out of the billboard frame entirely.

Outside of these, the wider UK media plan consisted of more OOH; large roadside billboards (towers, digital screens, landscape 96s), and the typical D6 formats you’ll find in the London Underground and bus shelters, these were mostly digital but some of the national/bus formats were paper (if that’s of interest to you), outside of that the creative varied only slightly as the primary key differed depending on the location/format. Then there was also a radio push, though I could only track down one 30-second standard spot, but I must say, the “Get Over Here” quip cut right through me; how can it not, the line is iconic for a reason and bodes well in a audio setting!

But the one that genuinely stopped me scrolling was Toronto. This is honestly such a completely out-of-the-ordinary piece of experiential work, but it’s just so damn cool: a silver Chevrolet Cruze, cut in half, with a giant QR code on the bonnet (scan for a chance to win $2,500 in prepaid gas cards and movie tickets), various yellow parking tickets stuck to the windscreen, a custom licence plate reading “Earthrealm $HOW1M3” (read it as showtime), and Kung Lao’s bladed hat lodged right between the centre of the roof because the car is split clean down the middle.

It was created by Toronto-based experiential production company WXM Tech on Queen Street West, bringing an Earthrealm aesthetic to the city as a one-off activation. “EARTHREALM” plates, a windscreen buried under parking tickets, “Your parking is not worthy” scrawled on the side, and embedded inside the wreckage, that unmistakable bladed hat, spinning ominously, while Fatboy Slim’s “The Rockafeller Skank” blared from the speaker system; aura-filled activation.

The spinning blade itself was apparently an additional flourish developed during production; WXM pushed the concept further with practical engineering once they latched onto the idea, throwing in ember-glowing LEDs and making the car’s cut edge look like it had lost a fight with a red-hot razor hat. In an increasingly crowded experiential landscape, every detail needs to work both in person and through a smartphone camera, and according to Little Black Book, the activation generated 56 million social media impressions; massive.

In all, I’d suggest brands look to leverage more experiential activations like this. It’s not just cool, it’s storytelling in itself, and that’s exactly what you’re trying to sell at the end of the day. While it’s not exactly transmedia, it could be, and that’s the power it has. A fan could take this exact moment and stunt and go on to whip up a quick mini story in their mind for what Kung Lao was up to; was he mid-battle with another opponent like Shao Khan and he’s left his iconic hat behind?

There’s a lot in this static placement. Given the QR code was already there, with enough production time and money, an AR version of the battle could’ve unfolded right on your screen. The possibilities are quite endless.

At the start of this year, I wrote a piece on how PlayStation adopted a similar approach but for their global campaign: It Happens on PS5. The campaign brought a mixture of creativity and media buying with the goal of creating unforgettable moments both in the real world and online, you can check that out and save it for later here:

Pair that with a 3D DOOH screen at Yonge-Eglinton Centre in Toronto from Pattison Outdoor, leveraging the same Kung Lao vs Liu Kang key art but giving it a 3D wraparound effect on the building, and you’ve got two pretty heavy placements in Toronto alone.

Conventions and the Global Fan Layer

Looking for a perfect example of how impactful MK actually is as an IP and franchise? Well, the Warner Brazil Instagram account has got you covered with their own content of them at CCXP25. Within, you get to see their pop-up booth - a simple enough setup with the MK logo and release date - for fans in cosplay (and there’s plenty) to take their own photos in.

Alongside that, a gaming section where audiences can be seen actually playing Mortal Kombat is included. There were also character posters and giveaway merch, but as I’ll get into, Mortal Kombat is a deeply fan-centric IP, and it’s clear from the amount of fans in cosplay that they genuinely care and put effort into their fandom. Costumes ranged from the typical and commercially sold costumes, to the far more intricate home-made complete with weapons; even retro-looking skeleton-head Scorpions made an appearance. For the franchise to give back by providing photo ops and a chance to hang with other MK fans is brilliant, and honestly the minimum really.

The gaming section had that proper esports feel too, players in expensive headsets on PS5’s, sat in proper gaming chairs, wearing jerseys with their names on; clearly encouraging that side of the franchise, which is essential to MK’s roots.

For added context, CCXP describe themselves as blending all kinds of pop culture worlds into one epic experience, a place for movie fans, binge-watchers, comic collectors, cosplayers, and everyone in between.

MKII hits that international mark as all franchises should, and it’s great to see LATAM fans and audiences show up and understand the assignment. The same energy showed up at New York Comic Con via the official MK Instagram account too; same context, same passion, just a different convention and a different audience, just to drill home the international point.

Then there’s Max Huang, who plays Kung Lao, at a fan event in Jakarta, showing fans some actual Kung Lao moves.

My thoughts taken as they are from my research: Dude, wtaf! Mortal Kombat and WB need to lean into this more often.

Funny thing is, this isn’t even a post from their official social media accounts, rather it’s from a pop culture adjacent account, Geek Culture. There’s a reason Max is Kung Lao, he just showed it off here, doing his own stunt work and movement, even in a suit and skinny trousers. Epic as f*ck to say the least. Not all stars will adopt this heavy approach to stunt work and choreography of course, but when one does, you should really lean into it when you can.

Making MK2 feel more real and life-like with practical sets, effects, and real stunts is what separates it from just another fight film. One extra tidbit from me: leaning into that for the Home Entertainment windows and mentioning it comes alongside bonus features, would likely excite fans and have them eat up sales for sure. Imagine a scene breakdown without all the glitz and glam, just watching the choreography play out, it’s cool and it shows off real skill; I’d love to check that out personally.

Huang also shared a video from 2019 of himself doing literal cardboard-hat training for the Kung Lao role, 107k likes from what is essentially resurfaced social proof content, showing he’s been working hard at this for 7 years!

Press, Talent, and the Trailer Numbers

Karl Urban as Johnny Cage was clearly positioned as a figurehead for this campaign, with a Late Night with Seth Meyers appearance being one stop on a genuinely global press tour and convention circuit.

I’ll say it again for those of you in the back:

Long gone are the days of relying strictly on star power.

You see, marketing movies has become increasingly multi-faceted, with so many more variables now playing into the overall strategy. And whilst an RDJ might be the figurehead of the MCU, he’s not actually the sole centre of the marketing mechanism and strategy. And although I personally can’t wait to see his version of Doom, the case is that a lot more goes into marketing movies: the IP itself, the trailer, the media channels, other stars and directors, interests in sports for example and so on…

That said, Karl Urban specifically is a slightly different case, because he’s not just star power being borrowed for the campaign, he is the campaign in a few key ways.

He played Johnny Cage, a pivotal Mortal Kombat character and central to the MKII story, basically a transmedia element on his own. The marketing leant specifically into that in-universe popularity, leveraging his fictionalised film catalogue and highlighting films like “Uncaged Fury” as poster opportunities, the trailer also featured him in key moments, all setting a tone for what to expect of him and his character before you’ve even seen him fight.

That in-universe weight is exactly what the press tour was built to cash in on.

The cast hit fan conventions for organic and earned press, late night slots like Seth, and trailer drops timed to capitalise on the initial buzz, and the numbers back up how well it worked. Screenrant’s coverage of the red-band trailer cites Deadline reporting 106.8 million views in its first 24 hours, breaking the record for the most-viewed red-band trailer ever in that window. I don’t think I have to tell you that’s massive lol!

The YouTube release of that same trailer sits at a more modest 2.5 million views and 90k likes, which makes sense, R-rated content tends to get demonetised and shown less in feeds, so releasing it was more of a creative flex than a reach play, proof to fans that what they’ve come to love about MK is still here.

Compare that to the Official Trailer’s 13 million views and it’s somewhat telling; yet you still need to be over 18 to watch it… Top comments on the Red Band Trailer read as you’d expect: “Scorpion pulling Noob’s shadow-clone out was insane” (9.8k likes), “This looks like a full on Johnny Cage movie and I’m not complaining” (7.9k likes), “It’s a fighting tournament to the death.”

There was also an Instagram post for the rated-R content reading “Allow us to blow your minds. Or your brains off. Whatever comes first,” with slightly lower engagement, though that tracks for content sitting on the more extreme side, the same struggle a lot of horror films face too, which is usually why they end up dayparted around watershed timings to avoid younger audiences.

Social media does already sidestep a chunk of that issue, since it’s less about reaching kids and more about avoiding the algorithm flagging or pulling the content; large studios get round that anyway by having reps preview and okay creative before it goes live. The TV side definitely leant into the same logic properly: a spot for “Mortal Kombat 2 sponsors late nights on Discovery” puts it right alongside Discovery/TLC’s true-crime, bodycam footage and unscripted lifestyle programming; watershed dayparting doing its job while still landing with an audience already engaged in late night and adult themes.

Last one for this section: the Adeline Rudolph (Kitana) interview with The Hollywood Reporter, because there are some genuinely good quotes in there for the transmedia discussion.

On whether the surviving champions deciding to rescue their dead friends from the Netherrealm hints at a third film:

And on what she’d want to explore further with Jeremy Slater’s third script in progress:

Good little read that whole thing, it’s nice to see the passion and work that goes in behind the scenes from the talent, and great to see the effort to adapt and adopt the franchise’s lore into their own repertoire.

Influencers, “WB Partner,” and “#WBInvited”

Warner Bros. Discovery have clearly built out a structured influencer arm here, consistently tagged with #WBPartner and #WBInvited. A few examples I’ve collected and added to my collection like General Grievous:

• Supes (POV: you met the greatest warriors in the universe)

• Dont Call Dom (POV: when the announcer yells finish him)

• Ashiv_ (pretty cool transitions)

• Yuvirayz (found myself in the MK universe).

Separately there’s Just the Nobodys with various content pieces alongside cast members, and Freddy Props attending the US premiere wearing a custom Raiden hat and contact lenses, which is honestly so freaking cool.

Just like most studios, Warner Bros. Discovery typically partners with digital influencers and content creators through bespoke campaigns, affiliate programs, and dedicated advertising networks. Creators are then utilised across their film, gaming, and television IPs to drive engagement, promote upcoming premieres, and boost direct merchandise sales.

Oh, how I love vertical integration and various touchpoints coming together.

And whilst this isn’t particularly new, influencers have worked with brands for a long time, this whole “WBPartner” thing is just a label Warner Bros have introduced to their campaigns and influencer branch to streamline their ‘army ranks’ as I like to put it.

With the first four examples, they all took place in the same setting, you can tell by the neon red and black background, and all start with “#WBPartner” at the beginning of each caption. Where they differ though, is in the creator and their approach. Despite the differences, what is clear to see is the direction of the content because they’re all very similar, representing or holding a character’s weapon, then panning out to see the main cast ensemble with the creator.

The other two examples I linked to are also Instagram influencers, but with very different styles, more akin to their actual content with what looks like less restriction or direction.

Essentially, what WB have done is a great job of manufacturing their own army of influencers who’ve built out a pretty robust library, attached to those various hashtags they’ve built. One click to the hashtag and you’re met with a wide variety of creators and content in relation to WB’s various titles.

Call that: distribution.

Interestingly, after searching for the same hashtag on X, I came across a WWE “WBPartner” post promoting a meet & greet for two of their athletes, a direct link back to my earlier commentary on the WWE crossover, and it comes full circle right here. Glad I caught this one!

Also worth a quick mention: Paddy “The Baddy” shared MK2 content to his Instagram, which initially I thought was so random, but it makes more sense given they’d done a partnership/ad buy with the UFC and the other mixed martial arts I’ve mentioned (boxing and WWE). Paddy’s well known to align himself with paid promo, though he doesn’t overdo it, he’s got official sponsors like Under Armour and Applied Nutrition, but it’s broader examples like this one and Dr Squatch that really catch my eye personally.

It’s simple enough on its own terms though: he’s a macro influencer, so aligning with him taps into the UFC audience and the wider media/partnership buy all at once, reaching a wider UK audience as well as other UFC fans globally, and lining up with interests the target audience is likely to have anyway. It didn’t do massive numbers, 11k likes, but that’s besides the point, it probably delivered a ton of impressions.

My one gripe is that it’s just using the MK2 promo trailer and clips rather than Paddy being more involved in the promo himself. That to me would’ve landed better than a boosted video asset on his profile!

Organic Social and the Fan Layer

I’d be remiss not to include some of the standard social media examples I’ve been stockpiling, organic content to paid ads to wider platform partnerships and extensions.

First up, the organic “Get Over Here” trend, which raked in 94k likes on Instagram: “Share your best ‘GET OVER HERE’ or ‘FINISH HIM’ and use #MortalKombatKall. You may just introduce the new Mortal Kombat II trailer on 2/25 at #IGNFanFest.” Great example of using engaging clips from your trailer and press footage to engage core fans, and while I couldn’t find evidence of it actually playing out at IGN Fan Fest, I imagine it did, otherwise it’d be a missed opportunity.

There’s also “My vocal stims for the next 3 months,” 9k likes but still 580 reshares, which is significant for an organic post featuring key audio cues, catchphrases, and sound effects lol. To me this is just a simple example of posting for that day, trial and error, trying a variety of content until you find your winners.

“If wrestling is fake then explain this,” 74k likes, a brilliant use of a key clip of Johnny “performing” and linking it to the age-old commentary around wrestling being fake. Simple, effective, engaging. One commenter was genuinely concerned for a moment, “This gotta be a scene in a set of Johnny making a movie and the acting director will yell cut. Then the main scene continues with Johnny leaving the set and Raiden appears to tell him about Mortal Kombat. God please let this be the case cause if this is a scene from the movie then we are cooked.”

“2026 MK Draft Klass,” posted on the 23rd of April, 44k likes, is a great example of having a social content calendar and aligning organic creative with macro environments and events, timed to NFL Draft season and using character posters as a roster to pick fighters from.

“We expect to see your most lethal fits” is an MK-themed cosplay carousel, 4.1k likes, a great way to spotlight and give back to fans, with some genuinely great content in there including two creators acting out their own version of Jax vs Scorpion.

There’s also a Letterboxd-style repost shared to Instagram of various Mortal Kombat in-universe films, transmedia layer stuff: Cool Hand Cage, Ninja Mime (directed by a fictional Martin Scorsese), Quantum Commando, Citizen Cage, Uncaged Fury, with the rest directed by an Alan Smithee (IYKYK), which is odd because one look at those Letterboxd reviews and they’re essentially near perfect; nothing scored below 4.2.

If we’re being real for a minute, it’s a cool concept and more filmmakers should put effort into developing these kinds of assets where it makes sense, world and story building that is. Johnny Cage is of course notorious for being a movie star in the MK universe, so this makes sense, but other examples where I’ve seen this appear in film rather than marketing material include Running Man with its in-world ads and worldbuilding (the Liquid Death appearance felt so right, I included this in my November watchlist piece), and even Paprika, where Satoshi Kon inserted Easter eggs, references, and visual cameos of his past films within his own work, a frequent doer of that as well.

It’s an extra step, I know, but fans really appreciate it, especially the eagle-eyed and franchise fans. Mortal Kombat especially requires that love and care, and if you wish for your filmography or worlds to hit the same peaks, you must follow suit.

There’s also a “rewatch MK ahead of MKII” post: “Nothing hits like a MORTAL KOMBAT fight scene. Rewatch it ahead of seeing MORTAL KOMBAT II in cinemas May 8.” A given really and somewhat organic drafting, one might say. Like saying, fancy seeing the next show? Watch this beforehand. It’s synergistic and a direct sequel too, so it only makes sense.

Isn’t it perfect that Lauren literally kicks my ass in this example, she has always had a weird knack for Mortal Kombat, and I genuinely get destroyed like that every time…

And then a Snapchat filter that captures your Bitmoji and pits it up against a friend of your choosing, letting you control your fighter and fight as you would in an actual MK game, picking the character you want your Bitmoji to mimic (I went with Shao Khan and Scorpion of course). This was so sick and I feel like it may have been wasted on Snapchat, as it could’ve been used in so many other capacities and platforms.

There’s also a great “what if” buried in here. Two fans showed up dressed as Scorpion and Sub-Zero and staged a fight as the credits rolled, UGC, 49k likes, just two people in matching costumes showing down while everyone watches. If the MK2/WB marketing and PR team were reactive enough, or had the foresight beforehand, they would’ve had a proper story on their hands.

Think Minions: The Rise of Gru and the “Gentleminions” effect, where viral audio sparked a TikTok phenomenon of fans dressing in formal suits to pack cinema screenings, causing a wave of social trends and even temporary theatre bans. This year it looks like Minions & Monsters are aiming to replicate that again, with another partnership with Yeat. This could’ve been replicated with MK2, and could be banked for the future, leaning more into the Lin Kuei potentially, having ninjas hide in theatres to capture phone users (Prince Charles Cinema did this) or staging fights between cosplayers and creators as the credits roll.

It looks like Japan have already cracked that code with their very own Mortal Kombat stage play; the recipe’s there, just kindly ask for it, then lift and shift for a wider audience!

Beyond the organic stuff, there’s also the standard paid YouTube ads that appeared on my CTV/PS5 YouTube app while I was watching or about to watch something, CTV and the big screen at home being essential for all film titles, that’s how you deliver your AV in the best way.

Finally, just chucking this one in here to link back to the social media calendar point I mentioned, but let’s just say someone knows ball…

Cinema Merch and the Popcorn Bucket Economy

It’s 2026 and of course the cinema and popcorn bucket trend doesn’t take any days off, with Mortal Kombat 2 also adding to the conversation with their own. Cinemark’s is a movie slate/clapperboard popcorn bucket with MK2 branding on top, “To my biggest fan. Cage” scribbled on it, and a functional closing clapper lid to store your popcorn. I’d say it’s too skinny and you’d expect to get some additional popcorn lol, but then again it’s better to be less bulky I think, and it’s still somewhat unique and relatable to the film.

Some others like the Galactus head or Jaws shark are pretty epic but otherwise unconventional, this does a decent enough job at both and would be a pretty cool addition to MK “Kollectors’” Kollections.

Then there’s the Regal range, kicking off with a Shao Khan Collectible Container that comes with a free large popcorn, epic because it’s literally his film helmet covering a popcorn tin. Sadly I don’t think you can wear it, unless your head is Lego-brick shaped and the size of a baby’s.

They also have a Collectible double combo, a green (jade) and black logo bucket plus two variations of a soda cup, one Kitana themed and one Johnny Cage themed, both with the equivalent character sat in a cinema chair as a topper, pretty cool, and I’d personally rock that bucket if I could for a minimal fee, economic crisis and all that.

Lastly there’s the Dragon Light Up Cup, self-explanatory really and sells itself, the dragon appearing 3D and circling the cup like a snake. There’s also other variations of tins and cups outside of these, but I think these get the most traction online, because if you search MK2 popcorn bucket you’ll mostly see the Shao Khan helmet, though I do believe there’s also a pretty cool 3D arcade machine collectible container too…

Press Coverage and Magazine Real Estate

As is the case with most movies, you can expect magazine covers to commemorate the release. This time it’s Den of Geek, a magazine and media owner I’d not particularly heard of till now, but a great addition because, with MKII being both a film and a game adaptation, Den of Geek I imagine is a perfectly audience-aligned media/PR buy. They seem to cover movies, TV, games, and comics, so putting MKII on the front cover for their “MEGA 2026 Preview Issue” aligns both of those audiences nicely.

What Happens After Theatrical: Home Entertainment and the Long Tail

Once theatrical wraps, the ‘Home Ents’ window kicks in, with the buy/rent to watch at home digitally coming first before going to streaming, HBO Max of course. There’ll be limited traditional home entertainment formats you can pick up physically (Blu-ray/4K), with the focus and budget likely going towards digital ownership as traditional media is slowly phased out, though physical releases will still likely be supported by ‘Kollector’s’ editions, fan bundles, and tie-in merch.

I put together a couple examples to capture the Home Ents window; a genuine feat in itself I promise you….

There’s an Instagram post capturing the release “to Digital on June 9th” whilst showcasing how the realms of MKII were built, reading: “From the decaying streets of Edenia to the terrifying Pit featured in the iconic video game series, discover how the Mortal Kombat II design teams blended practical sets with groundbreaking VFX to create the legendary realms in the film!”

This is a great example of bonus content and the USP of buying to own in essence. The fact they’ve highlighted the blend of VFX and practical sets will intrigue many fans - practical sets especially - and any similar BTS content too for that matter.

Whilst the audience interested in this is more niche than the typical fan, it’s an additional interest to account for when it comes to audiences, but generally speaking this isn’t something I’d tend to deep dive into on my own audience analysis or work and would opt to look elsewhere. However, it’s still an additional bonus that should be thought about during production, because fans and buyers do care about it.

Media Play News confirmed the windowing properly:

As I previously hinted, something I always find very difficult to find is Home Ents advertising and marketing examples - it’s always a pain - but I do try to find them when I can.

In fact, I did find a social example via Mortal Kombat Mobile on X, which I include more as an example of IP synergy and as the very basic MK2 social advertising; mostly digital heavy as Home Ents tends to see very little budget in comparison to Theatrical and Streaming. Budgets tend to get split to cover all digital bases where possible, social media, YouTube and CTV (LG, Samsung, etc), and then things like Amazon and maybe VOD/OOH/Radio if you’re lucky.

Going back to that synergy part ever so quickly, the above MK Mobile example from X also represents the literal Mortal Kombat game/app you can download and play on your phone. Whilst it’s telling you the movie is out digitally, it serves 2 messages, including a mention of there being an in-game cross-collaboration which saw MK2 skins added for a variety of characters.

Mortal Kombat 1, for example, saw skins for Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Johnny Cage, Kitana, and Shao Khan (side note: I wanna say Sub-Zero came from the first film, as he didn’t show up in MK2 for obvious reasons).

On the mobile game specifically, it looks like they geared content towards a “Season of the Warlord,” focusing on Shao Khan and bringing him into the game with his “devastating axe,” available for a limited time, rare enough for long-term fans and players to want to collect him, turning him into a season commodity to match typical live service games and their season passes to sustain interest and retention; think about Fortnite and the plethora of examples I’ve showcased previously. It’s somewhat low risk and effort, as you can sustain interest in both and combine the awareness of each to maximise the Mortal Kombat gamer/fan’s awareness of the film and encourage them to see it both in cinemas and at home.

Kitana also got some of the limelight, with her movie-inspired skin making its way into the game too, the post reading: “Kollect Mortal Kombat Movie inspired Kitana and Shao Khan to unleash their cinematic power at your fingertips, and claim 10 FREE movie celebration packs in your inbox.” If that’s not maximising the awareness and synergy of the brand and IP, then I don’t know what is.

The Transmedia Layer: Sound, Synergy, and Where MK Could Actually Go

I want to spend proper time on the sound of this franchise, because I genuinely think it’s the most underrated weapon in MK’s whole arsenal, and most brand universes don’t lean into it nearly as hard as they could.

One thing that’s always been central to Mortal Kombat, and I’d argue most brand universes and 360 IPs, is the music.

Mortal Kombat is no exception, it’s largely known for its iconic soundtracks, sound effects, and various character-specific quips. Call it a sonic profile, the unique auditory character of an object, environment, or brand. It describes how something “sounds” based on its acoustic properties, tone, and texture, and is used across multiple industries including audio engineering, consumer electronics, and corporate branding, for those not in the know.

But what is it that makes the MK soundtrack so iconic?

As the Grammy website puts it:

So when WaterTower Music shared to Instagram that “Techno Syndrome 2026 (feat. Ed Boon) is here!”, I’m sure MK fans’ ears pricked up and started listening immediately. Mortal Kombat alone is such an iconic franchise, and for Mortal Kombat 2 to continue leveraging the various assets it has at its disposal is just the tip of the iceberg.

You must be asking yourself at this point, why is music so important to transmedia and brand universes, right?

Well essentially, music is the emotional and cohesive glue of transmedia and brand universes.

You see, sound bypasses conscious analysis to trigger instant feelings, providing a universal, sensory thread that unifies disconnected platforms (films, video games, social media, retail spaces) into a single, immersive storyworld.

Simple right?

Stepping outside Mortal Kombat for a moment, into the realm of K-Pop, MIDiA shares a really insightful piece on why artists need transmedia storytelling. A few tidbits I pulled out and liked from it:

• In today’s fragmented marketing world, artists have to promote more than just their music, they have to build dedicated fandom, and more are implementing transmedia elements into their marketing as a result. The most recent example is BTS’s ARIRANG campaign, which connected across Spotify, Instagram, and Google through on-platform fan activities like scavenger hunts and trivia.

• Warner Music Group has signed an exclusive deal with Netflix to develop artist documentaries, while HYBE and Spotify have partnered on K-pop video podcasts.

• A multi-platform strategy doesn’t mean “be everywhere, all the time.”

• As fandom becomes more important, artists now need to think more like an online creator than simply a musician, building audiences across platforms, identity now being the centre rather than the music alone.

It’s in the details for the franchise.

For over three decades, the MK IP has possessed one of the most powerful auditory assets in entertainment history. When modern audiences think of the franchise, they don’t just picture blood and Fatalities, they hear the iconic “MORTAL KOMBAT!” yell and the driving electronic synth line.

And it’s in the strategy for the holding company too. As the parent of NetherRealm Studios (the game developers) and New Line Cinema/WaterTower Music (the film and music arms), Warner Bros. sits on a fully integrated pipeline, able to activate cross-platform continuity through several high-utility strategies. Whilst you certainly wouldn’t think too heavily on the music and audio, it’s actually the most effective and transmutable part of the franchise and IP. The ultimate goal of transmedia branding is to make an IP relevant outside its native format, and music is the most flexible tool for real-world and digital lifestyle immersion.

‘Kombining’ all of this together, you end up getting things like:

• Synergy, in-game and with the music ecosystem, “movie packs” releasing in-game alongside the new audio, customised character playlists popping up on Apple Music or Spotify to push distribution

• Physical multipliers, specialty labels creating coloured vinyls, Scorpion flame-orange and so on

• Sports & live events, Techno Syndrome basically functioning as an anthem, playable during sports highlights and broadcasts as a catchy jingle or sonic logo, playing on the subconscious mind

• UGC dominance, trending audio and snippets for short-form content, “Test Your Might” in the backdrop of gaming, fitness, or content creators doing extraordinary things

• Experiential, theme parks, VR experiences, attractions and pop-ups, soundscapes ensuring narrative transitions and letting fans step into Outworld environments

There’s a lot you can really do with music and audio, especially when it’s considered a key component of your brand universe and synergy map. I’d encourage you to think on this more when you’re working on your own films, IP, and music.

Where the Mortal Kombat Cinematic Universe Could Go Next

Honestly, not much to add on top of everything above in terms of what’s already happened, but what I could add is where the Mortal Kombat “cinematic universe” could expand from here.

Television & streaming.

We’ve already seen Japan prove an extension format like this can work, with their own MK stage play, so there’s clearly appetite for the lore living somewhere other than a two-hour film. A high-budget, top-notch episodic series could allow the franchise’s lore to breathe, giving more space to flesh out storylines and characters where the films feel rushed and action-packed.

Two examples of what they could do: a Lin Kuei Chronicles live-action prequel series tracing the origins of Sub-Zero (Bi-Han) and Scorpion (Hanzo Hasashi), which co-creator Ed Boon and actor Joe Taslim have already publicly discussed; or an Outworld Political Drama, a Game of Thrones-style thriller tracking the centuries-long conflict between Shao Kahn, King Jerrod, and the eventual annexation of Edenia, naturally fleshing out Kitana, Jade, and Sindel away from a strict tournament structure.

Genre-diversified video games.

While the mainline games continue as NetherRealm works on them for the core fans, the IP could branch into other genres to capture completely new demographics.

An action-RPG/beat ‘em up revival, a modern spiritual successor to Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, following Fire God Liu Kang and Kung Lao exploring different realms, would tap into the mainstream action-adventure market.

A Soulslike Netherrealm adventure, a dark, punishing single-player game starring Scorpion or a resurrected Noob Saibot navigating the horrific depths of the Netherrealm, would be a different swing entirely; Ninja Gaiden comes to mind.

Expanded animation universe.

The Mortal Kombat Legends animated films (Scorpion’s Revenge, Battle of the Realms) proved R-rated animation perfectly matches the game’s signature brutality.

An anthology series format, like Love, Death & Robots or Arcane, could explore a different realm each episode (the technological horror of the Cyber Lin Kuei initiative, or the lawless wasteland of the Chaosrealm).

Anime-style spin-offs, partnering with international animation powerhouses like Studio Mir, could produce a long-form series focused on the younger generation of fighters, Cassie Cage and Jacqui Briggs.

Publishing.

Comic books are essentially the glue for transmedia world building, historically, acting as a low-cost, high-yield bridge between game releases.

Canon graphic novels, replicating the success of the Mortal Kombat X comic series by publishing canonical prequels explaining status quo shifts between games and movies.

Lore compendiums, dark-fantasy novels focusing on the mythos of the Elder Gods, the creation of the Kamidogu, and the ancient tournaments.

Wrapping Up

So, pulling all of this together, what actually stands out to me from putting this one together?

Honestly, it’s how much of this campaign worked because the IP itself is built to be picked up and run with, not because WB reinvented anything. The realm system gives creators a built-in excuse to go anywhere, the characters are archetypal enough to survive a jump from arcade cabinet to WrestleMania ring without losing themselves, and the sound design alone has been doing brand recognition work since before half of this audience was born; including myself. WB didn’t have to manufacture a transmedia engine for MKII, it just had to actually use the one Boon and co built thirty-odd years ago. A lot of franchises would kill for that kind of head start, and most don’t use it half as well as MK has here.

What I kept noticing though, section after section, was how often the campaign stopped one step short. The Toronto car, the LinkedIn-style satire energy I’d love to see leant into more, the Snapchat filter that could’ve lived on three other platforms, Max Huang doing real stunt work that should be a Home Ents bonus feature and isn’t yet, as far as I can tell.

None of these are failures exactly, they’re just open doors. And weirdly, I think that’s actually a good sign for the franchise rather than a bad one, because it means there’s clear runway left if WB wants to take it. The fans are already doing unpaid worldbuilding in the gaps (the Letterboxd in-universe films bit is still one of my favourite things I found researching this), which usually means the appetite is there long before the studio catches up to it.

If I had to bet on what happens next, I think it comes down to whether WB treats this as a movie franchise that occasionally does cool marketing, or actually builds the cinematic universe properly; television, games, comics, the lot, the way DC is retrying to do with Gunn now at the helm.

Mortal Kombat has the lore, the sound, and now apparently the box office to support it. What it hasn’t quite had yet is the studio fully committing to “stories become worlds” rather than “stories become sequels.” That’s the gap I’ll be watching for with whatever comes next!

That’s The Harperverse breakdown of Mortal Kombat 2.

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For related reading: Backrooms • Predator: Badlands • From Screens to Space • Bring Her Back • PlayStation, Play, and the Long Game • DareDevil: Born Again • Lee Cronin’s The Mummy

~ most uncredited images will have been taken from the films TMDB page!

There’s something genuinely unusual about the Backrooms story.

Not the film itself - though I have thoughts on that too - but the entire arc of what it is, where it came from, and how a 20-year-old from the internet ended up directing a feature film for A24 with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve starring in it.

On paper, that doesn’t make any sense. In practice, it makes complete sense, because the Backrooms was never really a normal IP. It was always something stranger and more communal than that, and the way this film has been made and marketed reflects exactly that DNA - from guerrilla OOH drops in Wisconsin to immersive pop-ups in Burbank, in-universe fax machines, and brand takeovers on a Chinese metro.

I’ve been sitting on my research for this one for a while, mainly because the campaign is still very much in motion even as I write this. But it’s also because there’s a lot to unpack here.

So, I’m going to try and do it justice; the 4chan origin story and what Kane Parsons actually built on YouTube, to A24’s campaign mechanics, the transmedia ecosystem around the film, and what all of it means for anyone thinking about how stories get turned into worlds.

Let’s go in.

A Single Image, an Entire Internet Myth

Before we talk about the film or the marketing, we need to talk about what the Backrooms actually is, because the origin story is genuinely important to understanding why this campaign works the way it does.

In 2019, an anonymous user on 4chan posted a photograph of an empty office space; yellowish, damp-looking walls, buzzing fluorescent lights, low ceilings, no windows, no exits. The caption described it as a place you could “noclip” into from reality if you weren’t careful. That was it.

Reddit users eventually traced the original photograph through the Wayback Machine to a 2003 website for a model car racing facility in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, called Revolution Raceway.

The rooms had been cleaned up and repainted, but the space - low ceilings, fluorescent lighting, minimal decoration - matched the eerie liminal aesthetic perfectly. The image wasn’t staged. It was just real life, made unsettling by framing and context.

From that single post, an entire mythology grew. Short films, games, fan stories, wiki entries, ARG-style investigations, Creepypasta threads. Unlike traditional franchises where a central author expands a universe, the Backrooms became a form of decentralised worldbuilding. There was no director. There was no studio. There was no single canon. Anyone could add to it, and thousands did.

This matters enormously when you think about what Kane Parsons then did with it, and what A24 has had to navigate in bringing it to a cinema screen.

Kane Parsons

The YouTube Kid Who Understood the Assignment

In 2022, a then-teenager named Kane Parsons - online alias KanePixels - uploaded a short video to YouTube called The Backrooms (Found Footage). It had 83 million views the last time I checked. 83 million. For a no-budget short horror film made by someone who wasn’t old enough to vote in most countries.

That video, and the 21 more that followed in his Backrooms playlist, are what eventually led A24 and James Wan to his door. But the numbers alone don’t explain the phenomenon. What Kane built was something subtler and more intentional than most people give him credit for.

He said it himself in his conversation with James Wan on the A24 podcast:

Think about what that means for a second.

He wasn’t just making horror videos. He was designing content specifically to generate theory videos, reaction videos, analysis breakdowns, lore recaps.

He was building a secondary media ecosystem around his primary content before most of his audience knew what transmedia storytelling was. Channels like Nexpo, Night Mind, and Film Theory weren’t just covering his work. They amplified it, creating a free marketing operation around content that cost essentially nothing to produce.

That’s not luck.

That’s understanding how the internet actually works, from the inside out, because Kane was - and is - a member of the community he was creating for. As he put it:

He understood ARG culture, theory culture, Easter egg culture, the specific rewards that internet horror fans look for. He designed his work around those behaviours before he had an audience large enough to appreciate them.

The result was a community that didn’t just consume the Backrooms. They marketed it by engaging with it. Every rewatch, every Reddit thread, every Discord discussion, every fan-made lore breakdown was effectively another touchpoint in a campaign Kane never had to pay for.

From YouTube to A24: What Actually Happened

The transition from internet creator to feature filmmaker is becoming more common, but Parsons’ version of it is still one of the more unusual ones. He was barely 18 when serious industry conversations started, in fact he needed his Dad to jump on calls with him initially.

He walked into meetings, by his own account, worried about “beloved IPs getting torn to shreds.” That instinct - protecting the contract you made with your existing audience rather than chasing a clean slate - is what distinguishes him from a lot of adaptation projects that go badly wrong.

He told Cultured Magazine: “I feel it’s critical as the person directing this project and this entire series that you don’t go and betray the contract you made with the existing audience… There’s this very strong desire to start fresh. It’s just been like fighting a force of nature, with that being the average desire of all parties, and needing to counterbalance it constantly.”

That’s a remarkably mature read on how IP adaptations fail; and it’s coming from someone in their late teens. For context, this is the same instinct Kevin Feige used to protect Marvel, or Dave Filoni uses to protect Star Wars. The obsession isn’t with the film you’re making; it’s with the universe you’re stewarding.

It’s also worth being direct about the elephant in the room: Kane was 20 when he directed this film. There were whispers online - tedious and predictable ones - that he didn’t really direct it, that ghost directors were involved, that a 20-year-old couldn’t possibly be responsible for a studio feature. I find that take genuinely irritating, and I think it says more about the industry’s discomfort with how talent pathways are changing than it does about the work.

Renate Reinsve, who has a pretty credible eye for these things given her career trajectory, said it well: “He has so much life, and he was so particular about his ideas and his visions. He was very firm about them, and he was really trying all the time to ask how he could give better directions.”

Age means almost nothing when it comes to creative vision. What matters is whether the person understands the material deeply enough to protect and expand it. Kane demonstrably does. The YouTube channel is the evidence. The 83+ million views are the evidence. The 30,000 square feet of practical sets - which he designed in Blender before a single wall was built - are the evidence.

Speaking of which.

The 30,000 Square Feet of Yellow Wallpaper

One of the most consistently talked-about production details for this film is the decision to build the sets practically. The production reportedly spent millions constructing around 30,000 square feet of physical environments - walkable hallways, dead ends, impossible architecture - rather than relying on CGI. Kane also ran 50 different wallpaper tests to get the exact yellow tone right.

That’s not a throwaway detail. It’s a philosophical statement about what makes the Backrooms frightening, and it has direct implications for how the campaign was able to work.

The Backrooms as a concept is inherently environmental horror. The fear isn’t located in a specific monster or creature, it’s in the space itself. The endless corridors, the blind corners, the feeling that something could be just out of frame; monsters just add on top to stress you the f… out!

CGI environments, however impressive technically, tend to produce a specific kind of synthetic uncanniness that the Backrooms already weaponises. If everything looks digitally constructed, the horror becomes abstract. A real, walkable environment - one that the cast and crew could actually get lost in - creates a different register of dread entirely.

It also made the experiential marketing component of the campaign feel genuine. When audiences saw BTS footage of the actual set, or when IGN’s interviewer wandered through the pop-up and found corridors that went nowhere, the reaction wasn’t “cool production design,” it was visceral.

A comment section reaction to one BTS post captured it perfectly: Kane is pictured at his monitoring station in a hazmat suit, three screens behind him getting progressively bigger, the Backrooms wallpaper on the wall, a cardboard caveman cutout in frame. It’s bizarre and very on-brand. 121k likes. The set itself became content.

The Campaign: How A24 Sold an Internet Legend

A24’s marketing for Backrooms is a fascinating object of study because it operates on a completely different logic to most studio campaigns. There’s no P&A spend in the Superman range here ($10+ Million roughly). There’s no global outdoor takeover, no IMAX skyline activation, no sports league partnership. What A24 did instead was use the existing architecture of internet culture to do most of the heavy lifting; and then add just enough tactically precise activity to amplify it.

Posters, Trailers, and the Wallpaper as Merchandise

The first posters were released on Instagram on 30th March, with the caption “If you’re not careful… Backrooms trailer tomorrow.” They achieved 445k likes. The posters themselves are remarkably simple, which is both a creative choice and a commercial one.

AMC and Regal Cinemas received physical paper posters - not digital - which a community fan account clocked and called out specifically. Surprisingly, Fans appreciate that distinction. If you think about it, it signals craft and intentionality to exactly the kind of audience that cares about that. That same standard wallpaper poster was then also made available to download digitally, buy as an adhesive poster, or purchase as actual 30-inch wide rolls of yellow wallpaper for your home.

The poster is the merch. The merch is the marketing. They’re the same thing.

The Official Trailer on YouTube has over 36 million views. For a non-franchise A24 horror film, that’s extraordinary. And it’s not just the number, it’s the engagement around it. A comment on one still post from IMDb noted they could spot shoes from another scene “no-clipped” into a different frame. The community was frame-by-framing the trailer before the film even opened.

There’s also a Brazilian elevator activation I have to mention - found on X - where the static paste image on the outside of closed elevator doors shows a dimly lit Backrooms corridor. You see that at 2am and you’re going to feel it. Simple, inexpensive, and utterly on-brand; call it Trompe-l’œil' or deceiving the eye…

OOH: Guerrilla, Global, and Deeply Lore-Aware

The OOH strategy for Backrooms is not a blanket national spend. It’s deliberately targeted, with some placements chosen for scale and visibility and others for their symbolic meaning within the fandom. The combination is what makes it special.

The Oshkosh and New York Billboards

Two large roadside billboards appeared: one on the side of a building in Wisconsin at coordinates 44.016877, -88.5361499 (Oshkosh, the city where the original 2003 photograph was taken), and one above a Buddhist temple in East Broadway Mall, New York at 40.7162972, -73.9953365 (I know the coordinates because that’s what A24 shared to social media lol).

The reaction was immediate. As a fan put it in the comments of A24’s post: “Real ones know that the original Backrooms pic was taken in Oshkosh.” Rapper Kenny Hoopla responded: “I’m literally down the street - why did no one tell me A24 was in my city?!” The Insta post hit 100k likes, with 230 comments ranging from lore-aware fans to casual passers-by just clocking a very yellow billboard in an unusual place.

This is the kind of media placement that works on two levels simultaneously: broad outdoor awareness for anyone passing by, and deep fan significance for the community that immediately understood why those coordinates mattered. You can’t manufacture that kind of dual impact unless you actually know your audience well enough to find the resonant location.

The Blue-Tape Doorways

Connected to the above placements, “blue-taped doorways” started appearing throughout key cities; 744k+ likes which is insane! The exact same blue tape doorway shapes in various settings from overlooked corners to alleyways, and blank architectural spaces inside other liminal environments, rather than on traditional outdoor formats. Not just your bog standard paste-ups.

The Backrooms fan account shared the exact same doorways but from Oshkosh; captioned to lean fully into the in-universe fiction reports of “unusual disappearances,” compasses behaving strangely nearby, people hearing voices near the marked spaces.

Whether that caption was A24’s own work or community storytelling layered on top, it doesn’t really matter, because both are part of the same thing. The campaign and the community’s interpretation of it had become indistinguishable, which was the goal. Then, finally to add on top of that theme, more videos emerged capturing ASync in action; the Backrooms Insta account shared one video: “Doors open this Friday” (229k likes) with a bunch of comments about the fact they’re in the place those initial images came from. And then DiscussingFilm shared a video, a first person POV of someone walking through a tunnel under a bridge that connects to the Houses of Parliament, spotting another person in a hazmat putting blue tape on a wall just before the exit.

Again, low effort, no context, just a person in a hazmat placing blue taped doorways in a liminal space….

International OOH: China, Brazil, and Beyond

In China, a genuinely unusual digital OOH placement appeared that I haven’t seen done quite like this before: a deep immersive corner screen that mimics the architecture of the room itself, making it look like you can literally walk into the Backrooms. It’s video-based, so the room appears to move, furniture shifts, and a chair floats across to an adjacent screen. It’s one of the most on-brand OOH formats I’ve seen for any film; the medium and the message are the same.

In Brazil, a metro car was covered in promo. The key yellow wallpaper art with Renate Reinsve’s character, and crucially, the metro doors themselves were lined with that signature blue tape. So the doors of an actual moving train become a portal you walk through every day. Genius. Low cost. Entirely in-universe.

There’s also a “no-clipping” poster format that appeared in various markets; a physical poster slanted diagonally, cut off at the bottom as if it’s sinking through the floor. It looks like a mistake until you understand the lore. Then it’s one of the cleverest bits of contextual OOH I’ve seen.

The In-Universe Pluto TV Commercial and the Fax Machine

This is the one that gets me every time, I appreciate Bloody Disgusting for the details!

A24 ran a retro television commercial for “Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire” - the fictional furniture store that features prominently in the film - on Pluto TV. Pluto, for context, is a free ad-supported streaming platform (FAST). The commercial was designed to look indistinguishable from the kind of genuinely low-budget retro furniture ads that you might naturally see play on Pluto. I imagine the placement was chosen because it would feel native to that environment; not jarring, but uncanny.

And just maybe because it was shot for the films actual in-universe TV ad…

The commercial was spotted and filmed in its entirety by a fan account called Backrooms Movie Updates. A24 knew the community would find it. That was the plan. Earned media value generated by a paid placement that only has to reach one person to activate the network.

Then there’s the phone number included in the commercial: (408) 357-2875. Turns out, it’s a fax number. A fan then sent a fax. They received a PDF document in return; an in-universe document tied to the Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire mythology.

Who has a fax machine anymore?

Nobody. But that’s the point.

The Backrooms community includes people who will track down every possible hidden thread, and the reward for doing so was a piece of in-universe content delivered via technology that barely exists. It’s completely impractical and it’s a perfect piece of ARG-adjacent marketing that costs almost nothing to execute but generates outsized community value.

The Burbank Pop-Up: Enter the Backrooms

May 13th to 17th. Burbank, California. Limited slots available. The Instagram post announcing it read simply: “Enter the Backrooms. enter.backrooms.mov.”

From the footage that came out: IGN went and interviewed Kane literally inside the experience, wandering through corridors with dead ends that go nowhere. The Secret LA account documented it. Jacksepticeye attended (105k Instagram likes). A carousel from the Backrooms Instagram account captured attendees in various areas; video 3 had four guys doing a Harlem shake, the last clip shows people running from figures in hazmat suits; 208k likes.

The context worth noting here is what this activation solves. One of the defining characteristics of the Backrooms as a cultural phenomenon is that people genuinely started trying to find liminal spaces IRL; abandoned buildings, forgotten shopping corridors, empty car parks at 3am. That energy was already there. A24 didn’t create it. What they did was channel it into a legitimate, monetisable, deeply shareable version of the thing the community already wanted. You’re not manufacturing fan behaviour. You’re providing the container for it.

Social and Paid: A24’s Platform Intelligence

A24’s paid social strategy for Backrooms is worth examining because it doesn’t look like traditional paid advertising. They’re not running standard trailer cuts against broad horror audiences. They’re using paid budget to amplify native-format content in ways that feel organic to the platforms they’re appearing on.

The most interesting example is the Popculturebrain boosted post. Popculturebrain is a social media creator who makes split-screen explainer content - his face at the top, images relating to his topic below - in a very specific, recognisable format that fans of his know well. A24 ran his video as a paid/boosted post from their own account, where he explains the real Backrooms sets Kane built and gives background on the director’s YouTube origins. Small engagement numbers on the paid post itself (that’s fine, it’s a paid placement meant to drive awareness), but the point is what it signals: A24 testing social-native content formats by literally having platform-native creators produce them, then funding the distribution. It doesn’t look like an ad. It looks like content. Because it is content.

Similarly, the A24 Instagram account ran a boosted Esquire quote post - not a trailer, not a poster, but a critical endorsement - as a paid placement. Clean. Simple. Lets the credibility of an established publication do the persuasive work.

For anyone thinking about paid social strategy, both approaches work because they follow the audience’s existing behaviour rather than trying to override it. If Popculturebrain’s audience already trusts his format, A24 borrows that trust. If A24’s audience responds to critical validation, that’s what the paid post delivers. Platform-native thinking with paid fuel behind it.

Social: The Organic Layer

The organic social around Backrooms is another brilliant example in letting a community amplify a campaign without trying to control it, while seeding just enough first-party content to give that community things to react to.

A24’s own account produced a few key social pillars that did serious numbers:

The UGC Repost captured above is a smart use of UGC. This is something A24 have done before and studios will continue to replicate; this time A24 aimed to showcase flair by using various audience members own X posts with images. Thos images themselves tell stories; various liminal spaces and Backrooms inspired/lookalike environments, with Empty malls, staff corridors in Cinemas and more…

The “Cast attempts to map the 30,000 sq ft set” video is exactly what it sounds like, and it’s brilliant. You don’t need to explain that the set is enormous. You show four actors getting genuinely confused trying to navigate it. 304k likes on a companion post of Kane photographed on set by Wendigoon.

The Soundtrack post - 180k likes, captioned “You weren’t supposed to hear this” - for the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, composed by Edo van Breemen with Kane’s involvement. That caption does a lot of work. It’s in-universe. It sounds like a secret. It sounds like something the Async Research Institute doesn’t want you to hear. Even an album rollout becomes part of the mythology.

Third-party coverage and creator content is where the reach really multiplied. Letterboxd ran a six-minute interview with Kane on YouTube (197k views) and 110k Instagram likes, where he talked about how Portal games influenced the film’s direction; worth flagging because he’s mentioned Portal more than once across press and nobody’s properly adapted that IP for cinema yet. Watch that space…

Dread Central gave Kane their June digital cover with some genuinely great quotes: “I care about making sure stuff isn’t horror for the sake of horror. I enjoy bringing up concepts in different ways that aren’t inherently horrific, and cranking things up to ten to make people uncomfortable in ways that feel so unusual they become horrific.” That’s a director who understands his own work. And it reads as authentically as it was probably meant to.

Patrick Tomasso has made various pieces of great content - including the brilliant interview above - but his Insta post relating to the Canadian premiere is one I want to pull out at length, because Patrick’s caption captures something important about the YouTube-to-filmmaker moment that this whole post is really about:

“100 people > 100m views. I had the pleasure of hosting the Canadian premiere of the Backrooms movie with director Kane Parsons, and it got me reflecting quite a bit on the path of a YouTuber to traditional filmmaker. I was standing backstage with Kane as the credits started to run, and you hear the applause, and then we came out to do a Q&A, and I could feel his energy. I could feel the energy in the room, and that is something you will never feel on YouTube. Do not get me wrong, it is incredible the amount of people that we can reach with our platforms now. But truthfully, I would probably give all of that away for 100 people, 50 people, 20 people in an actual cinema watching something that I made. That, to me, is where film really comes alive. I want to be able to use those audiences and create little micro-moments in person with real people experiencing art together in actual cinemas.”

There’s something really honest about that. The numbers on YouTube are real. The feeling of a room watching something together is also real. And the whole arc of Backrooms - from anonymous forum post to Jacksepticeye in a pop-up in Burbank to a sold-out cinema in Canada - is proof that both things can be true at the same time.

Going back to the ‘traditional’, the Async Research Institute hat drop - exclusive early access when you bought your theatrical ticket online - is the merch and email marketing and brand universe-building all rolled into one. You buy a ticket, you get access to a limited merch item from within the fiction. Your ticket purchase becomes part of the world.

Then lastly, the UGC and the brand pile-on is also worth cataloguing, because it tells you something about the cultural gravity of the concept. The brands that leaned into it:

McDonald’s produced a two-minute horror short called “You’ve Been Here Before” (843k YouTube views). Found footage, first-person POV, iconic McDonald’s environmental cues (Grimace lurking at the end of a corridor, a giant ball pit accessed via red slides), caption: “chat, did I just noclip?” It’s genuinely good brand content, not cringe-adjacent.

IKEA Canada: “Ever wondered what the basement of an IKEA looks like?” Lamp and green chair against the Backrooms wallpaper. 95k likes. Simple, effective, and completely on-brand for IKEA’s social tone; they already exist in liminal retail spaces, so the joke practically writes itself.

Uber Eats: an Uber Eats delivery bag in the middle of a Backrooms corridor. “ok be so fr who ordered from the Backrooms.” One sentence. Correct.

Minecraft, Mountain Dew, Minions, Plants vs. Zombies, Burger King and more all had a go.

And Shrek. Just Shrek in a doorway, Fiona surrounded by furniture. It’s not the most creative execution. But I’m going to use it as an inlink because - and this is relevant - I wrote about the Shrek IP and its 25th anniversary recently, and the fact that Shrek is now reactive enough to play in trending cultural moments on social media says something interesting about where that franchise sits right now as a brand.

The Press Tour: Earned Media Done Right

The press circuit for Backrooms is substantial for an indie horror film, and it’s worth laying out in full because it shows how A24 sequenced earned media across different audience segments.

The biggest single piece of press was the A24 podcast episode with Kane and James Wan - 173k YouTube views, 64k Instagram likes. But what A24 also did was publish the full transcript on their website as a ‘Notes’ entry, and distribute the same conversation via Spotify and Apple Podcasts. The same interview across three different format layers, each designed to reach the Backrooms audience wherever they happen to consume: watching on YouTube, listening on a commute, or reading in full. That’s not complicated content strategy. It’s just content marketing done with actual care.

The mainstream press quickly spread and picked Kane up: BBC News released an 11-minute interview with Kane on their YouTube channel; the suggested video sidebar was and is still full of other Backrooms adjacent interviews: Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon (425k views & Kane said he’d bring a hydrogen bomb to survive the Backrooms, which is exactly the right energy for Fallon’s audience), Fandango’s scene breakdown (770k views), CBS Mornings (121k views, where Kane also talked about why he doesn’t want to embrace AI; a clip that did good numbers in itself given where the cultural conversation is right now), IGN, Barstool Sports: Out of Order, and the Dread Central cover I mentioned earlier. That’s just how the press and YouTube especially work; an algorithmic halo forms around the content (the BBC interview in this scenario) and kick off recruitment work for the whole press ecosystem.

That’s how earned media compounds. One interview becomes the gateway to six more. The A24 PR team clearly understood that and sequenced the press to feed that loop rather than treating each placement as standalone.

The Tour Diaries content series sits somewhere between press and organic social; three mini-documentary posts showing Kane in Mexico City, at the LA premiere, and in London. Each one captures him in Backrooms-esque environments: liminal spaces, corridors, transitional architecture. It gives followers a window into the press tour that feels personal and on-brand rather than like promotional boilerplate. 150k, 55k, and 48k likes respectively.

As seen in Tour Diaries 001: CDMX, Kane made an appearance at CCXP Mexico, where he spoke about the production in detail - the 30,000 square feet, modelling in Blender, the wallpaper tests - with that quote picked up and widely shared: “The set was huge. We built 30,000 square feet of actual backrooms that we could walk around in. Actually, some people were getting lost. It felt like being there, which was really weird” (THR).

Wendigoon and the Community Infrastructure

One of the quieter but most significant decisions in the campaign is how A24 positioned Wendigoon - real name Isaiah Markin, a YouTuber known for multi-hour video essays on horror lore, conspiracy theories, and analogue horror, and specifically someone who’s spent years covering Kane’s Backrooms series in exhaustive detail - within the promotional infrastructure.

He was given set access. He attended the premiere. And when a BTS image appeared captioned “KanePixels in the Backrooms, shot by WendigoonActual,” the comment section responded: “You’re telling me Wendigoon SHOT Kane Pixels in the backrooms?” / “A24 promoting Wendigoon, I’ve seen it all.” / “Jesus shot by God.”

304k likes on that post. And the reaction is community language: in-joke, reverence, and humour simultaneously. You cannot buy that response. You can only earn it by paying attention to who the community already trusts. Wendigoon isn’t a paid influencer in the traditional sense. He’s a community institution. A24 treated him like one.

Contrast that with Mike Majlak - co-host of the Impaulsive podcast - organically posting to his Instagram story that he’d gone to see Backrooms in theatres. No partnership. No payment (as far as I know). Just a creator with a large audience championing another creator’s work. That’s the social flywheel in action: if you’ve genuinely made something good for the right community, the community does the promotion.

The Merch and the A24 Brand Ecosystem

A24’s shop being a genuine marketing arm rather than an afterthought is something I’ve written about in The Drama / A24 marketing breakdown, and Backrooms is another strong example of it working.

The full merch range: the wallpaper poster (digital download and physical adhesive), rolls of actual yellow wallpaper for your home, Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire and Async Research Institute mugs and tees, an Async crewneck and hat (with exclusive early access for ticket buyers; email marketing, brand universe extension, and fan reward all in one mechanic), and the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack on vinyl.

Chiwetel Ejiofor wearing a Cap’n Clark’s tee in a simple two-image A24 Instagram carousel got 127k likes. The comment from A24: “a24.shop/Backrooms.” The product integration and the character promotion are the same post.

That’s the A24 brand ecosystem at its most efficient: the merch exists inside the fiction, the cast wears it organically, the shop comment is the call to action, and fans who buy it are literally decorating their homes with Backrooms wallpaper. Every item extends the fiction into the physical world of the buyer.

A24 and the Audience-First Approach

I want to spend a moment on the broader A24 philosophy here, because it contextualises why this campaign works at a structural level beyond the individual tactics.

A24 was built - as one Substack writer I follow put it - around “an unusually obsessive understanding of how to market specific films to specific audiences, run by people who didn’t come from the traditional studio system.” That obsessiveness is the thing. It’s what allowed them to identify that the Backrooms had an existing, passionate, highly engaged audience already doing the community-building work, and then design a campaign that added value to that community rather than trying to redirect it.

Most studios think about marketing as something you do to audiences. A24 has always thought about it as something you do with them. The fax machine commercial works because they knew someone would find it. The Oshkosh billboard works because they knew someone would understand why those coordinates mattered. The Wendigoon set visit works because they knew the community would react in exactly the way they did. None of those decisions are accidents.

It’s also worth noting what A24 didn’t do: they didn’t try to strip the community element out of the IP and make it into a clean studio horror film. The Async Research Institute mythology that Kane built on YouTube is in the film. The found footage aesthetic is in the film. The lore is honoured. The campaign reflects that continuity rather than treating the theatrical release as a separate product from the YouTube work.

That’s what Jordan of Think Like A Creator meant when he wrote that A24 figured out how to “market specific films to specific audiences” from the start. Backrooms is the test case for what that looks like when your audience is an internet fandom rather than a traditional film demographic.

The Transmedia Ecosystem: What Already Exists and What Could

The Backrooms IP is uniquely positioned for transmedia because it was never owned by anyone. Kane is explicit about this; he pays homage to where the concept originated and doesn’t claim sole authorship. The community built the mythology. He contributed a significant and influential branch of it.

Which means Puppet Combo - the indie studio behind Nun Massacre and Murder House - could release their own Backrooms console game around the same time as the film, and that’s not a problem. It’s the nature of the IP. Kane’s film doesn’t own the concept of the Backrooms. It owns his specific mythology and characters. Other interpretations can coexist, and arguably the game arriving simultaneously only deepens the overall cultural footprint.

The A24 podcast transcript makes Kane’s transmedia thinking explicit: “The material goes outside the confines of the YouTube series and outside the confines of the film.” The YouTube series and the film are designed to coexist and are different entry points into the same universe. He’s also talked about wanting to do a TV series. Rolling Stone got the exclusive on his plans to continue the story.

The question is what comes next and how the studio relationship navigates that. The community has co-ownership of the concept in a way that’s unusual for a theatrical IP. Managing that tension - between studio commercial interests and the open-source origins of the mythology - is one of the more interesting franchise management questions in entertainment right now.

If you want to dig further into how horror marketing has been working in 2026 more broadly - Send Help, Return to Silent Hill, Primate, Iron Lung, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple - the Horror Marketing in 2026 breakdown has all of it. Backrooms sits in interesting company. And the YouTube-to-filmmaker thread connects directly to what I wrote about Markiplier and Iron Lung in that piece. Worth reading together.

I Watched It. Here’s Where I Landed.

I watched Backrooms dead centre front row, completely alone, with nothing between me and the screen. Dark, cool, quiet room. That vulnerability ended up being exactly the right context.

The horror works. Really works, in the way that genuine atmospheric dread works, which is rarer than it should be. The environments are oppressive and disorientating in a way only practical sets can produce because you can feel the scale. The found footage opening sequences are genuinely effective at placing you inside the experience.

Where the film is shakier is the transition into more conventional narrative territory. The characters are performed well, but I never became particularly invested in them as people. By the end, I remembered the atmosphere far more than the plot. That’s not necessarily a failure - the Backrooms concept is inherently difficult to adapt into a conventional story arc - but it does mean the second half doesn’t quite reach the standard set by the first.

Overall as a horror experience, it succeeds. As a creator success story, it’s exciting. As a transmedia case study, it might be one of the most interesting films released this year.

What Creators and Marketers Can Actually Take From This

Let me be specific.

The community is the co-author.

The Backrooms worked before Kane’s films because the community built it. He honoured that, and designed his contribution to extend the community’s relationship with the concept rather than replace it. For any creator working with IP or community-driven content: what is the existing contract with your audience, and are you deepening it or betraying it?

Design content for the secondary ecosystem.

Kane engineered his work to generate theory videos and analysis content. He built a secondary media ecosystem into the structure of the primary work. What does your campaign generate beyond the campaign itself? What does the community do with your material? If the answer is nothing, you’ve left value on the table.

Let the medium match the mythology.

The fax machine. The no-clipping poster. The corner screen in China that makes you feel like you could walk into the room. The metro doors in Brazil lined with blue tape. Each of these works because it makes the Backrooms world bleed into the real one. If your IP has a world worth living in, your media placements can exist inside that world.

Find your lore-aware placements.

The Oshkosh billboard is not a standard roadside buy. It’s a media placement that means something to the people who already care, and generates earned media from the people who don’t yet know why it matters. Audience-first media planning isn’t just about reach. It’s about resonance.

Experiential with genuine stakes.

The Burbank pop-up worked because it gave the community a legitimate version of the thing they already wanted. Think about what your audience already does around your IP and build experiences that legitimise that behaviour rather than inventing new ones from scratch.

Platform-native paid.

The Popculturebrain boosted post. The Pluto TV commercial. The paid Esquire quote. None of these look like ads because they’re designed to be native to the environments they appear in. Paid budget amplifying earned-feeling content is the model.

Final Thoughts

The Backrooms story is, at its core, about what happens when a community builds something that no single person owns, and then the most talented member of that community is trusted - by a studio who recognised what they had - to bring it to a cinema screen without dismantling what made it special.

A24 then designed a campaign around that same principle. Every fax number, every Oshkosh billboard, every Wendigoon set visit, every Pluto TV commercial; all of it treated the community as a collaborator rather than a target demographic.

That’s not a playbook you can photocopy. But it is a philosophy. And it might be the most important shift happening in entertainment marketing right now.

I’ll be watching what Kane does next.

That’s The Harperverse breakdown of Backrooms.

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For related reading: Horror Marketing in 2026 • The Drama / A24 Marketing • How a 24-Year-Old Gen Z Watches Films • Lee Cronin’s The Mummy • How to Find Your Audience

~ most uncredited images will have been taken from the films TMDB page!

There’s something genuinely surreal about watching a show you grew up binging on Netflix - slightly too young and slightly too aware of how cool it was - graduate all the way into a 112-minute feature film with a world premiere in Birmingham, a BFI IMAX takeover, 50 global influencers in flat caps, and a Netflix partnership with a football club that was founded in Small Heath.

That is the Peaky Blinders story. Or at least, the marketing one.

I want to be clear about what this piece actually is, because it covers a lot of ground. Yes, there is a film - Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man - and yes, I’ll share my honest thoughts on it (including a Letterboxd review I wrote at the time).

But the thing I really want to dig into here is the journey. How a regional BBC drama became one of the most strategically marketed IPs in British television history, and how Netflix used this film as the culmination of over a decade of brand-building to turn the Shelby family into something that now genuinely competes with prestige American franchises on the global stage.

And before I forget, I’m also thrilled to be doing something a little different with this one.

I’m collaborating with from Hot Takes on Cinema, whose Substack is wonderful and who you should absolutely be reading. She reviewed The Immortal Man from a pure film criticism angle, and I’ve included a section of her take later in the piece because it’s genuinely one of the best write-ups I’ve read on it. More on the collaboration at the end.

Right. Let’s start at the beginning.

From BBC Two to the World: The Marketing Evolution of Peaky Blinders

If you were a Peaky fan in the early seasons - 2013, 2014 - you almost certainly didn’t discover it through a billboard or a Netflix algorithm. You heard about it from someone. A mate who wouldn’t stop going on about it. A family member who insisted you watch “just the first episode.”

That word-of-mouth quality was always baked into the show’s DNA, and the BBC knew it.

The early marketing strategy was hyper-local and deliberately grassroots. The BBC leaned heavily into Peaky’s West Midlands identity; “Made of Brum” was almost a positioning statement before it was ever a formal campaign. Billboards and posters were concentrated in the West Midlands, grounding the show in regional pride at a time when most British prestige drama was London-centric. If you were from Birmingham, this show was for you. It was about you.

The aesthetic was also part of the pitch from day one. The flat caps, the tailored suits, the razor-blade mythology; the BBC Creative team understood that this wasn’t just a costume drama, it was a lifestyle proposition. The cult started forming early, and the BBC essentially let it grow organically before nudging it.

The move that still stands out to me from that era is the fan art commission campaign for Series 5, and it’s worth spending a moment on. The BBC put out an open call, received over 1,000 submissions, selected 16 artists, paid each one £1,000, and used their work as the centrepiece of a nationwide out-of-home campaign.

As the BBC’s Chris Hooper put it at the time, the thinking was explicitly about harnessing existing fandom to bring new viewers in; the passion of the core audience as a conversion tool for casual ones.

The results were measurable. An estimated 789,000 pedestrians passed the murals during the campaign. Fans travelled from across the UK specifically to be photographed with them. BBC iPlayer broke records in Peaky’s month of transmission, with average weekly hours topping 30 million for the first time ever. YouGov data showed that BBC brand consideration among under-35s increased by 150% from the week before transmission to the week after Episode 1. That’s not a soft win. That’s a campaign that genuinely moved numbers.

I should say at this point that I was around for some of this, though on the younger and more peripheral end of it. I grew up in Leicester, not Birmingham, and was 13 going up to 17 during most of the BBC era. I’ve mostly watched via Netflix rather than iPlayer, which is actually quite telling in itself. At the time I was also far more interested in Game of Thrones and watched that via Sky/NOW, but Peaky was always in the background; something I knew was culturally significant even before I could fully articulate why.

The Netflix chapter changed everything.

Netflix acquired international distribution rights back in 2014. Internationally - and this is the detail that I didn’t know until I researched it and found it genuinely fascinating - they repackaged the show as a “Netflix Original.” Which it technically wasn’t. Not in the sense that Netflix developed, commissioned, or produced it. But in the sense that Netflix owned the international streaming rights exclusively, they could position it within their prestige catalogue alongside shows they had actually made. It was a branding manoeuvre as much as a distribution one.

From around Series 4 and 5, the Netflix recommendation engine would’ve begun to really kick in and that matters. You see, the algorithm would’ve had enough behavioural data by that point to start feeding Peaky Blinders to anyone who’d shown interest in British crime drama, prestige TV, or historical fiction; reaching even more audiences!

But the Peaky machine needed something to work with first, and what it had was organic; fan communities, Reddit threads, celebrity endorsements (Brad Pitt, Idris Elba, David Bowie reportedly asking Steven Knight to use his music, Snoop Dogg asking to meet Knight and apparently spending three hours talking about how the show reminded him of South Central LA). UGC and celeb validation gave the algorithm the signal it needed to move.

Netflix also, notably, started putting proper international paid media spend behind the show from Series 5 onwards - press, digital, paid social - capitalising on the organic success the show had already built rather than engineering it from scratch. Which is a genuinely smart sequencing decision.

Let the culture do the heavy lifting, then pour fuel on it once it’s already burning.

By the time the show reached the end of its run, the marketing evolution looked like this: local cult drama built on community and craft, scaled into a global lifestyle brand on the back of algorithmic discovery and Netflix’s prestige packaging, and then graduated into something more ambitious still; what I’d call a transmedia ecosystem.

The Peaky Blinders festivals in Digbeth (20,000 fans in 2019 alone), the Wahl grooming range, the Monopoly boards, the video games, the escape rooms, the grooming products, the real-world tourism pull (Black Country Living Museum has materially benefited from screen tourism linked to the show), the baby names Arthur and Ada ticking up in UK records in 2018; this was no longer just a show. It was a brand universe.

And The Immortal Man was the brand universe’s movie moment.

The Film: What Happened, and Why It Mattered

A quick bit of context before we get into the marketing, because the film itself is obviously the thing everything else is built around.

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man was released in UK cinemas on 6 March 2026, following its world premiere at Symphony Hall in Birmingham on 2 March, before arriving on Netflix on 20 March. Directed by Tom Harper (no relation sadly) from a screenplay by series creator Steven Knight, it runs 112 minutes and is set during the Birmingham Blitz in November 1940. Cillian Murphy returns as Tommy Shelby, joined by Barry Keoghan as Duke Shelby (Tommy’s son), Sophie Rundle as Ada Thorne, Rebecca Ferguson as Kaulo Chiriklo, and Tim Roth as John Beckett; a Nazi agent whose counterfeit money plot forms the backbone of the thriller narrative.

I’ll come back to the film itself through my own review and then through Marie’s shortly. But the key thing to understand about the film’s position in the franchise is this: it is both a finale and a launchpad.

It concludes Tommy Shelby’s story, but it deliberately sets up a next generation of Shelbys - Duke & Charles - who will carry the IP forward in a sequel series. That dual function shaped the marketing in ways that are worth unpacking.

Seeing It for Yourself: My Letterboxd Review

So, I went to see The Immortal Man at Picturehouse Central at Piccadilly Circus for the limited theatrical release, and I logged it on Letterboxd. Here’s what I wrote:

Where do I begin? The positives first: the soundtrack is bloody amazing, the cinematography is insane, and of course Cillian Murphy and the supporting cast - though it’s Cillian who steals the whole show.

The film does a lot of things you probably expect it to do, yet it’s welcomed in with the hope it’ll shock you in other places. The first half focuses heavily on where we left the series - a lot has happened, a refresher probably would’ve been good - and takes us through a journey of trauma and discovery as we watch a hollowed-out Tommy Shelby mope around (in a good way, Cillian owns this completely) until his lack of action catches up with him and his family.

The second half is all action. The climax feels expected based on everything that’s been set up, yet it didn’t land the way I hoped.

My main gripe is Duke. Can we please leave the sad boy/daddy issues trope in the past. Keoghan is not a bad actor by any means, but his character has no qualities you can actually latch onto or like. He feels bratty, whiny, a boy with the world at his fingertips because of his father, and by the end that’s still exactly the case. Everything falls into his lap and he has no idea what to do with it except scheme to look better than a man who was absent for most of his life.

And here’s the thing: if Netflix had gone with another season rather than a film, most of this could have been developed properly. A season would’ve allowed the pacing for real character work and better long-term storytelling, rather than squeezing a bunch of subplots and characters into what is supposed to be a farewell for Tommy and the remaining Shelby’s.

Apart from that main gripe, I don’t have huge issues with it. It’s a good film. It’s just obvious that this should’ve been another season or limited series (like a tie-in for Duke), and that this is trying to set up a newer, younger generation of the Peaky Blinders. Personally, I’m not too bothered about following along right now as I don’t think this warrants a continuation, and that comes from someone who is usually all for continuing stories where they make sense; that’s the kicker, where they make sense. If they can come up with a compelling enough story and advertise it well, I’m all ears!

Oh and did I forget to mention Barry Keoghan made a surprise appearance, just before the film started? That was cool. He was still rocking the Ringo haircut under his flat cap too.

A Different Lens: Marie from Hot Takes on Cinema

This is where the piece gets a bit different, because I want to share Marie’s take here; not as a replacement for my own, but as a complement. I’m collaborating with her on this one, and her review of The Immortal Man is sharp, nuanced, and covers territory that I think sits perfectly alongside a marketing breakdown.

Marie writes Hot Takes on Cinema over on Substack, and you should follow her.

Hot Takes on Cinema

Your tasting menu of movies and TV shows, with notes on flavour, texture, and aftertaste

By Marie-Theres Carl

She does proper, considered film criticism, the kind where you come away feeling like you understand something better than you did before.

Her full review is ‘Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man’ stumbles into greatness, and we’ll both be cross-posting for our respective audiences. But here’s a flavour of where she landed, because it resonated:

She opened by describing the film as arriving “like an old family curse in a new suit,” which is honestly one of the best lines written about Peaky Blinders full stop. She was initially unconvinced a return to the story was necessary, but came away having to admit the razor still cuts.

Her read on Cillian Murphy aligns completely with mine. She notes his face conveys everything the dialogue tries to state outright, often ten minutes earlier and then lands the killer observation that the film’s tendency to over-explain Tommy’s emotional wound, is what frustrates her most. We know. The room knows. The wallpaper probably knows.

On Barry Keoghan, she’s more generous than I was but arrives at a similar structural complaint. She found him good but his character written as “so brutal, so careless and, at times, so plainly foolish that he feels less like a person and more like a problem that the film intends to solve later.” She also notes - as a fun fact worth including - that Murphy was reportedly instrumental in casting Keoghan, personally reaching out about the role. Which makes the father-son tension feel even more deliberate, even if the writing doesn’t always give Duke the complexity to match it.

Her favourite scene is the one I’d also point to: the mud fight.

She describes it as raw and ugly, strangely funny in its indignity, and “emotionally charged in a way that the film desperately needs.” The sequence becomes even more memorable, she notes, when you find out it was shot on location in real mud with actual pig faeces. Glamour, thy name is Birmingham.

Her conclusion: “powerful, albeit flawed.” Not every choice works. But the ending knows exactly where to cut.

I think that’s fair. And I think the two readings - mine as someone emotionally invested in the Shelby legacy and impatient with the setup for what comes next, hers as someone coming in more as a pure film critic - capture the film’s genuine duality pretty well.

The Marketing: How Netflix Brought the King Home

Right. This is the bit I’ve been building towards.

What Netflix and the Peaky Blinders team did for The Immortal Man is not a standard film marketing campaign. It’s a case study in what happens when you have over a decade of brand equity, a passionate global fanbase, a genuinely iconic character in Tommy Shelby, and a marketing team willing to treat the whole thing as a cultural event rather than just a release.

Let me walk through the layers.

The World Premiere in Birmingham

This one feels symbolic first, strategic second; it’s actually both.

The world premiere for The Immortal Man was held at Symphony Hall in Birmingham on 2 March, with a red carpet outside the venue set against the backdrop of the water fountain; a space I know fairly well from living in Birmingham early in my marketing career. The production team dressed it with sandbags and World War Two era props to immerse attendees in the film’s setting. A drone flythrough of the red carpet was shared by Netflix and clocked over 240k likes on Instagram, whilst the same red carpet static images as captured above clocked in 382k likes on Insta!

Cillian Murphy introduced the film alongside the cast, talking about how this all began as a little show on BBC Two and ended here, at a world premiere in the city where it all started. His sign-off: “Just watch the f---ing film now.” Which is about as on-brand a send off as you could ask for.

But the choice to host the premiere in Birmingham was also a brand signal. The show has always claimed Birmingham as part of its identity, and bringing the global press call back to the city - rather than Leicester Square or Leicester Square-adjacent - reinforced the authenticity of that claim. It also meant that local pride was activated as part of the campaign and locals felt the weight of it.

And whilst the occasion was about the fans, it appears as though local celebrities also turned up for the event; Jon Haggerty showing up, for instance. The BBC also reported on others in attendance such as Duran Duran’s John Taylor, Birmingham City and Strictly Come Dancing’s Karen Carney, and Aston Villa players Jadon Sancho, Ezri Konsa, Tammy Abraham and Morgan Rogers. Now, if this doesn’t tell you something about how far-reaching the Peaky cultural footprint has become then I don’t know what will!

Out-of-Home: From Bus Stops to the BFI IMAX

Netflix went big on OOH for this one, and the spend signals that this wasn’t a tentative marketing investment; it was a statement.

The headline media buy for the UK was the BFI IMAX. A full exterior wrap on the largest cinema screen in the country, reading “The King Returns” alongside The Immortal Man imagery, which is both functionally a film advertisement and symbolically a declaration of stature. The BFI IMAX stands 20 metres high and 26 metres wide, roughly the height of five double-decker buses. It doesn’t just reach an audience, it signals an event.

The strategic smarts here is worth noting: not only was the format purchased, but Cillian Murphy and Steven Knight both appeared at the BFI for a Q&A around the release. So the building had Tommy Shelby’s face on it, and inside that building, the man who plays Tommy Shelby was talking about why this story matters. That’s what coherent campaign thinking looks like in practice.

Beyond the IMAX, bus stops appeared nationally to again land both the limited theatrical release and the Netflix premiere of 20 March; straightforward, effective, nationally scalable. I personally spotted the above shelter, which is the kind of thing that tends to make you realise the reach of a proper OOH buy.

And of course, Birmingham would have received its own coverage too; how could it not, given the film’s connection to the city? As Blow Up Media kindly shared; Netflix built a campaign spanning Giant Posters in the UK, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Barry Keoghan at the Piccadilly Screening, and Other Chance Encounters

Now, whilst the above example is not relevant to my following point, I thought I’d treat you to some more BTS featuring Keoghan. Anyway, this one is more personal but worth sharing, because it captures something about how The Immortal Man campaign operated at the ground level.

As you know, I went to Picturehouse Central for the limited theatrical release, and Barry Keoghan turned up. He gave a brief speech. Told us to enjoy the film. That was it. It was fast and unpretentious and weirdly perfect for a campaign that seemed to understand the value of the unannounced, restrained moment.

Then a few weeks later I bumped into him again at a boxing club. Still rocking the Ringo Starr mop. No press. No event. Just Barry Keoghan existing in London.

I mention this not to name-drop but because it illustrates something about the energy of this campaign. It felt embedded in culture in a way that wasn’t purely manufactured. Some of it was. But some of it was just the show’s cast being real people who live in the world.

The Birmingham City FC Partnership

This is honestly one of my favourite activations from the whole campaign, because it’s so contextually clean.

Netflix partnered with Birmingham City FC for a matchday takeover on 3 April: Blues vs Blackburn Rovers at St. Andrew’s Knighthead Park. The announcement was made alongside a bespoke Peaky/football video featuring actual BCFC players.

BCFC’s own statement framed it perfectly: “The Club and Netflix share an authentic and powerful connection through Peaky Blinders, the internationally acclaimed series and now film, set against the industrial heartland of Birmingham. Rooted in the city’s history and created by lifelong Blues supporter Steven Knight...”

The connections between the two run deep. Peaky Blinders is set primarily in Small Heath; original home of Birmingham City FC. The club was founded in 1875 as the Small Heath Alliance. Steven Knight, who created the show, is a lifelong Blues supporter. Tommy Shelby, according to Knight, would absolutely be a Birmingham City fan. The club has previously reverted to its “Small Heath Alliance” branding for special matchdays as a nod to this history.

The activation included fan zones, character interactions, immersive experiences, iconic imagery throughout the ground and fans were of course encouraged to turn up in baker boy hats!

Name a more perfect partnership. I genuinely can’t. It’s smart, it’s on brand, it’s deeply contextual, and it rewards long-term fans while making the release feel like a community event rather than just a product launch. BCFC fans will remember this matchday, which is exactly the point.

In similar news, it looks like they also did a partnered photo shoot with Ousmane Dembélé, the French professional footballer who plays for Paris Saint-Germain; Aura!

50 Global Creators: The DDA Influencer Campaign

For the launch weekend in Birmingham, Netflix worked with DDA Global to manage over 50 global creators as part of a wider creator programme, including overseeing talent at the world premiere and afterparty.

The weekend was structured with intent. It kicked off with a welcome mixer, then a visit to Digbeth’s Loc. Studios to see the Garrison pub set, which is a genuinely smart choice of activation venue, because it’s not just a studio tour, it’s an emotional touchpoint for fans. Creators then participated in a “Becoming Tommy” workshop, sat down for a Shelby Family Dinner and drinks reception, and the following day got premiere-ready at Small Heath Bespoke Tailoring & Barber Shop; getting a “Tommy trim” or “Ada-inspired styling,” embroidering flat caps and braces with their initials.

Then there were exclusive creator junket interviews with Barry Keoghan, Steven Knight, Tom Harper, and Antony Genn, managed end-to-end by DDA.

What you end up with is 50 global creators who didn’t just attend an event, but lived in the Peaky world for a weekend. Their content wouldn’t just appear as promotional, it would come across more personal. The stuff they made felt like genuine memory, not sponsored posts. And having that army of creators in period attire descending on the premiere is, as I noted in my research, a powerful visual in itself; the unity and solidarity of it. Very Peaky, actually.

It also did something smart geographically: it brought global talent to Birmingham at a moment when the city was already culturally activated. The creators’ content amplified Birmingham as much as it amplified the film.

The Companion Podcast

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man Podcast is a six-episode companion series hosted by Packy Lee - who plays Johnny Dogs in the show - and broadcaster Edith Bowman. Guests across the run include Cillian Murphy, Steven Knight, Sophie Rundle, Rebecca Ferguson, Barry Keoghan, and Tim Roth. Episodes run roughly 30 minutes each.

You can stream or download it on Netflix (video version, behind the subscription wall), Spotify, and Apple Podcasts (audio, free).

That last bit is the interesting part. The fact the audio version is accessible for free on Spotify and Apple - with Netflix branding throughout - means the podcast functions as a funnel. You don’t need to be a paying Netflix subscriber to access it, which removes a barrier for people who have lapsed, cancelled, or never subscribed. It’s a free entry point into the Peaky world that points back towards subscribing.

A clip of Barry Keoghan from the podcast - “Texting Cillian on Father’s Day and then playing his son is pure manifestation” - picked up over 124k likes on Instagram before the film even officially released on 20 March. The official podcast trailer clocked 210,000 views on YouTube.

As a format, the companion podcast is part of a wider trend we’re seeing from streaming platforms right now; adapting the traditional talk show / making-of format for on-demand audio audiences. Netflix doing this for Peaky signals they’re serious about treating the franchise as an extended media event rather than just a single release.

Behind the Scenes Content: Mud, Paint, and the Authentic Internet

Not all of the best content from the Immortal Man campaign came from Netflix’s official accounts. Some of the most resonant stuff came from the people who actually made the film.

The Netflix UK post of the BTS mud fight scene between Cillian Murphy and Barry Keoghan racked up 333,000+ likes on Instagram alone, and the caption did a lot of the work: “Their first day on set and it’s THIS scene.” It strips away the mythology and shows two actors covered in what turns out to be real mud and actual pig faeces; flagged by Marie in her review as a genuine fact, talk about method acting taking a smelly turn!

Then there’s the scenic painter, which I found so interesting. A crew member working as a scenic painter on the production posted a video walking through their location paint work; painting over modern road markings, ageing brickwork and shutters to make 2026 Birmingham look like 1940 Birmingham. The caption: “It’s not always glamorous, painting in all weather and regularly painting the road…but we always make it look good.” Showcasing the Production Designer (Jacqueline Abrahams) and Head Painter (Imogen Peers) by name.

I love this because it’s a reminder that the craft behind these productions is enormous and largely invisible. People make careers and livelihoods out of this work. More of it should be shared. The UGC from crew as well as cast is an underused vein of authentic content that audiences genuinely respond to. It humanises the production in ways that polished behind-the-scenes packagers can’t quite replicate.

Peaky Fashion, Influencers, and the Lifestyle Vein

One of the constants in Peaky’s identity as a brand - through the BBC era and into the Netflix era - is fashion. The Shelby aesthetic is genuinely aspirational in a way that’s almost absurd when you think about it: it’s a gang from 1920s Birmingham, and men across the world have given themselves the Tommy Shelby haircut (I have, multiple times, some more extreme than others). The suit, the flat cap, the baker boy hat aren’t costumes, they’re things people actually wear unironically!

The influencer engagement around The Immortal Man leaned into this hard. Damien Broderick, for instance, styled a full Peaky outfit and posted it around the release period; not necessarily in a formal partnership, but as someone who clearly felt the aesthetic was worth engaging with on its own terms. When an influencer’s audience is built partly on personal style and smart dressing, Peaky Blinders is an easy reference point, and the film’s release gave everyone an excuse to reach for it.

Rambert’s The Redemption of Thomas Shelby

This one sits slightly outside the Immortal Man campaign proper but deserves a mention as a marker of how expansive the Peaky brand universe had already become before the film arrived.

Rambert, the dance company, staged a full theatre production - The Redemption of Thomas Shelby - written by Steven Knight, with direction and choreography by Rambert’s Artistic Director Benoit Swan Pouffer. It tells Tommy’s World War One story through contemporary dance, with a live on-stage band performing specially commissioned music by Roman GianArthur alongside iconic Peaky tracks from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Radiohead, Anna Calvi, The Last Shadow Puppets, Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes, and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.

The production toured UK theatres and is now available on BBC iPlayer.

This is transmedia storytelling with actual range. Not just merchandise or gaming integrations, but a serious arts organisation adapting the IP through a completely different medium, for a completely different audience, commissioned by the IP’s own creator. The fact that it’s now on iPlayer means it’s also a piece of discovery content; someone can come to Peaky through the ballet before they ever watch the series.

The Murals: Art, Place, and the Long Game

Birmingham does murals. This is just a fact about the city. If you’ve spent any time in Digbeth - which I did, for a chunk of my early marketing career, working in the Custard Factory - you’ll know that murals are a constant presence. They’re on walls, in car parks, across industrial spaces. They stay for a long time. They even create their own footfall.

The BBC’s fan art commission campaign for Series 5 was one earlier version of this; commissioning artists to make murals and OOH pieces that doubled as genuine cultural artefacts. For the final series, there was also a dedicated mural, and the tradition of Peaky visual art in Birmingham is deep enough that it’s become part of the city’s aesthetic identity.

This is different from a standard OOH campaign in one important way: it’s craft, not just media. People stop in front of murals. They photograph them. They share them. They return to see how they’re weathering. A mural of Tommy Shelby in Digbeth is also, in some sense, a piece of Birmingham’s story told back to the people who live there.

What Comes Next: The Future of the Franchise

The Immortal Man was always designed as a bridge, not just an ending. The film concludes Tommy Shelby’s story in a way that works on its own terms; as Marie puts it, it allows him to become “a wound in a nice suit, handed down through the generations like valuable family heirlooms that nobody has the courage to sell.” But it simultaneously set up the next chapter.

In May 2026, it was confirmed that a sequel series is in development; two new six-episode seasons, set in post-war Birmingham in the early 1950s. The show will follow the next generation of Shelby’s: Jamie Bell has been cast as Duke Shelby (recast from Keoghan, which is interesting in itself), and Charlie Heaton will play Tommy’s youngest son, Charles. Steven Knight’s statement: “Once again, it will be rooted in Birmingham and will tell the story of a city rising from the ashes of the Birmingham Blitz. The new generation of Shelby’s have taken the wheel, and it will be a hell of a ride.”

My honest take on this?

Peaky Blinders was never going to go away. It’s too valuable to Netflix, too important to Birmingham, and too beloved a brand for anyone involved to simply close the file. The IP carries genuine global equity: Snoop Dogg chatting to Knight for three hours. Brad Pitt. David Beckham’s Peaky-inspired line at Kent & Curwen. A fanbase in Brazil, Indonesia, South Korea. None of that disappears when Tommy Shelby exits the stage.

But I do have some scepticism about the sequel. I obviously didn’t love the younger generation characters in the film, Duke in particular felt underdeveloped in a way that makes me less excited about a whole series built around him. I preferred the original cast, the original texture, and I genuinely don’t see what story needs to be told that Tommy’s world didn’t already tell.

That said: recasting Duke with Jamie Bell is a significant swing, and bringing in Charlie Heaton alongside him suggests Netflix is taking the new cast seriously. I might show up. I just don’t think I’ll be doing it with the same anticipation I had for the original series.

Industry Takeaways

I want to close the marketing analysis with a few observations that feel genuinely applicable beyond just this campaign, because I think the Peaky Blinders marketing evolution is one of the better case studies going for how a British IP can be built and scaled without losing its soul.

Local Roots Are a Global Asset, Not a Limitation

Every time the Peaky campaign went hyper-local - the BBC’s Birmingham billboards, the fan art murals in Digbeth, the premiere at Symphony Hall, the BCFC matchday takeover - it paradoxically made the IP feel more universal. Authenticity travels. A show that is genuinely, specifically from somewhere reads as more real than a show that could be from anywhere. Netflix understood this when they inherited the brand: they didn’t try to sand off the Birmingham edges, they amplified them.

Fan-First Strategies Build the Equity That Algorithms Then Multiply

The BBC spent years building genuine fan investment - the art commissions, the festivals, the cult positioning - before Netflix’s recommendation engine had enough data to turbocharge it. The organic fandom came first. The algorithmic scale came second. This is a sequencing lesson: you can’t buy the kind of trust that makes a brand resilient. You have to earn it, and then the spend amplifies what’s already there.

Companion Content as Franchise Infrastructure

The podcast, the Rambert dance production, the behind-the-scenes content ecosystem aren’t extras. They’re how a franchise stays alive between release windows and becomes genuinely transmedia rather than just multi-platform. Different audience entry points. Different emotional modes. The same story world, experienced differently depending on who you are and where you come from.

Let the Craft Speak

The scenic painter’s Instagram video. The mud fight BTS. Appearing for Q&A’s at the BFI. The realest content in this campaign wasn’t scripted or managed. It came from people who cared about what they were making and shared it. That content, in aggregate, communicates something no official marketing can: this was made by people who gave a damn.

A Note on the Collaboration

As mentioned at the top, this piece is a collaboration with Marie from Hot Takes on Cinema - I’d love you to check out her writing if you don’t already. She reviews films with real rigour and warmth, and her full review of The Immortal Man can be found here. We’re cross-posting for our respective audiences, and I’m grateful she was up for doing something a bit different with this one.

If you enjoyed this breakdown - the film analysis, the marketing deep dive, the transmedia lens - consider subscribing. The Harperverse is where I write about how stories become worlds and brands become universes. More of this to come.

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~ most uncredited images will have been taken from the films TMDB page!

There’s a phrase that gets thrown around in sport - and apparently in Hollywood - called a Hail Mary. The desperate, end-of-game throw into the end zone with no guarantee anyone’s catching it. You do it because you have to.

Because there’s nothing left to lose.

That’s also - in a roundabout way - the context Amazon MGM Studios found themselves in prior to releasing Project Hail Mary. Now, that’s not to say they were giving up on theatrical by any means. Far from it in fact. It’s just that they’d already tried, invested, and hadn’t broken through yet with their previous attempts.

Mercy and Crime 101. Costly lessons rather than outright disasters, but hardly the proof of concept a studio needs when it's trying to convince a sceptical exhibition industry that it's serious about theatrical releases.

So when Mike Hopkins, head of Prime Video & Amazon MGM Studios, stood on stage at CinemaCon and told a room full of theatre owners “our ambition for theatrical film is in the top half of the first inning”, it could have easily been dismissed as little more than PR rhetoric.

And, to be fair, theatre owners had every right to take a wait-and-see approach. The good news for Amazon was that they didn’t have to wait long to see those words put into action.

As Project Hail Mary opened to $140.9 million globally in its first weekend - $80.6 million domestically - becoming Amazon MGM’s biggest opening ever, and only the second original, non-franchise, non-sequel film in the past decade to crack $80 million on debut. An A CinemaScore. 95% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics. 96% audience score.

A Hail Mary that actually landed.

Before I jump in and get to the all important breakdown you’re here for, please do consider subscribing if you haven’t already!

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Now, I’m not only just going to be breaking down what happened here. I’ll be looking to show you why it worked, how Amazon MGM pulled it off, and what it means for anyone fascinated by the business of entertainment, audience-building, and how stories get sold in 2026.

So we’ll be diving into:

• The numbers, the audience, and the wider context that turned Project Hail Mary from another release into a genuine industry story

• How Amazon MGM actually built this campaign, from media strategy and channel selection to the thinking behind the execution

• The social media and influencer playbook that helped separate this from almost every other blockbuster campaign in recent memory

• The out-of-home activations, immersive experiences, and press moments - including the Shard stunt I somehow missed and still haven’t forgiven myself for

• The collaborations, brand partnerships, and Amazon ecosystem advantages that only a company like Amazon can bring to the table

• The transmedia foundations being laid beneath the surface, quietly building something that could become much bigger than a single film

Let’s get into it!

The Numbers, the Context, and Why This Is an Industry Story

First, the facts. Project Hail Mary is an adaptation of Andy Weir’s 2021 novel - the same writer behind The Martian - directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and produced by and starring Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, a science teacher who wakes up alone on a spaceship with no memory and a mission to save the sun.

The film had a reported production budget in the $200 million range. Add a P&A spend estimated to be significant (think comparable to other tentpole-level releases), and you’re looking at a substantial bet for a studio whose previous theatrical attempts had underperformed. But they swung hard, and it paid off.

$140.9 million globally on opening weekend. A minimal 32% drop in week two; in post-COVID box office terms, is remarkable, because it signals audiences were coming back because of word-of-mouth, not just opening weekend hype. The film crossed $300 million in ten days and had reached roughly $433 million worldwide by early April 2026. By any measure, this is a genuine hit.

More importantly for the industry conversation, Paul Dergarabedian of Comscore called the film and its rollout a “textbook example” of how to harness the power of a legacy studio (MGM) alongside a modern streamer (Amazon). That framing matters, because what we’re really witnessing isn’t just a good movie doing well. It’s proof of concept for a studio model that had yet to demonstrate it could work at this level.

And one more number worth holding: CinemaScore A. In a summer increasingly dominated by franchise fatigue and audience scepticism, PHM held the room and pocketed early before anyone else really even entered. Literally speaking, audiences were laughing, gasping, leaning forward, cheering for Rocky and Grace. I watched it in a smaller screening here in London and felt the communal energy. That shared experience, which streaming genuinely cannot replicate, is what drove those week-two numbers.

The Audience: Who They Went After, and How They Found Them

Before we talk tactics, let’s talk targeting. Because one of the most interesting things about Project Hail Mary’s campaign is how deliberately they thought about who this film was for, and how deliberately they went after multiple audience groups at once rather than picking a lane.

The most obvious angle is the existing fanbase. Andy Weir’s novel had already sold millions of copies, and The Martian had done the groundwork of proving that scientifically-grounded, character-driven sci-fi could be both critically acclaimed and commercially successful. So BookTok was an active part of the plan; more on that when we get to social.

But what made this campaign genuinely interesting was the family angle. As Simon Pulman wrote on LinkedIn after the opening weekend: Project Hail Mary is one of the first films in a long time that a family could attend without hesitation, knowing they’d walk out uplifted. No bad language, no divisive politics, no overt scariness, just an enormously entertaining story that works for adults and children without condescending to either. That 80s/90s family blockbuster feeling, which studios essentially abandoned in favour of superhero spectacle, is back. And Rocky - more on him shortly - is a huge part of why.

The campaign also went deep into what the Hollywood Reporter described as “faith and family, multicultural, and science/tech communities.” They partnered specifically with NASA, ran HBCU-focused programming with Spelman College’s speech and debate team, and targeted audiences through community screenings in ways that felt earned rather than performative.

Then there’s the “literally me” contingent; the Ryan Gosling effect. Gosling carries a very specific cultural weight right now. His persona - self-aware, understated, unexpectedly funny, somehow simultaneously hyper-masculine and deeply uncool in the most appealing way - is essentially baked into the DNA of Ryland Grace as a character. As one rival studio executive noted to THR: “His humor, intelligence, and understated charisma are embedded in the DNA of the film.” Which is convenient when your lead actor is also a hands-on creative partner in the marketing campaign.

The combination of book readers, families, science communities, Ryan Gosling stans, and Gen Z meme culture meant that PHM had multiple legitimate reasons to be on your timeline.

That cross-demographic reach is not an accident, it’s the result of a marketing team, led by Amazon Studios’ head of global marketing Sue Kroll - a Warner Bros. veteran who famously turned Saltburn into a multigenerational viral hit on Prime Video by trusting instinct over data, and who now had the same brief applied to a $150M+ theatrical gamble - thinking carefully about each audience layer and building a campaign that could speak to all of them without feeling muddled.

How They Actually Marketed It: Media Planning, Channels, and the Campaign Architecture

Let me be honest: the PHM campaign didn’t reinvent the traditional tentpole playbook. It did the traditional things really well, and then bolted on a social-first, creator-driven layer that most blockbuster campaigns are still struggling to master.

The traditional foundation was solid. Press tours in London, Paris, and Mexico City. Press junkets at science-centric locations - JPL and the Griffith Observatory - which doubled as both media moments and visual storytelling about the film’s real-world credibility. Talk show rounds. The global premiere in Leicester Square, which got beautiful b-roll content with a CGI Rocky dropped into the footage so he appeared to be walking the red carpet alongside Gosling. Smart, inexpensive, highly shareable.

The Super Bowl spot. The Winter Olympics sneak peek. A moment during the NFL NFC Championship game where Gosling recorded a promotional video specifically about the concept of the Hail Mary in sport and in life; genius, because it takes the film’s title and turns it into a literal piece of sports programming. That’s the kind of contextual thinking that makes a media buy feel more like earned content.

The Kelce brothers’ podcast appearance was another smart placement. Not a traditional chat show, but a massive reach play into the NFL-adjacent audience that crossed directly into the sports/Hail Mary concept already embedded in the campaign’s DNA; appreciate you for the heads up on this example (see his post here)!

The IMAX positioning also deserves its own mention, because it wasn’t just an exhibition strategy, it was the marketing message. “Filmed for IMAX” became a selling point that reached specific audiences (the premium cinema crowd, the tech-curious, the Gosling fans who would happily pay more for the experience) and also gave the campaign visual language that was inherently more cinematic than a standard theatrical release. Gosling even recorded a “core memory experience” piece of content about working with the IMAX team behind the film, which then circulated as social content. One asset, multiple functions.

A Quick Pit Stop: IMAX Did What?

Before we get to paid digital, I need to give IMAX their own moment because they’ve genuinely earned it, and because 2026 is shaping up to be a historically significant year for the format anyway; The Odyssey is on the horizon! PHM was one of the loudest proponents of the IMAX experience this cycle, and the supporting campaign around it was creative enough to warrant its own short breakdown.

Starting with the organic social content, because IMAX’s own account has been quietly doing excellent work. The reel showcasing how they physically load PHM onto 70MM IMAX film - the actual mechanical process, the sheer scale of the reels - is exactly the kind of behind-the-scenes content that’s increasingly infiltrating feeds like mine for good reason. It’s not just for film nerds either. There’s a whole maker/craft community that finds process content like this genuinely compelling, and IMAX are smart to feed that instinct.

Then there’s the static meme - “Space is big. Your screen should be too” - which is simple, shareable, and does the entire brand argument in eight words. Stick that on a post with the right key art and you’ve done more persuasion work than most 30-second spots.

But the real headline from the IMAX side of this campaign is genuinely one of the more outrageous stunts I’ve seen in a while: PHM became the first film trailer to premiere in the stratosphere!

A bespoke IMAX display unit was launched 101,000 feet above Earth, with footage playing against the curvature of the planet beneath it. I’ll be honest, when I first clocked this I had to re-read it twice. It’s completely unnecessary. It’s also completely brilliant.

That’s not a media buy. That’s a piece of news. Every outlet that covers space, cinema, or technology has a reason to write about it, and the earned media value of that single stunt almost certainly outweighs whatever it cost to execute.

And then - because apparently the stratosphere wasn’t ambitious enough - PHM claimed the record for the highest altitude launch and retrieval of a LEGO set, naturally featuring the PHM LEGO set itself. (Daily Mail Instagram) At this point I’m starting to wonder if there’s a dedicated “world record” line item in the P&A budget, and honestly, good.

Saying that though, I do sense a common theme; Masters of the Universe Shatters Records Even Before Release. Best believe I’ll be showcasing this in my MOTU piece later this year too!

On the influencer side, IMAX appear to have sent out PHM-themed gift boxes to creators - complete with the LEGO set, the book, a knitted Earth (love this), and a poster. Contextually perfect gifting, and a reminder that influencer seeding isn’t only the studio’s job. The exhibitor can play that game too when the campaign is worth leaning into. I’d very much like one of those boxes, for what it’s worth. Manifesting ;)

Then there’s the projectionists’ POV content; two different examples of projection booth footage that capture the sheer physical difference in scale between IMAX and a standard screen. The second one in particular, with the red Astrophage particles filling the frame, capture that iconic 2001: A Space Odyssey feel, definitely not an accidental association for a film this visually ambitious. And yes, someone made a meme about whether your TV at home could replicate the experience. No. It cannot. Sit down.

IMAX also dropped their own PHM merch, branded tees, available globally. Small note to IMAX’s UX team: if you’re shipping internationally, please sort the USD to GBP currency display. We’re spending the money, we just want to know how much of it we’re spending before checkout. This is a minor gripe but a real one.

All in all, the IMAX campaign surrounding PHM is a simple reminder that exhibition can be a genuine marketing partner rather than just a passive screen on which the film plays. When IMAX brings their own creative energy, their own influencer seeding, their own social content, and their own world-record stunts to a release, it multiplies the campaign’s reach in ways that don’t come out of the studio’s P&A budget. That’s a relationship worth nurturing, and PHM is the proof of concept.

Now, back to the usual scheduling with paid digital - YouTube pre-rolls, social video, trailer bites - which was obviously always going to be a key part of the plan. I personally saw the YouTube unskippable ads running in the wild, and they were well-targeted. The trailers themselves work because they sell the world-ending stakes, the last-ditch effort to save the planet and the universe, being a somewhat regular person who’s unqualified and chucked into said situation, and then of course the friendship between Gosling and Rocky (human and alien) without over-explaining the plot. You don’t really need to know the full premise, you just need to know there are high stakes & see those two characters together and want more.

Preview screenings (the “dark” period before the official UK release on March 19th that confused people on Reddit, myself included) were a smart deployment of a classic tactic. Running special early-access viewings on the 14th and 15th in the UK, then going dark before the full theatrical rollout, created a cycle of early word-of-mouth from passionate fans who then reported back to their networks before the opening weekend. The studios know what they’re doing here, word of mouth remains the single most effective driver of cinema attendance, consistently above any paid medium.

Social Media: Where This Campaign Actually Won

Okay. Here’s where things get genuinely interesting, and where PHM separates itself from every other blockbuster marketing campaign of the past decade.

I want to quote again here, because he put it cleanly:

He’s right, and I want to go further.

The central piece of the social strategy was Gosling himself; not as a talking head doing press, but as an active participant in creating shareable content. The “Ryan Gosling Believes in the Hail Mary” viral video series was the spine of this.

One of the more famous examples that got picked up early, was Gosling throwing an actual football ‘through’ the giant Randy’s Donuts sign in LA. It picked up a lot of traction online, with reshares and critiques. Not because it was expensive. Not because it was complicated. Because it was committed, absurd, and perfectly on-brand for both the film and the man; plus it was just before the Super Bowl Trailer was supposed to debut.

The Jeopardy! skit - Gosling appearing in a promotional segment as the reigning champion before answering Final Jeopardy with “I don’t know?” raked in views. A scripted bit designed to mimic the kind of last-resort, nothing-to-lose energy that the film’s title embodies. Clever and incredibly cost-effective in terms of reach per pound.

Then there’s the La La Land crossover, which might be my favourite piece of content from the whole campaign. Gosling throws a Hail Mary to “fix” the La La Land movie poster in honour of the film’s 10th anniversary; the post was shared simultaneously by both the PHM and La La Land accounts, pulling in both audiences. Over 1.1 million likes on Instagram. A reimagined version of the poster they created alongside it pulled 418k. That’s leverage without a big budget; it’s just smart IP thinking.

Rocky, crucially, was everywhere on social, and not in a passive “here’s the character” way. He appeared in countdown videos alongside Gosling (who even wore the same fit for multiple pieces, clearly all shot on the same day, which tells you something about the efficiency of the content production). Rocky appeared in the Leicester Square premiere footage via CGI. He bought his own cinema tickets. He interacted with a live stream that pulled nearly 1 million likes on a video of him watching Gosling sleep. He danced with influencer Kelladactyl across LA. He got his own trading cards, a Rocky plush, and a Cinemark shoulder buddy. This is the Grogu playbook in action - a secondary character who becomes the primary emotional hook and merchandising engine - and executed at a blockbuster scale.

The r/ProjectHailMary subreddit is worth pausing on here, because it tells you something organic is happening. People building 3D-printed Rocky models. Full LEGO set recreations. Meme threads and scene breakdowns. A fandom forming in real time around a film that hadn’t even finished its theatrical run. That’s not something you can manufacture; you can create the conditions for it though, and PHM did just that.

Influencer-wise, the campaign mixed broad and niche really well. Cleo Abram - 3 million followers on Instagram alone, passionate about science, established on BookTok - got a paid partnership to share her take on the real science in the film. It’s pretty standard paid creator work, but the rationale is sound: she’s contextually perfect for this film, and her reach into the science-curious audience is genuine. The post was then boosted as a paid ad, which is how you turn creator content into a full-funnel media asset rather than just a single organic hit.

On a similar contextual logic: Adam Savage from Tested donning the PHM spacesuit and walking through the film’s practical sets. His audience - builders, makers, sceptics, former Mythbusters fans - is exactly the group that would ordinarily raise an eyebrow at CGI-heavy sci-fi. Giving them behind-the-scenes access to a film that shot its alien suit practically is the right content for the right creator. It converts the credibility-conscious viewer.

@jeremylynchIf Hollywood movies used Gen Z slang 😂 #ProjectHailMary. Only in cinemas and IMAX now!

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Then there’s also Jeremy Lynch, a different beast entirely. a UK-based football and content creator who’s been around long enough to cost a pretty penny. Must have been worth it though because the content he created with Gosling landed hard: a simple clip of Gosling kicking a real football high into the sky, Lynch catching it and returning it (77k likes), and the Gen Z slang reimagining of the PHM script which hit 950k likes (on Insta) and is still pinned to the top of his feed. Other influencers commented with their own takes, Jake Paul included. The comment “you could spend half a million dollars on a commercial and it wouldn’t be better than this” had 70k likes alone. That comment ironically must be the brief for this entire section.

Hideo Kojima sharing a carousel of himself at the cinema for PHM, posing in a pop-up - 264k likes, 4.8 million followers - is what happens when you create something good enough that the self-described “70% made of movies” game director wants to be associated with it publicly. That’s not a paid deal. That’s earned reach from a master storyteller.

Eva Mendes sharing the same video of Gosling throwing a Hail Mary through the donut sign with the caption “Only my man would forget to mention this and just come home with donuts,” 336k+ likes. A real wife, supporting her man, in a way that feels completely authentic and lands as another piece of campaign content without being campaign content; Fist my Bump.

Tom Daley knitting Gosling’s iconic sweater in a paid collaboration with PHM and his own brand Made With Love, fascinates me from a creative brief standpoint. Someone, somewhere in that marketing team, thought “how do we reach the craft community, the family audience, and the people who obsess over costume design in a single post?” and landed on the Olympian who famously taught himself to knit and has built a brand around it. That’s genuinely intelligent media planning and PR.

The PHM Marathon Stamp Card - a piece of content encouraging audiences to see the film in every available format - is a nice example of how social can function as a loyalty mechanism. In an ideal world, you’d have a physical version being handed out in high-footfall areas with a free ticket incentive built in. The digital version is still a clever way to gamify the premium viewing experience though.

OOH, Immersive Activity, and PR: Making the Streets Feel Like Space

Here’s where I have to confess something: I missed the Shard activation. And I knew it was happening. I genuinely cannot forgive myself; lesson to be learnt here though I’m sure, allow sign up notifs or something similar to add to your reminders/calendar!

Rocky - his bubble, his alien warmth, his entire deal - was placed at the Shard ahead of the theatrical release, appearing outside the building and surprising commuters passing through London Bridge station. The Shard’s own blog described it as turning “an ordinary journey through the building into something far more memorable.” It was an intimate, stature-driven activation rather than a mass-reach play. Small area, enormous cultural weight. The kind of thing that creates FOMO when it gets covered by Secret London (136k likes on their video of it) and pop culture social media accounts, because those who missed it immediately wish they hadn’t.

That’s the point of a stunt like this. It’s not only about the live footfall. It’s about the earned social media and press coverage that turns a one-day experiential moment into a multi-day conversation.