Filmed for a reported $11,000 over 7 days, Paranormal Activity broke box office records over the weekend.
How?
The film is about a young couple who become convinced that a demonic presence lurks in their bedroom at night, so they decide to set up a video camera to catch it. The movie…opened at the end of September with midnight screenings in just 13 small college towns.
From there, it has become a Web sensation, with chatter about the movie bouncing from Twitter to Facebook, spurring a coming nationwide release.
The company behind the viral buzz is Eventful, a venture-backed start-up in San Diego hired by Paramount Pictures, the movie’s producer. Eventful provides a service that lets performers ask their fans where they should appear. For $30,000 to $250,000, Eventful builds and hosts a Web page where people can vote by clicking on a button that says “Demand it!”
Paramount promised to release “Paranormal Activity” in cities where enough people demanded it and nationwide if a million people demanded it.
They got their 1,000,000 requests, but the bigger test was at the box office. That result:
Spectacular. The film expanded to 160 screens and averaged $49,379 per screen. That’s the highest per-screen average ever for a film playing in more than 100 theaters. These results would be impressive regardless of the marketing method used, but the fact that the campaign has been very, very Internet — and especially social media focused, makes this story that much more interesting.
Yes, that and Steven Spielberg:
After seeing the startling amount of word-of-mouth buzz the movie was getting, it seems that Paramount’s first inclination was to pat writer/director Oren Peli on his head and bottom and reshoot it with, you know, famous and expensive people. However, Steven Spielberg suggested this might not be necessary since the movie was already resonating with early viewers. Hence, after a little editing and the addition of a new and, guess what, scarier ending, they organized some midnight college town screenings.
In his NYTimes review, A.O.Scott calls the movie a crudely made, half-clever little frightener:
At the midnight screening I attended last weekend, by far the most entertaining thing about the movie was the audience.
“Oh no. Oh hell no.” That was a stocky gentleman in the row behind me, whimpering as a door swung open on-screen. There was a lot of screaming later on — when, for example, the same door slammed shut — and also laughter, both anxious and mirthful. …
By any serious critical standard, “Paranormal Activity” is not a very good movie. It looks and sounds terrible. Its plot is thin and perforated with illogic. The acting occasionally rises to the level of adequacy. But it does have an ingenious, if not terribly original, formal conceit — that everything on-screen is real-life amateur video — that is executed with enough skill to make you jump and shriek.
My college days behind me, I won’t be seeing the movie. But I do admire the marketing acumen.