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 Hollywood studios are going to ever more creative lengths to
attract attention in a jam-packed entertainment market where
social media plays a key role in promoting content.
For Matt Damon's October film "The Martian," in which an
astronaut is stranded on Mars, 20th Century Fox Studios hosted a
media day last week at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space
Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern
California just to promote a trailer.
Journalists got a sneak peek at the first 50 minutes of the
film, toured the lab and interviewed Damon at its Mission
Control which is usually reserved for scientists working on
operations such as landing the Curiosity rover on Mars in 2012.
"We're in a world with a very crowded marketplace," said "The
Martian" producer Aditya Sood. "We want to make sure that people
get the message that the movie's coming out."
After the media day, "The Martian" trailer became one of the top
entertainment news stories, garnering 4.8 million views on
Facebook and 3.3 million views on YouTube in just 48 hours.
"It makes sense for studios to spend money to get journalists to
tweet and use social media because they believe it somehow will
turn into box office dollars," said Entertainment Weekly film
reporter Nicole Sperling.
Trailers are becoming the fast, bite-size way to attract an
audience at a time when five or more movies a week are released
in the United States.
In August, movie reporters, including from Reuters, received a
visit from two men with zombie makeup, mimicking the creepy twin
characters from Focus Features latest horror movie, "Sinister
2."
The "twins" delivered a wooden box with a taxidermied rat and a
USB card with a link to the movie's latest trailer.
"The people covering the industry are in some ways tastemakers,
so even if people aren't reading our magazines or articles,
they're reading our Twitter feed," Sperling said.
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 Earlier in August, Warner Bros hosted a party at a Los
Angeles hotel to promote its October Peter Pan prequel "Pan."
The rooftop was decked out to look like Neverland, with set
pieces and costumes from the family adventure film.
But the media guests were distracted by the word "Compton" from a
sky-writing plane to promote Universal Pictures' rap music film
"Straight Outta Compton."
Sony Pictures started drumming up buzz for its upcoming "The Walk"
film, based on French high-wire artist Philippe Petit's 1974 trek
between New York's Twin Towers, by placing people on the rope
through Sony's Morpheus virtual reality headset.
Media and those attending computer graphics convention Siggraph in
Los Angeles in August were placed in the virtual setting atop the
Twin Towers with the tightrope stretching ahead.
The headset allowed them to look 360 degrees around the New York
skyline, see the quarter-mile drop and take a stomach- flipping walk
along the wire.
"Giving people a unique opportunity to identify with a character or
a storyline and actually experience it personally, it's like the
mega-trailer," said David Stern, founder of Create Advertising
Group, which developed the experience.
"There's nothing more emotional and visceral than standing on a wire
strung between the World Trade Center towers."
(Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy, editing by Jill Serjeant and Lisa Von
Ahn)
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