Guerrilla Marketing on The CineBlog

The Invite: The Case for the Slow Release

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Twelve million US dollars for domestic rights. That was the cheque A24 wrote at Sundance for Olivia Wilde’s dinner-party comedy The Invite, one of the biggest sales of the festival, and the number is worth holding in your head for the length of this piece, because everything intelligent about this release flows from what the buyer and the seller decided to do with it next. They did the old thing. They did the thing the trades had been writing obituaries for since the pandemic: a platform release, New York and Los Angeles first, a slow build, and a bet that word of mouth still exists as a market force. Three weekends into wide release the film sat at twenty million domestic and fifteen point seven international from 36 markets, on its way past forty million worldwide with Italy, France and Spain still to open. The consultant David A. Gross, who watches these curves for a living, told Variety he would not be surprised by a finish above sixty million. For a talking-heads comedy in a summer owned by The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day, that is not counterprogramming. That is a heist.

The Blair Witch Project: The Architecture of a Hoax

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Before the proliferation of social media, independent films relied entirely on traditional, expensive festival acquisitions for marketing. You went to Sundance, you prayed a studio bought your film, and you hoped they spent millions putting it in theaters. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez broke this model by weaponizing the nascent internet.

Blurring the Lines

For their $60,000 “found footage” film, The Blair Witch Project, the directors launched BlairWitch.com. They did not present the narrative as a fictional horror film; they presented it as a genuine, tragic documentary about three missing student filmmakers.

Skinamarink: The Pirated Leak That Grossed $15 Million

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Bref, the old model of film distribution is dead, and Kyle Edward Ball danced on its grave for the price of a used Honda Civic. We are constantly told that you need a multi-million dollar marketing campaign and a PR agency to get a film seen. Skinamarink proves that you actually only need two things: $15,000, and a catastrophic security breach.

The narrative of this film’s success is a complete subversion of the studio system. It is a terrifying masterclass in the sheer, unpredictable power of the internet hive mind.