Paramount Pictures is building buzz and a cult following for their new low-budget horror film titled, “Paranormal Activity”. The movie has been in limited release for about two weeks now and has developed growing fan-base, which outrivals many big-budget films. By using social media, Paramount has been building a grassroots campaign to select specific cities to offer a limited release of the movie. Check out the trailer below – if you can handle it….
The campaign launched with the help from Eventful, a San Diego-based social media and event management company. Eventful has generated a good amount of buzz and movie goer demand by not only leveraging its own service, but by also enlisting users to “spread the word” or “demand a limited release viewing” via Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and any other social networking platform that wants to link to the Eventful “Demand It” page.
With a real time counter of people demanding the movie to play in their city (over 635,000 and counting) the “Demand It” campaign notes that if 1,000,000 people demand to see the film – the film will get a nation wide release. Of course the studio still retains the right to refuse or select which cities to include – but the grassroots buzz created by leveraging social media to distribute their film will surely have a big influence.
Interestingly enough, I first heard about the film from a friend on Twitter (thank you Funny or Die). Leveraging the ever growing social media network to promote virtually anything is a far more effective way to reach the masses – assuming you have something of interest to promote. Given the success in this film launch campaign, and the enormous level of buzz generated by it, you can bet this won’t be the last time a Hollywood studio uses social media in place of traditional media to release its new “low-budget” films.
What do you think of using social media to not only launch and promote films – but any other medium?
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I think you are right. But you should cover more on this topic.