Film Futurist

I should say first that I have NOT seen Paranormal Activity, chiefly because, well…I’m a scaredy-cat and probably wouldn’t sleep for days afterwards. BUT, that never stopped me from a big picture analysis. Of course the hype everyone is hanging on to right now is the parallel between Paranormal and Blair Witch. And I get that: movie made for a mere $15,000 grosses Studio a crazy amount of money (at last count on Box Office Mojo, $63 Million and dreams are born again! Hollywood hopefuls – actors, directors, writers are juiced to give that old system a try.

So here’s where I step back and ask: was the success of Paranormal an anomaly in the Blair Witch manner, or is it in fact the beginning of a wave? While I get that this film is probably scarier in a “real” way than say, Saw VI, that paragon of torture porn which it trounced at the box office, I have to wonder if the convergence of all these phenomena at the same moment spells more than just “great content”. There are a lot of “firsts” here: certainly the use of Eventful.com, which until now has been used primarily for live music events; there’s the suddenly powerful force of immediate social media like twitter and of course, there’s the sheer desperation of the studios to make a buck, any buck in the midst of a funding crisis akin to none other in recent Hollywood history.

Assuming that none of these factors are changing anytime soon – ie, access to social media, immediate audience responses (that can make or break opening weekends), and a cashflow issue not likely to be resolved so fast, will models like this soon become ubiquitous? It seems inevitable to me. I’ve always been dubious of Hollywood test screenings and the magic scores that determine whether a movie gets released or not, or if characters or endings should be changed. It seems that at a certain price-point (an din this case rather extremely low), these studio people should be delighted to have ways of gauging audiences interest in their films. It’s such a low-risk strategy that I wonder if Paranormal’s success will send a message to the powers that be.

But of course, the million dollar question remains unanswered: is this a marketing/distribution strategy that will work for a film without this sort of draw – the horror, the midnight screenings, the sheer “viral-ness” of it? And will there emerge other platforms, such as Eventful.com, which can perhaps draw different groups of people to an event they can feel they have participated in bringing to the rest of the public? Certainly, there are some indie film communities springing up around various audience engagement concepts. And I wonder how those will shake out in the months and year to come – since that is really how quickly I believe we will see vast transformation in the world of audience-content relationships.