Men's Lifestyle March 13, 2026 0 Comments

Are Original Movies Doomed to Disappear? The Shocking Truth I Discovered Will Change How You See Hollywood Forever!

So, here we are—Oscar weekend is almost upon us, and for once, Hollywood might just get it right. In a year packed with more flops than hits, the spotlight finally lands on two big, bold films that aren’t just star-studded spectacles but genuine cultural lightning rods. It feels like a rare vintage—original, ambitious, and scandal-free—which makes you wonder: are these event films the last hurrah of old-school Hollywood, or the blueprint for the future? With streaming reigning supreme in our living rooms, getting folks off the couch and into theaters has become less about watching a movie and more about chasing an experience. But does the razzle-dazzle marketing—the blimps, the sing-alongs, the wild promotional stunts—really pull in the crowds, or is it just noise in a crowded digital world? I’ve been poking around behind the scenes, crunching numbers, chatting with insiders, and well, the answer’s as messy and unpredictable as a viral TikTok dance. Ready to dive into the wild, weird, and wonderful world of making movies that matter again? LEARN MORE

8 min read

For a brief moment this weekend, barring some new political catastrophe, movies will be at the center of culture. In a year when Hollywood experienced more downs than ups, these Oscars are a dream scenario. The two front-runners for Best Picture have big budgets, A-list stars, top auteurs, and relevant themes, and they’ve inspired passionate discourse and little in the way of scandal. It’s possible that these daring originals are the last remnants of a rapidly dying old Hollywood. But ostensibly, Sinners and One Battle After Another are precisely what everyone in the business seems to be chasing these days: event films.

Between the rise of streaming and ample free online content, most people have entertainment galore at home. So the task for the film business has been to make a trip to the theater a uniquely fun time. It is the reason why premium screens are popping up in new markets; why theaters are expanding offerings to include sing-alongs and 4DX; why companies are rethinking what kinds of movies they make; and why distributors are cooking up ever more elaborate marketing stunts. “More so now than ever, moviegoing has to be an event,” says Kent Sanderson, CEO of Bleeker Street Media. “What used to be more of a habit among American consumers has become more event based, and the need for urgency, regardless of what the content is, is key to any campaign.”

Over the past year, I’ve watched, with a mix of amusement and exasperation, as the New York Stock Exchange was turned into an advertisement for Materialists, as an orange Marty Supreme blimp hovered over the Hollywood sign for weeks on end, as dozens of grown adults gleefully shaved their heads for a bald-only Bugonia screening, and as A24 opened a Vegas wedding chapel to promote The Drama. These sorts of clever stunts are not new. But in the past dozen years they’ve become increasingly common as movies try to generate buzz and win attention in an increasingly fragmented and saturated media landscape.

On the one hand, you’ve got to applaud the creativity. On the other, I’ve often found myself wondering if these sorts of stunts—and the considerable marketing budgets used to execute them—are truly what it takes to get the masses to care about a new movie that doesn’t prominently feature Spider-Man, Elphaba, or Elvis. And if so, is that sustainable?

I’ll lay my cards on the table. I care about ambitious, original cinema—both the sort that might be recognized with awards and that which can simply offer a fun Friday night with friends. And so I’ve been consumed with the question of how these sorts of films—the unicorns of modern cinema—break out and why. I’ve monitored the box office, read the trades, spoken to smart people who work in each sector of the industry, and for the most part I’ve become convinced that … well, yeah, William Goldman was right: Nobody knows anything.

Okay, sorry, that’s not exactly right. Everybody has a theory of what works, and for the most part that theory is actually pretty solid. It’s just that this theory is as likely to lead you to Eddington, which grossed roughly half its budget at the box office, as it is to lead you to Materialists, which quintupled its budget.

This past year, many movies that I thought would be hits—including Eddington—fizzled. And plenty of others that were barely on my radar wound up raking it in. Ultimately, luck and timing probably play as big a role in a movie’s success as quality or marketing. But still, it’s worth asking: What are the through lines between recent original successes—like Sinners, Weapons, and Materialists—that dominated the discourse and earned several multiples of their budgets? In a time when there tend to be two financial outcomes—home run or whiff—how did these three films hit the ball out of the park? And how can other films replicate their success? Drawing on my years of working as a movie critic and my conversations from key players in the industry, here’s what I came up with.

ryan coogler, michael b. jordan and miles caton attend special screening of "sinners"

Kate Green//Getty Images

Nearly a million people watched Ryan Coogler talk about aspect ratios—the result is Sinners’s outstanding premium-format success.

Step 1: Find a Hot Young Auteur

When I’d ask people who don’t go to a lot of movies why they were excited to see films like Materialists, Sinners, and Weapons, they’d usually bring up Celine Song, Ryan Coogler, and Zach Cregger. They were eager for big new swings from the creators behind Black Panther, Past Lives, and Barbarian. And as much as or more than their films’ stars, these directors were central to the movies’ publicity campaigns. This year, Internet star Markiplier more or less single-handedly drove scores of fans to theaters to see his independently distributed debut feature, Iron Lung. The Letterboxd generation may not go to the movies as frequently as their parents once did, but the fact that nearly a million people watched Ryan Coogler talk about aspect ratios is a testament to their enduring cinephilic enthusiasm.

Step 2: Let the Director Cook

More commercial used to mean more conventional. That’s not the case anymore. Materialists, Sinners, Weapons, and other recent original hits—films like Challengers, The Substance, and Longlegs—are broadly entertaining and working in familiar genres, but they were also allowed to be weird, unique products of a bold creator’s imagination. You might love them or hate them, but none of these films are playing it safe. “Those are all films that, in addition to being from very strong directors, take on subject matter in ways that prompt you to continue talking about them after you leave the theater,” says Scott Macaulay, longtime producer and former editor in chief of Filmmaker magazine. Song says she could feel that audiences would show up for Materialists from the moment the cameras started rolling. Why? “Because every single member of our crew and cast wanted to talk about it. Everybody had opinions,” she told me.

In terms of virality, you’re just trying to shake enough trees that produce a moment you can seize on.

Step 3: Create a Comparison to an Old Favorite Flick

If you heard Song, Coogler, and Cregger talk about their respective movies, you probably noticed that they’d all frequently mention one thing: their references. Though these films weren’t based on IP, anyone paying attention knew that they were each in dialogue with popular movies from the ’90s, like The Age of Innocence, From Dusk Till Dawn, and Magnolia. “What motivates a big audience—if I had to crystallize it into the strongest priority—is you have a great idea that is something familiar with a twist,” says Kevin Goetz, author of the new book How to Score in Hollywood. Talking about popular references is one way to give viewers a framework to latch on to.

Step 4: Don’t Give Away Too Much

In addition to putting a new spin on a familiar framework, these films’ marketing campaigns each emphasized a sense of mystery around a central question. The Sinners trailer alludes to a battle with dark forces but never shows the vampires. The Materialists trailer creates intrigue around Lucy’s (Dakota Johnson) choice between the poor handsome man she has chemistry with (Chris Evans) and the rich, handsome man she finds a little boring (Pedro Pascal). And the Weapons trailer asks: What happened to a classroom of children who disappeared at 2:17 a.m.? “Our mission for the marketing was: Lean into the question, lean away from the answer,” Zach Cregger told Vanity Fair earlier this year. And by skipping film festivals, each movie’s central question stayed fresh until they were open to the public, and they avoided a cycle of hype and backlash preceding the release.

airbnb hosts table tennis experience in nyc with appearance by marty supreme's timothee chalamet

Bryan Bedder//Getty Images

Timothée Chalamet pulled out every stop during the Marty Supreme press tour, right down to hosting a table-tennis tournament.

Step 5: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

Clever stunts and strong trailers are great, but to create the sense that everyone’s talking about a movie, you need to make it inescapable. That means spending lots of money on digital advertising, physical advertising, hosting influencer screenings, and so forth. And if you’re an indie film, in particular, it means front-loading your blitz. “You used to be able to do a monthlong campaign for an indie film where it would roll out for like three months and keep getting bigger as word of mouth traveled, and you’d hold on to screens and keep growing and building up to a really nice gross,” says Bleeker Street EVP of publicity Rachel Allen. “Nowadays, you have one shot, and it’s a lot shorter of a window to capture those audiences. You need to be as loud as possible for that opening weekend, because by week two or three you might not have even close to the number of screens you would have.”

Alternatively: If you don’t have a lot of marketing money, execute the fundamentals and try something different. “I’m surprised that more people don’t go back to how J.J. Abrams released Cloverfield the first time,” says Adam Faze, cofounder of the viral short-form studio Gymnasium. “There was that ARG game aspect where every character had a Myspace page and you actually thought it was real. There was all this conversation on Reddit about finding all the things on the Internet that were connected to it. There’s such an opportunity while you’re making a movie to find some secondary storyline that you could be filming with an iPhone that you could be dropping online and making people think it’s real. And then all of a sudden go, Actually this is part of this thing that’s coming out next week.”

Step 6: Surf the Wave

Everything Timothée Chalamet does notwithstanding, most of the viral moments that have generated buzz for movies have been happy accidents. Barbenheimer happened only because of a scheduling fluke. Warner Bros. could never have planned the “chicken jockey” mayhem brought on by Minecraft. Miles Teller likely wasn’t dancing at the 2022 world premiere of Top Gun: Maverick in the hopes that it would become a TikTok trend. So the task for publicists and distributors is to be savvy and nimble enough to capitalize on an organic moment. When Nick Quah was reporting on what he deemed the “New Media Circuit”—the “maddening sprawl” of publicity options in the digital age—he found that “in terms of virality, you’re just trying to shake enough trees that produce a moment you can seize on” and that “the really good [publicity teams] seize it.” Sometimes that means simply getting out of the way and letting kids act crazy. Other times, it means fanning the flames on social media and supplying short-form creators with assets so they can do their thing.

Step 7: Pray

Even when a movie has the juice and plenty of marketing resources behind it, it can stumble based on bad timing or some other fluke. Audiences are fickle, and nothing is guaranteed. Each of the past few years, there have only been a few original sensations, and they haven’t necessarily been the greatest movies of the given year. So at a certain point, all you can do is make the best possible movie and hope and pray it resonates. “This whole industry is the lottery,” says Anora producer Alex Coco. “So make something crazy and original and fucked-up and buy your ticket, and hope it becomes the next trend.”