Let's Talk About Movies: "10 Cloverfield Lane" and Mystery Box Marketing

Alo Party Peoples.

I am not opposed to film makers naming their films after unrelated existing things inting  order to get their vision off the ground. So if you want to make a nasty little thriller like an extended Twilight Zone episode, and you have to name it after a found footage kaiju movie from eight years ago to get it made, I'm fine with it; you do what you have to in service of your art, but that is not the case with 10 Cloverfield Lane. 

10 Cloverfield Lane started production as an under the radar indie script called The Cellar, and it was picked up by Paramount and placed  under lock and key for months before getting a surprise trailer a couple months before release along with a viral marketing campaign hinting at possible connections to Cloverfield, so instead of thinking "Oh, this looks like a nasty little thriller, I might buy it on demand one day", you think "Oh, this reminds me of that found footage Godzilla movie that I sort of remember,  I might go see that." in service of the Mystery Box marketing shenanigans of producer J.J. Abrams.

If you don't have to know what the Mystery Box is - then I envy your superior life choices - but it's J.J. Abrams' twee little Ted Talk name for the way he makes/markets his movies, it boils down to "audiences like to be surprised", so he hides as much about his films as possible, in hopes of recapturing the pre-Internet experience of seeing films sight-unseen, remember the trailers for The Force Awakens? We saw almost every big moment of the film, but we had almost no narrative context for any of it, so we were free to speculate, which created terabyte after terabyte of free advertising.

This is Abrams' specialty, he's probably one of the best marketers ever, and it's a technique that was pioneered with Cloverfield itself, a campaign that was so low key that for months the film didn't even have a title, and it worked there because it was an original property that wasn't tied to anything else, so when people thought "A found footage Godzilla movie? I haven't seen that before, I'll check it out.", there was enough there to satisfy them. Now, however, Abrams appears to be trying to take that kind of marketing and turn it into branding for a loosely connected anthology

If that's the game, getting funding for rising indie filmmakers to make low-budget but high-polish genre pieces with relative artistic freedom so long as they have some mention of the word "cloverfield", I'm fine with that, that sounds awesome, but it would have been a better idea to use something a bit more general like "J.J. Abrams Presents...", because between the name and the marketing, anyone going to see 10 Cloverfield Lane that doesn't follow entertainment news isn't expecting an extended Twilight Zone episode with a larger than usual budget for the finale, they're expecting a kaiju at the end, so when they don't get one it's going to feel like a letdown.

10 Cloverfield Lane is a good movie, if allowed to stand on it's own merits it might even have been a sleeper hit that got director Dan Tractenberg a dedicated following, but now that it's been absorbed into Abrams' sphere, it can only be remembered as another example of the Mystery Box.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B