The first footage of long legs director Osgood Perkins shared with distributors Neon It was a short clip showing the Nicolas Cage reveal.

“It was very small footage, a very early image and I had never seen anything like it,” recalls Neon boss Tom Quinn. “If it wasn’t Nick Cage (doing that performance) it would be absolutely crazy,” “The fact that it was was Nick Cage multiplied it by 10. We thought: ‘If Cage is doing it that“We have to get involved.”

“What triggered us was listening to it,” adds Christian Parkes, marketing director at Neon. “It was like nothing we had ever heard before. It could only have come from Cage. It was: this is something we have to take very seriously.”

For those of you who I haven’t seen long legslook away now. The following contains spoilers for 2024’s biggest indie release, the film in which Neon threw out the marketing rulebook and mounted a guerilla marketing campaign that resulted in Perkins’ serial killer thriller being released in mid- of the summer, with $22 million in its opening weekend, on track to gross $75 million domestic gross and $100 million at the worldwide box office, making long legs the most successful indie horror movie in a decade.

if you have seen long legsYou know exactly what Quinn and Perkins are talking about. Cage as Longlegs, an elusive serial killer pursued by FBI agent Lee Harker (maika monroe), is so transformed that it is almost unrecognizable. Her face, covered in heavy white makeup, is a swollen, disfigured mask of silicone and prosthetics. His lips are swollen and pale. His white books, white jacket, and long, unkempt hair give him the androgynous feel of a broke glam rocker. Then there is the voice. Cage turns his usual film noir growl into a high-pitched chant as Longlegs mutters to himself, tossing out biblical warnings and satanic praise, before yelling at no one in particular.

It’s one of the scariest, strangest, most complete performances of Cage’s career, a career in which there is no shortage of strange, complete performances. Cage’s revelation, which runs deep into the film, is the long legs money shot, his WTF moment.

Neon decided to keep it hidden. Instead of featuring Cage as Longlegs in every piece of marketing they could, targeting the actor’s huge and loyal fan base, they took another tack. They used the Jaws playbook.

“Tom has said, time and time again, that one of the reasons Jaws “It’s the best movie of all time, one of the reasons it works so well is because you don’t see the shark,” says Parkes. “So we thought, let’s not show the shark. Let’s not show Cage. Let’s stop it.”

Abandoning the idea of ​​a campaign that would “spoon-feed” its audience with “the standard, the teaser, the trailer, the poster and the TV ads,” Parkes and Neon designed a marketing campaign to reflect the mysterious plot of the film, in which Monroe, as Agent Lee Harker tries to gather clues to find the killer who has been murdering young children for decades.

The entire campaign was going to be a “breadcrumb series” designed to turn horror fans into real crime detectives. In early 2024, the first disturbing crumbs, images and videos, including some showing a creepy family photo, a nun in a black habit, and a wall with a cryptic message, were posted online and posted on different platforms at different times in the year. anus. the day. There was no movie title or company logo. No Maika Monroe. No Nick Cage.

The Internet began to chatter.

“Theories were going crazy on all platforms, Reddit in particular, and we threw some friend at those guys,” Parkes laughs.

When Neon released the first teaser, it had no dialogue, only Monroe was glimpsed from behind and Cage remained in the shadows. The last shot was an encrypted code that becomes the film’s title: long legs.

The response was immediate.

“The response online and on social media was, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but I love this. I don’t want to see any more of this movie. “I’m already sold,” says Parkes. Neon had already recorded a trailer for the film: “a great trailer, the kind of trailer you’d expect if you took a very conventional linear marketing approach”, but with long legs Taking on a life of its own online, with fans clamoring for less certainty, not more, the company changed its strategy.

Quinn and Parkes called Nicolas Cage to ask if they could keep his image out of any marketing materials.

“Nick started by saying, ‘Am I right in thinking you’re going to hold back my magnificent grotesque until later in the campaign?’” Parkes recalls. “You can see him saying it, right? And I said, ‘Actually, Nick, we don’t want to show you anything.’ He leaned back in his chair and smiled. And just like that, we knew we were good.”

Neon continued to focus his long legs campaign about horror superfans, the kind of obsessives who scour the Internet and scour online forums in search of news, crumbs or clues, rumors or speculation about the film. If they could win over those people, they figured they would have an army of motivated marketers ready to spread the word.

“From the beginning, we said we had to respect the horror audience, the genre audience, because I think they’re largely underserved by distributors and studios,” Parkes says. “If we treat them with respect, if we talk to them on their terms and on their level and bring them on board, they will invest in this film, they will see it through and they will make it their own.”

That meant focusing on digital and “organic” marketing, with very few traditional media buys. “The total release budget across all creative materials, all media, all theatrical spend and all advertising spend to open the film was just under $10 million,” Parkes says. “Online media accounted for about 70 percent of that. We made very specific purchases on Hulu, a little bit on Amazon. And no television.”

The outdoor marketing was “ridiculously light” and consisted of a handful of bus stop ads and four billboards in Los Angeles.

“If you buy a board on Sunset (Boulevard) it can cost you $250,000. If you buy a board at La Brea below Olympic, it costs $7,000,” Parkes says, “so we bought the $7,000 boards.”

The posters did not include the title of the film (although they did have the release date, 7.12., in the bottom corner) and all featured Nick Cage as Longlegs but, in keeping with his Jaws strategy, they were trimmed to hide more than they revealed. One only showed the lower half of his face. Another showed a single eye peering out from the left corner. One had a phone number. Call the number and you’ll receive an insidiously creepy and unpleasant recorded message from Cage in character as Longlegs: “There she is, the birthday girl. What is your name? “Little Angel.”

“People started pranking their parents, texting them: ‘Hey mom, I just got a new phone number. Can you check it and make sure it works? and send them Longlegs’ number, then take a screenshot of the text exchange,” says Parkes. “We received more than 1.5 million calls from more than 60 countries. From a single board, for a couple of thousand dollars.”

Neon is as obsessed with testing and tracking as any major studio. For each launch campaign, they monitor online awareness, social media mentions, affinity sharing, and a dozen other metrics. His work with horror masters Blumhouse: Neon and Blumhouse co-run BH Tilt, which has released micro-budget genre titles like Improvement and The Belko experiment — has made them, Quinn says, “particularly sensitive to some of the subset numbers” of horror superfans. In the depths of long legs campaign, a number in particular told them that their strategy was working.

“Spontaneous awareness for horror fans was a 10 for the movie,” Quinn says. “That was a key indicator that this was going to open up well beyond projections.”

When Neon pre-purchased long legsRegarding the script, Osgood’s name and Cage’s mini-clip, “we were projecting a gross of $10 million,” Quinn recalls. “We saw the movie and raised the number to a goal of $25 million.” After its marketing campaign, in the weeks leading up to the launch, “we saw something much bigger.”

long legs was dated July 12, 2024, right in the middle of the successful summer season, designed as counter-programming to the family studio fare on offer: Inside out 2, Despicable Me 4 and take me to the moon.

Neon kept dropping the breadcrumbs. On June 14, they took out a Zodiac Killer-inspired ad in the San Francisco Times, written in the long legs cipher code, which led to CumpleañosAsesinatos.neta website that purports to document 20 years of backstory to the Longlegs murders. They posted a video of Monroe in character meeting Longlegs for the first time (Cage’s face was obscured) with a recording of her heart rate jumping from 76 BPM to 170 BPM. Friend to hungry horror fans.

In its first weekend, long legs Open at number 2, only behind. Despicable Me 4 in its second year, raising $22.4 million. The film would remain in the top 10 until mid-August and would remain in theaters until Halloween. The final collection in the United States was 74.35 million dollars, surpassing that of the Oscar winner. Parasite ($53 million domestic) to become the highest-grossing Neon film of all time. long legs the A24 flew by talk to me and focus functions Insidious Chapter 3 become the most successful independent horror film of the last 10 years. For a 10 million dollar movie and less than 10 million dollars in marketing.

Neon’s guerrilla campaign to long legs it was too customized, too project-specific, to provide a one-size-fits-all model for the industry. But its strategy of offering breadcrumbs on billboards, social media on TV ads, and the need to empower fans to become partners rather than passive consumers, is already rewriting the rule book for film promotion. independent.