the marketing genius of "mother!"

In light of "mother!" coming out this weekend, I wanted to write sort of a love letter to the marketing genius of this movie. Some of you may know that when I'm not writing or watching movies, I'm a young public relations professional. With my PR and marketing background, I love looking into the promotion of certain movies.

There have been a lot of cool ways movies have been promoted this year (see A Ghost Story) but none have been as weird and attention-grabbing as Darren Aronofsky's "mother!"

close release date

The timeline of this movie's promotions are a spectacle themselves. Two posters for "mother!" were released on August 4th; the full trailer was released on August 8th; the first clip from was released on August 30th. Just to give you some perspective as to why this timeline is super short: the first trailer to "Black Panther" was released on June 9th of this year, but the movie isn't set to release until February 16th, 2018.

It's almost unheard of to only give yourself little over a month to promote a movie. He even moved the release date up a month. What's really genius is they pulled it off

easter eggs

When the posters for "mother!" were released, people went crazy trying to figure out what exactly this movie would be. Many found some easter eggs that stood out once the full trailer was released. We're in an era where audiences love to solve mysteries and search for small things filmmakers leave for the 'true fans'. Aronofsky was smart to apply this to his promo.

Aronofsky launched a website to promote the movie called youllneveranswerthedooragain.com. I use the term 'website' loosely because it's just a kaleidoscope-like image that you can move around. But, if you look closely enough, it has yet another easter egg that I'll let you figure out for yourself.

ominous comments

With social media, there are a few options movies have when it comes to publicity. You can be like Shamylan and tweet about the whole process of making a movie from writing to shooting. or you can be like Aronofsky by sharing almost nothing and when he does, it's things like, "It's a cruise missile shooting into a wall, this film. I want audiences to be prepared for that and prepped that it's a very intense ride."

Even though I don't know much about this movie, I know one thing for sure: it's going to be unlike anythign I've ever seen.