The biggest YouTube channel on earth, 517 million subscribers, showed up to a Mumbai promo event for Ramayana on Saturday, and the press event that was supposed to be a two-hour spectacle ran about fifteen minutes, according to Hollywood Reporter India. The media had been waiting three and a half hours, and a chunk of them walked out.
The math is the whole story. They spent the entire marketing budget on the attendance of a man who built a career out of other people's patience, and the reward was a three-and-a-half-hour wait for the press and a fifteen-minute show. The Free Press Journal called it a mega event wrapped in an anticlimax. That is not a PR fail. That is a product demo. His format is literally "suffer for 30 minutes and get a crumb," and the promo tour just ran the demo on the press.
And the one announcement the audience was allowed: MrBeast and producer Namit Malhotra are doing Angry Birds 3. He didn't know until the day. Malhotra called it destiny. A man with 517 million subscribers gets cast in a third-party Angry Birds movie by destiny, announced mid-event as a consolation prize for a delayed press conference. The event was not about the film. The film was the venue for a cameo announcement.
So the epic with Ranbir Kapoor as Rama and Yash as Ravana gets a new tagline for free: even the promo tour has better pacing than the product.
YOUR TURN: Fifteen minutes of show for 517 million subscribers. The most expensive anticlimax in history?
PAPER TRAIL
- The event coverage: Hollywood Reporter India
- The walkout report: Metro India
- The "total chaos" version: Entertain India
- The debate coverage: Bollywood Mascot
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