Quentin Tarantino surprised an AFI Fest crowd at the TCL Chinese Theatre on Friday night by screening the first 17 minutes of The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, the script he wrote that David Fincher is directing, according to Deadline. The film is due in theaters November 25 and on Netflix December 23.
The surprise screening is the oldest card in Hollywood, and now it has its own marketing calendar. A single frame during the Super Bowl. A trailer dropped a month early. A hard release date in every presser. And then the big twist: the surprise is a surprise with a scheduled date, at a specific theater, for a crowd that got the invite and that the tabloids already tipped.
That's the trick. The AFI screening was not a screening, it was a focus group with seats. Every gasp in that room was a data point, and the clip rights were negotiated before the lights went down. The audience wasn't there to watch a movie. They were there to watch a press release happen live and pretend it was a discovery.
The Fincher detail is the best part, because it shows the machine at full capacity. A director who does zero public appearances in thirty years shows up once, says nothing, and becomes the plot twist. Brad Pitt gets to play his Oscar-winning hitman again without doing a single interview. Netflix gets its theatrical window. Everybody wins except the word "surprise."
YOUR TURN: Is it still a surprise when it has a trailer, or is it just an event?
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