first images Leggy manager osgood perkins shared with distributors Neon It was a short clip showing Nicolas Cage uncover.

“It was a very small piece of footage, very early footage, and I had never seen anything like it,” recalls Neon boss Tom Quinn. “If it wasn’t for Nick Cage (who did this performance), this would be absolutely crazy.” it was Nick Cage collided with 10. We thought: ‘If Cage is doing this HE“We should also get involved.”

“Hearing it was what triggered it for us,” adds Neon marketing manager Christian Parkes. “It wasn’t like anything we’d ever heard before. It could just have come from Cage. This was something we really had to take seriously.”

For those of you I didn’t see LeggyNow look away. The following contains spoilers for the film, in which Neon, the most successful indie film of 2024, throws out the marketing rulebook and orchestrates a guerrilla marketing campaign that results in Perkins’ serial killer thriller opening to $22 million in mid-summer. It’s on track to hit $75 million in first-weekend domestic grosses and $100 million at the worldwide box office Leggy most successful indie fear a movie every ten years.

if you saw LeggyYou know exactly what Quinn and Parkes are talking about. Cage as Longlegs, an elusive serial killer pursued by FBI Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), has changed almost beyond recognition. Her face, covered in heavy white make-up, is a swollen, distorted mask of silicone and prosthetics. His lips are swollen and pale. His white books, white jacket, and long, messy hair give him the androgynous feel of a rocker who’s lost his charm. Then there is sound. As Longlegs mutters to himself, Cage turns his usual film noir growl into a high-pitched song, shouting Biblical warnings and Satanic praises, and then suddenly yelling at no one in particular.

This is one of the most terrifying, strange and full-on performances of Cage’s career; A career full of strange, full-on performances. Going deeper into the film, Cage’s appearance Leggy coin thrown, WTF moment.

Neon decided to keep it secret. Instead of portraying Cage as Leggy in every piece of marketing, targeting the actor’s large and loyal fan base, they went another route. they used jaws playbook.

“Tom said this over and over again: jaws best movie ever; One of the reasons it works so well is that you can’t see the shark,” says Parkes. “So we thought we shouldn’t show the shark. Let’s not show Cage. Let’s keep him back.”

Abandoning the idea of ​​a campaign that would “spoon-feed” its audience “with canards, teasers, trailers, posters and TV spots”, Parkes and Neon devised a marketing campaign that would reflect the film’s mysterious plot. In this campaign, Monroe stars as the Agent. Lee Harker has been trying to piece together clues to find the killer who has been killing young children for decades.

The entire campaign was to be a “crumb series” designed to turn horror fans into true crime detectives. Starting in early 2024, the first scraps of disturbing images and videos, including a creepy family photo, a black nun, and a wall with a cryptic message, hit the internet and were published on different platforms at different times in 2024. day. The film had no title or company logo. No Maika Monroe. No Nick Cage.

The internet started talking.

“Theories were floating around wildly on every platform, especially Reddit, and we played a little prank on these guys,” Parkes said with a chuckle.

When Neon released the first teaser, there was no dialogue, Monroe was only seen from behind, and Cage was left in the shadows. The final shot was a cipher code that became the film’s title: Leggy.

The answer came immediately.

“The feedback online and on social media was: ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but I love this. I don’t want to see anything else but this movie. I was already sold,” says Parkes. Neon had already cut a trailer for the film – “a great trailer, the kind of trailer you’d expect if you took a very traditional, linear marketing approach” – but Leggy The company, which had taken on a life of its own online, changed strategy as fans demanded less certainty, not more.

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

“Nick asked, ‘Am I right to believe that you will keep my magnificent quirk until later in the campaign?'” Parkes said. “He started by saying,” Parkes recalls. “You can see him saying that, right? And I said, ‘Actually, Nick, we don’t want to show you this at all.’ He leaned back in his chair and smiled. And just like that, we knew we were okay.

Neon remained focused Leggy A campaign aimed at obsessive horror fans who scour the internet and scour online forums for any new scraps or clues, rumors or speculations about the film. If they could win over these people, they reasoned, they would have an army of self-motivated marketers ready to spread the word.

“We said from the very beginning that we needed to respect the horror audience, the genre audience, because I think they are massively underserved by distributors and studios,” says Parkes. “If we treat them with respect, if we talk on their terms and at their level, if we bring them in, they will invest in this film, they will carry this film and make it their own,” he said.

This meant focusing on digital and “organic” marketing with very few traditional media buys. “The entire release budget across all creative materials, all media, all theatrical investments and all promotional investments for the opening of the film was just under $10 million,” says Parkes. “Online media accounted for about 70 percent of that. We’ve made some very targeted acquisitions on Hulu and a little bit on Amazon. And there is no television.

Outside marketing was “ridiculously light”, consisting of a handful of bus stop ads and four billboards in Los Angeles.

“If you buy a board from Sunset (Boulevard), it could cost you $250,000. If you buy a sub-Olympic board from La Brea it costs $7,000,” says Parkes, “so we bought the $7,000 board.”

The billboards didn’t include the film’s name – though the release date was 7.12 in the bottom corner – and they all featured Nick Cage as Leggy, but true to his word jaws in strategy, they are cropped to hide more than they reveal. One showed the lower half of his face. Another showed a single eye peering in from the left corner. Someone had a phone number. When you call the number, you get a subtly creepy and unpleasant recorded message from Cage’s character Stilt: “There she is, almost the birthday girl. What is your name? Little angel.”

“People started pranking their parents and texting them: ‘Hi mom, I got a new phone number. Can you check and make sure it’s working?’ and send them the Longlegs number, then take a screenshot of the text exchange,” says Parkes. “We received over 1.5 million calls from over 60 countries. For a few thousand dollars from a single board.”

Neon is as obsessed with testing and tracking as any studio professional. They track online awareness, social media mentions, affinity shares, and a dozen other metrics for each campaign published. Their work with horror masters Blumhouse — Neon and Blumhouse co-run BH Tilt, which publishes micro-budget genre games like: Update And Unfriended: Dark Web– making them “particularly sensitive to certain subset numbers” of horror fans, says Quinn. into the depths Leggy campaign, one figure in particular told them their strategy was working.

“For horror fans, unaided awareness was a 10 point for the movie,” says Quinn. “This was an important indication that the situation would open up much beyond predictions.”

Neon pre-purchased Leggy“We were projecting $10 million gross,” Quinn recalls, in the script, Osgood’s name and Cage’s mini-clip. “We saw the movie and raised it to a $25 million goal.” Following marketing campaigns, “we saw something much bigger” in the weeks leading up to the release.

Leggy Released July 12, 2024, in the midst of the summer blockbuster season, it was designed as counter-programming to the family-friendly studio fare offered: Inside Out 2, Despicable Me 4 And Fly Me to the Moon.

Neon kept dropping bread crumbs. On June 14, they ran a Zodiac Killer-inspired ad in the Seattle Times. Leggy password code led to this thebirthdaymurders.netA website that claims to document a 20-year history of Longlegs murders. They released a video of Monroe meeting Longlegs in character for the first time – with Cage’s face darkened – with the recording of his heart rate jumping from 76 BPM to 170 BPM. For hungry horror stans, man.

On your first weekend, Leggy Opened at number 2, only at the back Despicable Me 4 It grossed $22.4 million in its sophomore year. The film will remain in the top 10 through mid-August and remain in theaters until Halloween. Latest US earnings surpass Oscar winner with $74.35 million Interference ($53 million domestic) It will become Neon’s highest-grossing film of all time. Leggy passed by the A24 talk to me and Focus Features’ Insidious Part 3 It will be the most successful independent horror film of the last 10 years. For a $10 million movie and under $10 million for marketing.

Neon’s guerilla campaign Leggy was too specific and project-specific to provide a one-size-fits-all plan for the industry. But breadcrumbs via billboards, strategies to leverage social media through TV ads, and the need to empower fans to become partners rather than passive consumers are already rewriting the rulebook of independent film promotion.