Lots of films have become big hits thanks to online word of mouth, ranging from the guerilla campaign for "Step Up" to the huge fan-based campaigns behind the Harry Potter and "The Lord of the Rings" franchises. If you want to see how it all really evolved, we have to go back to the important year of 1999, when everything on the Internet began to change. A few small sites existed as far back as "Stargate" in 1994, but 1999 saw the emergence of an online destination as a major asset. Today in How Movies Find Audiences, we look back at five very different examples of how studios started to use the web as a powerful way to let the public know about their film (with a little help from the Internet Archive).
The Blair Witch Project
The undisputed granddaddy of online movie buzz, this low-budget indie became a pop culture sensation in large part thanks to its ingenious site, which led many visitors to wonder whether the "found footage" events in the film might be real.
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American Beauty
Taking a very different approach was the site for the year's Best Picture winner, "American Beauty," which featured animated Flash collages from the film along with overlapping memorable quotes from the film. It was an abstract, unusual approach… and surprisingly, it's one of the very few movie sites from '99 that still exists today in its original form.
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Fight Club
Equally offbeat is the colorful site designed for "Fight Club," which focuses on the philosophy of one of its main characters, Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt). Once people saw the film, the repeated references to soap took on a completely different meaning.
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Star Wars
It's hard to imagine a "Star Wars" film opening to anything less than a full-scale online promotional blitz, but in '99 things were a bit different. The official site for the series handled both the film and tie-in merchandise promotions for "Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace," and as you can see from these shots, it's a very different approach from what you'd see today.
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Dogma
One of the first Internet personalities to fully embrace the possibilities of this new arena was writer/director Kevin Smith, whose View Askew became the source for online info about his films, tours, merchandise, and fan boards. When his film "Dogma" became so controversial it had to switch distributors, the site was built up with a hefty selection of content for fans and newcomers alike—and the "Hate Letter of the Week" became essential reading.
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What's your favorite movie from 1999, and why?
