In late October, Twitter and Warner Bros. unveiled its #DuneWeek marketing campaign to drum up fan excitement around the star-studded sci-fi film hitting theaters and HBO Max on Oct. 22, with nearly the whole main cast and director Denis Villeneuve taking turns answering fan questions about the world of Arrakis and their respective characters for the week-long marketing campaign that brought together fan Twitter and Hollywood.
But these interactions weren’t happening on a Warner Bros. or HBO Max Twitter account. Instead, original content for #DuneWeek took place on the Twitter-operated @TwitterMovies handle, which has been positioning itself as a prime location for studios and advertisers to reach audiences, for free.
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While studios can pay for promotions on Twitter (which Warner Bros. did for its Dune promotions elsewhere on the platform), marketing on @TwitterMovies — and its TV counterpart @TwitterTV — allows studios’ marketing teams to have another opportunity to promote and receive organic engagement on their respective projects, while Twitter can boost its presence on the handle and deepen relationships with studios for future paid partnerships and services.
In the case of #DuneWeek, by using @TwitterMovies for specific promotion, Warner Bros. was able to leverage the account’s preexisting millions of followers — the handle has been gaining followers since Dec. 2011 — whereas the standalone Dune account only started becoming active in 2020 to coincide with early promotion for the film.
“We do not solicit any fee to work with @TwitterMovies, and we do not choose our projects based on the amount a studio is spending on an overall Twitter marketing campaign,” James Brownstein, Twitter’s head of film partnerships, tells The Hollywood Reporter via email. “But when we partner on an organic content campaign on @TwitterMovies that performs really well, it reminds advertisers how important our platform is for reaching an audience who will buy movie tickets or subscriptions.”
Engagement on the @TwitterMovies handle, which has 6.8 million followers, has grown by 674 percent since 2020, ballooning from 3.9 million engagements (likes, retweets, quote retweets, replies and video views) in 2020 to 30.1 million engagements in 2021, according to Twitter. Brownstein says Twitter ran watch parties, Q&As with talent and other interactions with fans to support studio partners and prove Twitter’s influence and impact in the marketing space, which helped drive growth between 2020 and 2021 amid changing release schedules and hybrid models due to the pandemic.
“We put in years of work to show our partners that we can drive really effective organic content marketing campaigns on Twitter,” Brownstein says. “As we entered a packed 2021 slate, we had a ton of momentum and trust with our top partners, and this helped us to really accelerate.”
Amy Sligh, the social marketing lead for Twitter’s entertainment verticals, also notes that posts on @TwitterMovies that perform well organically may get an extra “paid boost” to reach even more users.
But a shift in tone away from pure marketing language has also helped @TwitterMovies become a more fan-centric hub to better connect with movie lovers, according to Sligh. “Over the past few years, our approach to @TwitterMovies has shifted from being more promotional to speaking with fans as fans,” Sligh says, pointing to tweets that reference memes or other online trends. “We couldn’t do the same things in 2020 that we did in years prior due to the pandemic. So, in 2021, we had to create new ways to participate in the conversation which, ironically, took the handle to a new level.”
At the end of 2021, other major marketing blitzes original to the @TwitterMovies handle included clips of The Matrix Resurrections stars Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss answering fan questions about returning to the franchise; Spider-Man: No Way Home stars Tom Holland, Zendaya and Jacob Batalon reacting to fan tweets; West Side Story’s Rachel Zegler explaining some of her past tweets; and Last Night in Soho director Edgar Wright answering fan questions.
Dustin Sandoval, vp digital marketing at Disney Studios, tells THR that using the @TwitterMovies and @TwitterTV accounts allows Disney to reach a more general audience who might not already be following popular Disney brands like Marvel and Pixar on Twitter.
“Working with that handle gives us an opportunity to reach a little bit further and potentially even a broader audience, knowing that we still have millions of fans on our @MarvelStudios handle, big Marvel’s handle,” Sandoval says. “But @TwitterMovies is movie fans, so we can reach a nice general audience of just people who are all loving the same thing and expose them to some of the stuff that we’re doing.”
Already, Sandoval says Disney is having conversations with Twitter for upcoming promotions around the upcoming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness film, which is expected to release on May 6. And looking ahead at the 2022 schedule, Sandoval says he’s personally excited for activations around the highly anticipated Avatar sequel that will resonate with the fandom.
“We pay attention to everything that all of our fans are saying and are really tuned in to what they’re gravitating toward, and we love to let them know, ‘Hey, we see you and you hear you’ by putting out something that feels like it’s a tweet that they would do,” Sandoval says. “It’s really fun to see.”
This story first appeared in the Jan. 12 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
