What Went Right: Cloverfield
By Shalimar Sahota
August 9, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Back in 2007, as Paramount’s Transformers opened over the July 4th holiday moviegoers got to witness an unexpected showstopper of a teaser trailer for something no one had even heard of. Looking like a home video, it opens with numerous twentysomethings enjoying a party in an apartment building. The celebrations are cut short when a roar and a tremor cause the lights to momentarily go dead. Believing it to be an earthquake, they go up to the rooftop only to see an enormous explosion in the distance. The fiery debris rains down from the sky, some of which flies in their direction. As the people scramble downstairs and onto the streets, another roar is heard, followed by a huge object seen hurtling towards them. Landing in the middle of the street (while a man repeatedly screams “OH MY GOD”) is the decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty. The screen goes black. Audiences are told is that it’s from producer J.J. Abrams, it’ll be in theaters 1-18-08, and according to one partygoer, “It’s gonna be the best night ever!” There was no title.
This was a masterful teaser trailer that did exactly what a trailer was supposed to do; it got people talking. It was even more impressive that a studio had the meteoric balls to announce their latest film in this way. Teasing people with snippets of footage is one thing, but teasing people about the existence of a film that no one had heard of is another. It was later revealed that the trailer was shot two weeks before principal photography on the film had even begun.
On the unique marketing, Abrams said, “I missed the excitement of seeing a trailer when it was something completely new. So I thought ‘What if we make this film in secret without letting anyone know? And what if we play a teaser for this film no-one’s ever heard of in front of a big blockbuster and don’t even give them the name?’ I knew that if I went to the theater having never heard about this movie and saw that trailer, I’d lose my mind.”
A few days later, Paramount helped bring calm to those losing their minds and revealed a name, announcing that the film had a working title called Cloverfield and that it revolves around a monster attack in New York. This basic storyline is essentially all people really needed to know to enjoy the film, and that this monster movie was filmed by a professional amateur. A teaser poster arrived two weeks later. In the foreground was the Statue of Liberty, minus head. In the background was a partially ruined city, with smoke billowing. Again, there was no title, just the date – 1-18-08. It was a poster that said so little, yet so much.
As news dried up, die-hard obsessives with a lot of free time turned to the Internet, where the film’s viral marketing turned out to be as unique as it was weird, with a number of websites supposedly linked to the film. One of the first to be unearthed was 1-18-08.com. The site included photo snaps of characters, which could be flipped over to reveal their names. Searching the character names led to their MySpace pages. The sites Slusho.jp and Tagruato.jp (the former discovered after a character in the teaser is seen wearing a Slusho T-shirt) offered little hints about the possible origin of the monster. ethanhaaswasright.com and lilyandjason.com were just a fraction of the many sites that were mistaken to be a part of Cloverfield’s marketing campaign. The sites that were definitely related had a weird black swirly symbol visible on the page. While these all got people talking (with enough background information to work on a possible prequel), there was still little information about the film itself. Most people just wanted to know what the monster looked like.
Directed by Matt Reeves (though it appears as if his hands are being heavily guided by his producer), Cloverfield follows five survivors, Rob (Michael Stahl-David), his brother Jason (Mike Vogel), Jason’s girlfriend Lily (Jessica Lucas) and her friend Marlena (Lizzy Caplan). They are filmed by their friend Hud (T.J. Miller), who decides to document the attack that is happening because “people are gonna wanna know how it all went down.” As they attempt to leave the city, Rob receives a distressing voicemail from his girlfriend Beth (Odette Yustman) and risks his own life and those of his friends when he decides to rescue her.
Production was kept heavily under wraps. To prevent word from getting out, the cast members were not told anything about the story before shooting. Drew Goddard is credited as the writer, though it is believed that the cast did not even get to see his full script until midway through the production. This was apparently done to prevent the possibility of an Internet leak. Also, that the cast members were not A-list stars worked to the film’s advantage (a well known celebrity in this scenario told from the point of view of an everyman would be incredibly distracting). It also helped keep the cost down, for Cloverfield had a slim production budget of just $25 million. From watching it, you’d probably think it cost somewhere near twice that amount. With the exception of the end credits, the lack of any musical score also tightened the expenditure and even managed to make the few jump scares more frightening.
In reality, if Manhattan is turned into a full-scale war zone within a matter of minutes and your life is in serious danger, I doubt you would be so concerned about filming what’s happening around you. I say this and yet filming what was happening is exactly what a small minority of people did during the events of 9/11. Evoking memories of what happened on that fateful day, Cloverfield plays to those fears, with buildings crumbling, phones not working, even including a police officer telling people to keep moving. Also during the opening when the characters are on the rooftop, someone can be heard saying, “another terrorist attack.”
Cloverfield opened at the US box office on January 18, 2008. It reached the #1 spot with an opening weekend take of $40 million. After two days in release, it had already managed to recoup its production budget. Also, it still currently holds the record for the highest opening weekend in the month of January. Withholding information and keeping the monster out of sight in all the advertisements and trailers appeared to have worked. However, the film dropped a monumental 68% in its second week, falling to #4 with a take of $12.7 million. By week three it was down to #9, earning $4.8 million.
Its performance showed just how frontloaded the film was. Leading up to its release, the evasive marketing managed to get millions talking, generating a huge amount of buzz and causing many to speculate what would happen in the film. For anyone who was interested, it meant viewing the film as soon as possible. Once the “secret” was out (most likely the secret being that Cloverfield had no secret), the film just couldn’t hold. Reviews were mostly positive. It was described as better than that Roland Emmerich’s summer blockbuster Godzilla, yet having a critically derided film as Cloverfield’s closest buddy for comparison might have also contributed to its dramatic decline. Nevertheless it finished its run at the US box office with $80 million. Add in an overseas gross of $90.7 million and Cloverfield had earned $170.7 million worldwide. What makes the film a success is what it managed to achieve with such a low budget.
The whole found footage malarkey was popularized by The Blair Witch Project back in 1999. Since Cloverfield there have been quite a number of found footage films - The Devil Inside, The Last Exorcism, Apollo 18, Quarantine (a remake of the genuinely frightening Spanish horror film [Rec]) Project X and Chronicle. It appears to have reached its zenith with Paramount’s own Paranormal Activity franchise. The low cost has meant that all of these films have been profitable. However, I find it a shame that since Cloverfield no studio has attempted to employ the covert, under the radar tactic of filmmaking. I imagine that today’s technology would probably just make it too hard to set-up while also relying on the hope that none of the cast and crew blab.
I viewed Cloverfield on the Monday after its opening weekend. I went in having only viewed the trailers, avoiding all reviews and covering my ears whenever I heard people talking about it. I imagine that this is how Abrams and Reeves would have wanted it. It was nice to see a new spin on a monster movie told from the point of view of a regular guy. There has been a lot of talk of a sequel, and while it would be nice to revisit this world, the film doesn’t need one. It’s not about seeing the heroes save the day by finally destroying the monster. It’s about what we can gather and understand from the found footage presented to us. These are just normal survivors with no real special skills (except for maybe Hud’s ability to keep on filming), and seeing how they react in a terrifying situation.
The ploy of keeping as much as possible all hush-hush was the one defining factor that contributed to Cloverfield’s success. If you wanted to know what the monster looked like, or what happened to the survivors, then you had to pay for a ticket. Abrams employed a similar tactic on Super 8, where all signs indicated that the film is centred around an alien, but by holding back on shots of the creature itself everyone wanted to know what it looked like. In some cases the packaging can be more exciting than the contents itself. Thing is, Cloverfield doesn’t really have a big secret or a whopping great twist; clever marketing (to the point where you’re refusing to even give people a title) made audiences think that there was more. It’s just a monster movie. But what helps is that Cloverfield is a good one.