How the Film Community is Making Use of Twitter

Have you joined Twitter yet? You know the much-talked about microblogging tool that everyone’s using.

You should, instead of procrastinating and trying to convince yourself that it’s the latest tech craze, and that’ll it’ll go out of style just like the other online trends of yesteryear.

Ashton Kutcher did, and well, he sure was glad he did.

Kutcher and his frequent tweet postings are being credited with bringing massive advance publicity to the movie Five Killers, the Lionsgate movie that his production company Katalyst is co-producing, by linking to a video of himself on getting his chest hairs plucked for the movie. At last count (done by Twitterholic), Kutcher had over 620,000 followers (and counting), fourth only behind CNN, Britney Spears and President Barack Obama. Now that’s a lot of attention. That’s about as good, if not better, than doing press for a magazine with a circulation of a million. After all, Tweets get retweeted, or passed around; totally viral, indeed. Newscasts and websites of prominent news stations and entertainment news magazines all reported on

According to Gregg Kilday’s rather insightful article in The Hollywood Reporter, Kutcher’s guerrilla marketing efforts ring quite well with the movie’s director, who told the trade paper:

“The reaction has been incredible. I have gotten thousands of enthusiastic posts from people thanking me for the frank, unpolished look at the making of my latest film.”

One would expect Kiletic to go off in a tangent at his star for violating the sanctity of a movie set, but no. He only had praise for Kutcher’s Pr-ing, saying,

“He’s a dedicated Twitter powerhouse. He makes sure he connects every day and is honest and open. The old fake veneer our business has been flogging for years is wearing thin. It’s time to shake things up: Take control of your information — own it.”

Kilday’s article goes on to detail how the Hollywood movie community is leveraging Twitter for plenty of pre-release publicity.

Michael Moses, a Universal publicity executive, confessed to using Twitter to get early reaction to the studio-leaked Bruno movie previews, while Jon Favreau muses on Iron Man 2 early rehearsals. Paramount, whose M. Night Shyamalan-directed The Last Airbender is currently being filmed, updates fans on set happenings via the tweets of the movie’s producers Sam Mercer and Frank Marshall.

Recently, Lionsgate offered movie fans their first peek at an outside poster for its upcoming movie Crank High Voltage.

Twitter is definitely a way for studios to get feedback, and allows them to get constructive and deconstructive criticism from moviegoers. It’s certainly better to get a premature verdict on a @reply than at the box office receipts tallying bulletin board. Now that’s priceless and…all for nothing (although there’s been some talk about having paid corporate accounts).

Perhaps, it’s time you should make Twitter a part of your movie marketing and PR campaign if you haven’t thought of it already.

So what are you waiting for? In less than 140 words: join today!