How Nolan’s The Odyssey Is Giving Film Promotion A New Playbook

If you must absolutely get a peek at Christopher Nolan’s take on The Odyssey which releases next year right now, you will have to make your way to one of the estimated 10 theatres in the world that are screening re-releases of Sinners and One Battle After Another in IMAX 70mm. This is essentially a six-minute-long trailer dressed up as a prologue that will play ahead of the re-releases. And if you can wait a bit longer, that is till the end of this week, then you can watch the same prologue – again only in IMAX theatres, but not just the few that screen 70mm – when James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire & Ash hits the screen.

For the rest of the hoi polloi who can only catch the latest Avatar in an ordinary, non-IMAX theatre, they will just have to make do with a trailer (and not the full six-minute-long prologue). There was another teaser trailer that released earlier this year too – again only in theatres – that was screened along with <Jurassic World Rebirth>.

There is so far no word yet on a digital release of these trailers, if it all there will be one. Some shakily filmed versions of these trailers have leaked online, but they have been swiftly taken down, only generating more hype.

It’s a remarkably different approach to film promotion. In an era where trailers are dropped online to get maximum eyeballs and virality, sometimes so many back-to-back to build anticipation that viewers, when finally watching the movie, can feel surprised to find plot points they hadn’t guessed before, Nolan is going in this other direction. He is giving us such a slow-drip of promotion, something so exclusive and rare that one must go to a theatre, and preferably an IMAX theatre, just to catch its trailer. The treatment is as if it is not a film, not in the mere sense of the term, but something more monumental and rare.

Of course, there are not that many who can pull off such a marketing campaign. Nolan has built that kind of devotion among film viewers that they will go to a theatre just to watch a trailer or find a format which he recommends to watch a movie in. And he has used this kind of strategy before, as recently as his last film Oppenheimer, whose first look debuted exclusively before <Nope>. But he hadn’t gone to the extent that he has now.

It is in a way a throwback to an earlier time of film promotion. Back in 1998, you could catch the first glimpse of then much hyped Star Wars: The Phantom Menace only if you bought tickets to theatres showing films like <Meet Joe Black> and The Waterboy. A New York Times report from then describes how many people paid full admission just to see the trailer and then left when the movie began. (The trailer was also shown after the movie ended, and a handful of theater owners were kind enough to allow filmgoers to return with their torn ticket stub to rewatch the trailer).

Not everyone has been enthused by Nolan’s choice of marketing. Some have wondered if this will not in fact hasten movie-watching in theatres from what it is now – a casual pastime –into something that is to be experienced only once in a while, when an ‘event’ movie such as Nolan’s The Odyssey turns up. But one can argue that this is exactly what theatres need right now. At a time, when questions are being raised about the future of theatrical releases, and when these fears have gotten heightened by the proposed acquisition of Warner Bros by a streamer like Netflix, Nolan’s The Odyssey could be the shot in the arm that shows that people still care to watch movies in a theatre.

It is of course evident that the film’s campaign is using the trailer not just as a loyalty reward for regular cinema-goers, but really as a bait for people to come back to the theatres. The exclusivity of the trailers so far is less about keeping the material hidden and more about choreographing the exact circumstances under which ‘the real thing’ is to be experienced – on a big screen, preferably in a premium format.

So far, going by the hype it has already generated so far from release, this strategy seems to be working. In an era of infinite streaming content and multiple trailers fighting for eyeballs,  Nolan may be showing that if theatres are to survive, this might be the way to go.