The Cloverfield hype

“Cloverfield” by JJ Abrams. Remember the names. You’re gonna hear from it again. Guaranteed.

Cloverfield is the project name for an upcoming movie, style “The Blair Witch meeting the ‘Lost’ monster during Armageddon”. It is produced by Lost co-creator and Mission: Impossible III director JJ Abrams…

There’s already a big (internet-) hype around the movie, and hey, it’s only hitting the screens in January 2008…

Internet Hype

The makers of “The Blair Witch” movie created one of the first internet-based hypes ever. With clever “viral marketing” and pseudo-realistic websites, they created more stir for a movie than anyone would ever be able to realize. How ? Here’s the clever part: They “inject” viral marketing websites and new releases into a number of “randomly” selected forums and newsgroups, and let the internet do it’s work: spread the information.

For this new movie (“Cloverfield” – if you don’t remember the name now I don’t know why ) ), they did the same thing:

On July 10th, a movie trailer which failed to reveal the film’s title left U.S. cinema audiences desperate for more information. The strange promo, which is being shown across the country before screenings of America’s number one film Transformers, features a bunch of New Yorkers enjoying a dinner party before the lights go out and fireballs drop all over the city. The trailer contains no title, but reveals only a release date of January 18, 2008 and that the movie is produced by JJ Abrams.

 

Only hours later, the trailer appeared on YouTube. Paramount Pictures Corp initially didn’t react to it, until a day or so later, when they made a lot of fuss about it and demanded to have it removed. Hmmm… clever again, no ? EVERYBODY knows that movies released on YouTube start leading their own lives minutes after being released. And certainly when companies like Paramount demand to remove it… (“This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Paramount Pictures Corp.”) A perfect viral marketing stunt, no ? By the time the film is hitting the screens, people will *die* to see it.

Monsters

According to RottenTomatoes.com there is definitively a monster in the film, and it’s called “The Parasite”…

Some believe it is the Cthulh, one of the creatures appearing in the books of HP Lovecraft, an American author of fantasy, horror and science fiction (1890-1937)

 

Speculations and ideas

EthanHaasWasRight.com and EthanHaasWasWrong.blogspot.com

Various Sources warn people that the siteis a fake and has nothing to do with this movie.

I’m not too sure that it’s fake. Did you know that Paramount pulled both camcorder vids of the Cloverfield trailer as well as the “Ethan Haas” videos from YouTube ? To be continued…

More information and a walk trough can be found here.

Oh, and is it a coincidence that one of the “Others” was called Ethan in JJ’s “Lost” ?

I believe we’re mixing two (or even more) movie projects:

1. They’re working on a (first) movie on HP Lovecraft’s works. Looking at the success of Harry Potter, Narnia and Lord of the Rings, it’s clear that people *like* this kind of sci-fi / fantasy movies.
   *** “Cloverfield” might be a modern version of the story !?
2. Same for the Ethan Haas websites: it might simply be *another* movie Paramount is working on, and accidently linked to Cloverfield…

Links

• The official1-18-2008 website:
  http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/11808
• The Wiki pageon Cloverfield:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloverfield
• The IMDB official page (currently still “Untitled”):
  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1060277
• YouTube search for Cloverfield:
  http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cloverfield
• The official trailer at Apple.com (also in HD !):
  http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/11808

Pictures

JJ Abrams