For the latest Studio Ghibli movie, they are releasing nothing about it. No trailers, no commercials or ads with any type of footages or images, just the title and a vague poster. They are banking on their studio’s name recognition (and probably the novelty/mystery of the unmarketing) to ensure box office success. It will doubtlessly work in this case.
Has anything like this ever been tried with an American movie? Could it work (with “work” meaning a big ooening weekend) in the US, with a big name or big franchise?
It wasn’t a wide theatrical release, and it wasn’t a major studio deal with a big-name cast, though it does have the “Cloverfield pseudo-franchise” recognition factor. So it’s not an identical situation, where they were counting on news coverage of the non-marketing to do the marketing for them during the weeks leading up to the release. Indeed, it wasn’t really announced at all, and the whole promotional message was “surprise! here’s a whole-ass movie you didn’t know about!”
However, it is comparable in that they chose not to do any advance marketing, and then they did a big splashy announcement and hoped that media coverage and internet chatter about their unusual strategy would do most of the heavy lifting.
Incidentally, it’s hard to say if the approach could be considered to have “worked.” The movie apparently didn’t get stellar viewing numbers (Netflix is opaque about its stats), and snap reviews were pretty bad. But there’s some reason to think the movie got better short-term viewership than if they’d marketed it more conventionally.