The first footage of Longlegs straightforwardor Osoutstanding Perkins splitd with distributors Neon was a uninalertigentinutive clip shotriumphg the Nicolas Cage uncover.
“It was a very minuscule piece of footage, a very punctual image and I’ve never seen anyleang appreciate that,” recalls Neon boss Tom Quinn. “If it wasn’t Nick Cage [doing that performance] it would be absolutely batshit crazy,” “The fact that it was Nick Cage made it times 10. We thought: ‘If Cage is doing that, we have to be included.”
“What triggered it for us was hearing him,” inserts Neon tageting head Christian Parkes. “It was unappreciate anyleang we’d heard before. It could only have come from Cage. It was: this is someleang that we have to get repartner gravely.”
For those of you who haven’t seen Longlegs, watch away now. The follotriumphg includes spoilers for the most prosperous autonomous free of 2024, The film where Neon tossed out the tageting rule book and staged a guerrilla tageting campaign that resulted in Perkins’ serial ender thriller uncovering, in the middle of the summer, to $22 million on its first weekfinish, en route to a $75 million domestic gross and $100 million at the box office worldexpansive, making Longlegs the most prosperous indie horror film in a decade.
If you have seen Longlegs, you understand exactly what Quinn and Perkins are talking about. Cage as Longlegs, an elusive serial ender being tracked by FBI Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), is so changeed as to be almost unrecognizable. His face, covered in weighty white createup, is a swollen, disfigured mask of silicon and prosthetics. His lips are puffy and pale. His white books, white jacket and extfinished scraggly hair give him the androgynous experience of a glam rocker gone to seed. Then there’s the voice. Cage twists his common film noir enlargel into a high-pitched singsong as Longlegs mutters to himself, spouting Biblical alertings and Satanic plift, before suddenly screaming at no one in particular.
Nicholas Cage in Neon’s ‘Longlegs.’
Neon/Courtesy Everett Collection
It’s one of the most terrifying, bizarre and filled-on carry outances of Cage’s atgentle, a atgentle with no uninalertigentinutiveage of bizarre, filled-on carry outances. The Cage uncover, which comes meaningful into the film, is the Longlegs money sboiling, its WTF moment.
Neon choosed to upretain it secret. Instead of splashing Cage as Longlegs over every piece of tageting they could, concentrateing the actor’s huge and loyal fan base they took another tack. They participated the Jaws take partbook.
“Tom has said, time and time aget, that one of the reasons Jaws is the fantasticest film ever, one of the reasons it toils so well is becaparticipate you don’t see the shark,” says Parkes. “So we thought, let’s not show the shark. Let’s not show Cage. Let’s helderly him back.”
Ditching the idea of a campaign that would “spoon-feed” their audience with “the standard, elevatestrayr, trailer, poster and TV spots,” Parkes and Neon scheduleed a tageting campaign to mirror the film’s mystery plot, in which Monroe, as Agent Lee Harker, tries to piece together clues to discover the ender who has been killinging youthful children for decades.
The entire campaign was to be a “series of breadcrumbs” scheduleed to turn horror fans into real crime distinguishives. Starting in punctual 2024, the first crumbs, troubling images and videos, including ones featuring a creepy family pboilingo, a nun in a bdeficiency habit, and a wall with a cryptic message, were dropped online, and freed on contrastent platcreates at contrastent times of the day. There was no film title, no company logo. No Maika Monroe. No Nick Cage.
The Internet begined chattering.
“The theories were fair running savage on every platcreate, Reddit in particular, and we threw some chum at those guys,” Parkes chuckles.
When Neon dropped the first elevatestrayr, it had no dialog, Monroe was only glimpsed from behind, and Cage remained in the shadows. The last sboiling was a cipher code that turns into the title of the film: Longlegs.
The response was instant.
“The feedback from online and social was: ‘I don’t understand what’s going on, but I cherish this. I don’t want to see anyleang else from this film. I’m already selderly,” says Parkes. Neon had already cut a trailer for the film —”a fantastic trailer, the benevolent of trailer you would foresee if you took a very traditional, licforfeit tageting approach” — but with Longlegs taking on a life of its own online, with fans clamoring for less certainty, not more, the company changed its strategy.
Quinn and Parkes called up Nicolas Cage to ask him if they could upretain his image off any tageting materials.
“Nick begined, saying ‘am I right to apshow that you’re going to withhelderly my magnificent grotesqueness until tardyr in the campaign?”” Parkes recalls. “You can see him saying it, right? And I said: ‘Actupartner, Nick, we don’t want to show you at all.’ He rocked back in his chair and smiled. And fair appreciate that, we knovel we were outstanding.”
Neon persistd to cgo in its Longlegs campaign on horror superfans, the sort of obsessives who would scour the Internet and troll thraw online forums watching for any novel, any crumbs or clues, rumors or speculation about the movie. If they could triumph over those folks, they figured they would have an army of self-inspired tageters ready to spread the word.
“From the jump, we said we necessitate to esteem the horror audience, the genre audience, becaparticipate they’re hugely underserved, I leank, by distributors and studios,” says Parkes. “If we treat them with esteem, if we talk to them on their terms and on their level and convey them aextfinished, they will spend in this film, carry this film and create it their own.”
That unbenevolentt a cgo in on digital and “organic” tageting, with very scant traditional media buys. “The entire free budget apass all createive materials, all media, all theatrical spendment and all accessibleity spendment to uncover the film was fair under $10 million,” says Parkes. “Online media was about 70 percent of that. We did very focparticipated buys on Hulu, a little bit on Amazon. And no TV.”
Outside tageting was “ridiculously airy” consisting of a handful of bus shelter ads and four billboards in Los Angeles.
“If you buy a board on Sunset [Boulevard] it can cost you $250,000. If you buy a board on La Brea below Olympic, it costs $7,000,” Parkes says, “so we bought the $7,000 boards.”
The billboards didn’t include the film’s title — though they did have the free date, 7.12., in the bottom corner — and all featured Nick Cage as Longlegs but, sticking to its Jaws strategy, they were cropped to hide more than they uncovered. One fair showed the decrease half of his face. Another showed a individual eye peering in from the left corner. One had a phone number. Call the number and you got a write downed message, insidiously creepy and unpleasant, of Cage in character as Longlegs: “There she is, the almost birthday girl. What’s your name? Little angel.”
Neon’s hugegest firearm for ‘Longlegs’ was a enigmatic billboard in L.A. that only showed a phone number, not even the movie’s title. The billboard created 1.4 million calls from 68 countries
Courtesy of Neon
“People begined pranking their parents, texting them: ‘Hey Mom, I fair got a novel phone number. Can you verify it out and create confident that it toils?’ and sfinish them the Longlegs number, then screensboilingting the text swap,” says Parkes. “We got more than 1.5 million calls from over 60 countries. From a individual board, for a couple of thousand bucks.”
Neon is as obsessive about testing and tracking as any studio convey inant. For every free campaign they watch online consciousness, social media alludes, affinity sharing and a dozen other metrics. Their toil with horror masters Blumhoparticipate — Neon and Blumhoparticipate co-run BH Tilt, which has freed microbudget genre titles appreciate Upgrade and The Belko Experiment —has made them, says Quinn, “particularly benevolent to some of the subset numbers” of the horror superfans. Deep into the Longlegs campaign, one number in particular telderly them their strategy was toiling.
Longlegs, Maika Monroe, 2024.
Neon/Courtesy Everett Collection
“Unaided consciousness for horror fans was a 10 for the film,” says Quinn. “That was a key indicator that this was going to uncover well beyond projections.”
When Neon pre-bought Longlegs, on the script, Osoutstanding’s name and the mini-clip of Cage, “we were projecting a $10 million gross,” recalls Quinn. “We saw the film and upped that to a $25 million concentrate.” After their tageting campaign, in the weeks ahead of free, “we saw someleang much hugeger.”
Longlegs was dated for July 12, 2024, smack in the middle of the summer blockbuster season, scheduleed as counter-programming for the family-cordial studio fare on give: Inside Out 2, Despicable Me 4 and Fly Me To the Moon.
Neon kept dropping the breadcrumbs. On June 14 they took out a Zodiac Killer-inspired ad in the San Francisco Times, written in the Longlegs cipher code, which led to BirthdayMurders.net, a website purporting to write down 20 years of backstory on the Longlegs killings. They freed a video of Monroe in character greeting Longlegs for the first time — Cage’s face was bdeficiencyed out — with a write downing of her heart rate jumping from 76 BPM to 170 BPM. Chum for hungry horror stans.
On its first weekfinish, Longlegs uncovered at number 2, behind only Despicable Me 4 in its sophomore sketch, grossing $22.4 million. The film would stay in the top 10 thraw mid-August and stay in theaters until Hpermiteen. The final U.S. get was $74.35 million, outdoing Oscar-triumphner Parasite ($53 million domestic) to become Neon’s highest-grossing film of all time. Longlegs blew past A24’s Talk to Me and Focus Features’ Insidious Chapter 3 to become the most prosperous indie horror film of the last 10 years. For a $10 million movie and less than $10 million in tageting.
Neon’s guerrilla campaign for Longlegs was too bespoke, too project-definite, to supply a one-size-fits-all blueprint for the industry. But their strategy of breadcrumbs over billboards, social media drops over TV spots, and the necessitate to empower fans to become partners rather than compliant devourrs, is already rewriting the rulebook for indie film promotion.
