A.V. Club Blog

In our increasingly fast-moving world (according to a commercial I saw the other day, there's CALCIUM in 7-Up now!), many movie studios are using alternative methods to create what they call "buzz" about their upcoming releases.

A simple trailer used to be enough, but seeing as how most trailers are horrible wastes of time, movie studios decided to branch out a bit.

For example, to promote the new Chappelle/Gondry Joint, Dave Chappelle has been submitting to any and all televised interviews. Even the ones that involve James Lipton.

To promote Firewall, a new movie in which Harrison Ford pretends to know how computers work (Don't worry. There's also fire.

See?), the movie studio devised a computer game to play online. In it, you can wander around a darkened office, clicking on various objects to gain information like "This book is not of interest," and "This plant really needs more light."

Realizing that their movie was basically all about sex and Sharon Stone's new haircut, the people behind Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction released an unrated promo reel on the Internet that features a lot of both of those things. And nudity. And bad music.

But the best alternative promotion (so far) is a computer game created for the upcoming Paul Walker movie Running Scared. In it, you get to be Paul Walker! It's true! See what it's like to hunt down mobsters like Paul, and shoot bad guys like Paul, and go down on Paul Walker's wife like Paul! What? Yes.

No, it doesn't have anything to do with the movie, but this promotion is genius. They even managed to get a virtual Tide product placement next to the virtual bed.

So is this the future of movie promotion?