That, apparently, was the brainstorm generated by Netflix’s PR team, which has managed to generate significantly more buzz for itself than the actual movie has this week, by hiring an actor to live in a room built into a billboard in Los Angeles. This guy (as yet unidentified) has apparently been in the billboard since Thursday, and is reportedly scheduled to depart on Saturday—a significantly lesser amount of time than Lee and Moura’s characters are trapped in their house in the movie, but, then, they only had to contend with largely unseen monsters, and not what have to assume has been a significant amount of honking on L.A.’s Sunset Boulevard.
Per THR, Netflix has confirmed that it’s just the one guy in there, not actors working in shifts, which immediately raises questions like “How do you effectively air condition a billboard?” and “Have these people seen that episode of the last season of Hacks where a stunt like this goes spectacularly wrong?” and “Toilet?” The dude reportedly has a whiteboard so he can communicate with people in the outside world, presumably so they can be reminded that password sharing is bad, and that streaming service price hikes are just the normal cost of doing business.
And while this stunt is absolutely going to live in our memories way longer than The Last House itself will, it does make us wonder what other sort of people-trapping marketing tricks Hollywood could come up with next. Locking a performer in an elevated kitchen for Tony? Trapping them in a floating deposition chamber for The Social Reckoning? Hey, there’s another Dune movie coming out in a couple of months: Any actors want to get entombed under a million pounds of sand to help move a couple more movie tickets? It’s a bold new era in movie marketing/consensual kidnapping!
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