Oren Peli Israeli filmmaker made Paranormal Activity for $15,000 and shot this tale of a young couple who videotaped the strange noises they hear inside a room in a house. Dubbed the Blair Witch Project on steroids, what makes this story different is the fact it has over 1 million people will have seen it before national release in the US due to social media marketing grossed $7 million from 144 theatres over a weekend.

The film originally picked up by Speilberg’s DreamWorks, but marketing was by Paramount. Paramount tried carefully to develop and manage the phenomenon with free midnight screenings in college campus towns. Then encouraged fans to demand the movie in their town via an online petition campaign.

The “demand it” campaign was touted on the Eventful site as “The First Ever Major Film Release Decided By You”.
Founded in 2004, Eventful is the leading events website which enables its community of users to discover, promote, share and create events. see http://about.eventful.com/ for more info.

This reminds me of a film created a by team called Four Eyed Monsters that debuted on Youtube and it being the first ever feature length film to be posted, in addition to creating an online video blog, they produced accompanying webisodes and used social media to market, promote and sell the film.
They encouraged fans to buy tickets at cinemas they were touring, so they could advance book a cinema and showing the film had an audience wanting to see it. In addition they also made it available as a paid for download from iTunes and also as a mail order dvd.

Useful links worth checking up on.

Paranormal Main site
http://www.paranormalactivity-movie.com/trailer.html

Eventful
http://eventful.com

Can we do YES WE CAN 1 million tickets sold
http://eventful.com/performers/paranormal-activity-/P0-001-000212499-6/competitions

Oren Peli interview at Dread Central with mp3 download
http://www.dreadcentral.com/interviews/peli-oren-paranormal-activity

CNN Showbiz article

http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Movies/10/12/paranormal.activity.movie/index.html

Mashable article

Paranormal Activity Rides the Social Web to Millions
http://mashable.com/2009/10/13/paranormal-activity-success/

Four Eyed Monsters

Main site
http://foureyedmonsters.com

Youtube site
http://www.youtube.com/user/foureyedmonsters