Memes are the new trailers, they're just unpredictable. It could be one frame. It could be one peculiarly photogenic character. Or it could be an earworm of a song. If you’re a streaming executive, a showrunner or a director, your dream should be that some piece of your content becomes a meme. In a nauseatingly choppy sea of content, a meme is to today’s series and shows what an award was to yesterday’s. But unlike awards, which can to a certain degree be engineered with stars and PR, memes born from series or movies are impossible to manufacture and predict. Over the holiday break, Netflix released a new fantasy series called "The Witcher." It’s based on a popular video game which was based on a popular series of books. In ten days, the show became the biggest TV series in the world according to some exotic new metric necessitated by streaming called “demand expressions,” beating out "The Mandalorian." And it became the sixth highest viewed piece of content on Netflix of 2019. Why? Sure, the show had some things going for it. First, a built-in core fan base. Second, prime real estate at the top of the Netflix app in over 60 million homes in the US alone.
And third, a holiday week with plenty of time for binge-watching. Or maybe it was the meme. “Toss A Coin To Your Witcher,” a medieval-sounding folk song from the show sung by a character named Jaskier at the end of the second episode, became a meme, making the show ubiquitous on Twitter, Reddit and Instagram during the crucial window when a binge-release show needs to drive conversation the most. But Netflix's preparation and response proves they didn't see the meme coming. According to The Verge, fans are clamoring for the song but it has not been released in official form on streaming services like Spotify. So fans uploaded it to YouTube where it has tens of millions of views. Memes are the new trailers. They're becoming a key vehicle for word-of-mouth marketing of series and films. One way to make a hit series or movie is to ride a meme from it. The only problem is that they're impossible to engineer. "The Mandalorian" famously rode the meme puppet Baby Yoda to becoming a monster hit this fall.
But judging from everything I've read from the creation of the character by Jon Favreau and the marketing decisions that led up to the release of the series, Baby Yoda was simply another cute character from a factory that churns out cute characters. There were no Baby Yoda toys made before launch. Here's Disney CEO Bob Iger on Baby Yoda: "Well, look, the scale of the reaction is probably beyond my expectations by a wide margin. That said, the moment I laid eyes on the character, I had a strong feeling the character was going to connect with audiences. It's just so cute, so interesting, so compelling, in many respects so familiar and yet so new."And two upper-middlebrow films, Marriage Story and Uncut Gems, spent the fall and winter of 2019 dominating certain Twitter timelines and Instagram feeds in meme form. For the former, Adam Sandler stars in the "This Is How I Win" meme. The movie is a smash hit. And for the latter, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansen star in the Argument meme. That film has a 95% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and received a leading six nominations at the Golden Globes.
Marriage Story director Noah Baumbach admitted to being surprised by the reaction to the argument scene and having to be shown the memes. And judging by how closely the Safdie brothers, who directed Uncut Gems, guarded screener copies of their film and barred editors from taking copies of it home, it's easy to assume they never planned on any frame of their moving escaping the confines of the theater. Even "The Righteous Gemstones," a minor but brilliant HBO show with a meme song, may have gotten a boost that made a second season a no-brainer for the network. And after the original meme-as-trailer, Bird Box, was debunked as a happy coincidence for Netflix, it feels safe to say they're unpredictable. But that doesn't mean content creators and platforms won't try to engineer memes that jump out of their movies and series and into our timelines. If any of you see a series or a movie that contains a character or a song or a frame that you feel is engineered to become a meme, please send it in!
The shorter stuff
We're all going to need to sign up for Apple TV+ soon when those Plepler productions start hitting. (NYT)
Here is Gwyneth Paltrow's instantly iconic poster for her new Netflix show. (Twitter)
Speaking of Goop, Gwyneth's response to Ryan Seacrest on the red carpet at the Golden Globes was pleasantly excruciating: "Well, I'm sort of semi-retired a bit from acting because I have a company that I do." (E!)
Our generation has invented cloying names for made up anxieties like Sunday Scaries and Summer Scaries, the feeling of knowing that your weekend or summer is coming to an end. I'm surprised no one invented an equally infantilizing name for the feeling of knowing that "Friends" will not be available on any streaming platform for five months. The Friends Frights? (THR)
Loglines for in-production films are apparently now a consumer-facing thing. Netflix tweeted a seemingly infinite number of elevator pitches for their upcoming movies. (Twitter)
The VP of Erewhon flexed on Netflix: "I'm in talks with someone from Netflix. They wanted to film in our store, but I don't think it's 'You.' I don't even know. I gotta check my email." (THR)
Amazon Prime Video is borrowing the iconic tag line from the Transformers franchise - "More Than Meets The Eye" - to market its very much non-Transformers-related Al Pacino Nazi-hunter series. (Twitter)
Jimmy Iovine gets permanent respect for producing Damn The Torpedoes, Darkness On The Edge of Town, The River and Making Movies, but his taste in art veers toward the...unsubtle. (NYT)
I'm going to steal this move from Adam Driver: "At one point, after completing a thought, Driver informed me, 'That’s the end of the sentence.'" (NYT)
Comedy Central released an absurd number of minutes watched in a successful attempt to remind everyone how popular South Park is. (THR)
Knives Out grossed more in China than The Rise of Skywalker. For those of you who are normal, this matters because the guy who directed Knives Out directed the previous Star Wars film and everyone got in a big fight about it. (Deadline) (THR)
One of my favorite series is Pitchfork's Sunday Review. Eric Harvey's piece on Peter Gabriel's So this weekend led me to this incredible footage of Peter Gabriel moaning in gibberish in a historically ugly shirt in front of an absolutely MASSIVE CROWD of people in Argentina going nuts for him in 1986. A gift. (YouTube)