To promote “Bugonia,” Focus Features invited fans to step into the world of alien conspiracists

If alien activity has been of concern lately, good news! All suspicions of extraterrestrial life can be collected and discussed on a website made for that very purpose.

Bugonia, the latest film from Oscar-nominated director Yorgos Lanthimos, centers on two conspiracy theorists kidnapping a pharmaceutical CEO, and the marketing team decided to use the real world to keep audiences immersed in its tin-foil-hat world.

Ahead of the movie’s late-October release, Focus Features, which produced and distributed the film, rolled out three in-world stunts, including a LinkedIn page for the company Auxolith, where main character Michelle Fuller (played by Emma Stone) is CEO; OOH billboards seemingly advertising Fuller and Auxolith that were graffitied over with phrases like “Andromedan filth” and “Join the human resistance”; and a conspiracy theory website, HumanResistanceHQ.com, housing research about “suspected Andromedans.” None of it is real, but for at least a second, anyone coming across these stunts just might believe it could be.

“Not every movie lends itself to that [in-world approach],” Joshua Kornblit, EVP of marketing at Focus Features, told us. “In this case, it felt like there was a real reason for it to exist.”

Real or not real?

Bugonia is far from the first film to take the in-world marketing approach. Perhaps most famously, the low-budget horror The Blair Witch Project launched its own guerrilla marketing website in 1999 that led audiences to wonder whether the film’s tale of missing filmmakers was fiction or reality. The ambiguous campaign is often credited as revolutionizing the movie marketing playbook, and several IYKYK-style campaigns have since followed.

Recently, movies have found new ways to bring audiences into the worlds of their films. Marketing for the horror film Longlegs, following an investigation into a series of demonic murders, included billboards featuring a phone number where callers could hear a prerecorded message from the movie’s main serial killer; Weapons, meanwhile, got promotion via a retro news site for the fictional town of Maybrook documenting the missing children central to the movie’s mysterious plot.

While horror movies often find the in-world approach attractive as a marketing option, Bugonia’s alien conspiracy kidnapping plot leans more sci-fi and comedy. Still, Kornblit said, the film’s characters and believable conspiracy conceit made it a good fit to bring elements of its plot into the real world.

“It’s something we see on the internet, it’s something that exists, so it just feels very natural and that people would kind of get it and engage with it,” he said.

The website in particular has become a sort of central hub for fan engagement. On it, visitors can read through detailed news clippings about suspicious missing persons and UFO sightings, learn about Andromedan anatomy and technology, and get involved in the comments section, which boast hundreds of participants seemingly fully bought in to the fictional world.

Kornblit said that the OOH and supporting Reddit and X ads were designed to drive interest back to the site, and it’s become a place that can be revisited and explored more even after watching the film.

“People are seeing the movie and they’re coming back [to the site] because they just want to extend that experience and they’re eager to learn more,” Kornblit said. “It works really hard, harder than most things you can do.”

Out of this world

Since rolling out online, the campaign’s social footprint, from press and digital hits, has reached 12 million engagements, according to the studio, and in a busy movie marketing environment—especially as awards season ramps up—Kornblit credits the in-world strategy as a way to stand out.

“Audiences are inundated,” he said. “When you can create an experience, whether that be in the physical world or digital world, where people can just go deeper and connect with the characters and the themes and really engage with it and tell their friends, there’s just something different. And I think people enjoy that, especially for this kind of genre, and it just makes them an active participant.”

Still, there can be risks to being self-referential. Who’s to say that a passerby won’t think the Auxolith billboards are an ad for a real pharmaceutical company, or that the LinkedIn page won’t inspire someone to inquire about a job? One of the top comments on an Auxolith LinkedIn post that shows a fake Forbes cover featuring its CEO sports an explanation from a LinkedIn user who felt the need to clear the air: “This is Emma Stone. If you go to this company’s page on LinkedIn, it’s a ‘fictious company’ from an upcoming film Bugonia. I guess this is their idea of ‘marketing.’”

For Kornblit, any potential for confusion is worth the benefit of committing to the bit.

“For those where it catches your attention, those are the people that then dig in,” he said. “And those are the people, I think, that are starting the conversation, which then gets built online, where most people are discovering it.”