Pantelion Films and Fullscreen leveraged a social-first content day with the star of How To Be A Latin Lover to produce platform-specific activations around key theatrical campaign moments that maximized title awareness pre-release, ultimately leading to Pantelion's biggest box office opening ever.
Pantelion Films' challenge for Fullscreen was unique: launch How To Be A Latin Lover theatrically in the US—a bilingual feature film starring Mexican comedian Eugenio Derbez. With the film, Pantelion hoped to grow upon the surprise domestic success of 2013's Instructions Not Included, thereby building a case for more Spanish and bilingual theatrical released films in the US.
Fullscreen knew that success depended on the film's ability to generate broad awareness pre-release, so we concepted and produced a series of high impact social activations across Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, leveraging cultural relevance and talent access to breakthrough fans' oversaturated newsfeeds.
First, Maximo, the main character, gave fans love advice during the finale of ABC's The Bachelor on Twitter, driving 135 Million hashtag impressions in only two hours. Then Eugenio Derbez "photobombed" co-star Salma Hayek's selfies on Instagram for April Fool's Day, with the images earning nearly 1 Million views and engagements. Finally, on Facebook, a talent-led canvas ad taught fans the rules of latin love, leading to a 59% viewer completion rate and over 160,000 clicks to purchase tickets.
Derbez's participation in the social campaign and his partnership on custom content allowed for activations that were truly catered to the fans and relevant to trending social moments. Whether as himself or his character, he unified the campaign thematically by teaching fans "How To Be A Latin Lover."
Overall, the social campaign exceeded expectations on all three of the major platforms. On Facebook, 635K clicks to purchase tickets accounted for over 90% of total referrals from the ticketing link. On Twitter, a 54% video completion rate far exceeded the industry average and was a driving force behind the 62M people reached on the platform in the opening weekend. And on Instagram, over 1M total video views of campaign content extended awareness well beyond Derbez's core fans.
When opening weekend arrived, How To Be A Latin Lover became Pantelion's biggest box office opening ever, and proved the potential of star Derbez, and of future bilingual theatrical releases in the US.
