Happy Wednesday, FutureParty people. On the heels of the phenomenal debut of Longlegs (more on that below), independent distributor Neon has picked up the rights to a new horror film — Shelby Oaks. The movie, written and directed by YouTube-vlogger-turned-filmmaker Chris Stuckmann, has had quite the rags-to-riches story. After launching a financing campaign on Kickstarter in 2022, it went on to raise a record-breaking $1.39 million, woo horror maestro Mike Flanagan to join as an Executive Producer, and is now set to premiere at Fantasia Festival this Saturday. Talk about a dream come true.

In other news… Longlegs played a masterful, long marketing campaign, AI firms have been caught scraping YouTube content, and Balenciaga gives customers a new look at its fashion.

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• YouTube – A Different Man

• X (Twitter) – The Acolyte

• Google – Stranger Things

• Reddit – Matthew McConaughey

• TikTok – “Millionaire” - Chris Stapleton

• Spotify – “Patterns” - Laura Marling

.ENTERTAINMENT.

Longlegs turned opaque marketing into a clear success

The Future. Independent distributor Neon has scared up some incredible business by taking a less-is-more approach to marketing its latest hit horror film, Longlegs. With the majority of movie releases falling below expectations this year, expect more upcoming titles to try the less-is-more approach to their marketing campaigns to build intrigue instead of just awareness.

Tease and scare
Longlegs exceeded expectations with a $22.6 million debut at the box office.

Here’s how Neon pulled it off:

• They started the marketing campaign back in January, releasing several cryptic teasers that didn’t give away the plot, were filled with riddles, and never showed the title serial killer played by star Nicolas Cage.

• But, Neon did put up billboards with a phone number where people could listen to a voice message from Cage in character.

• A 90s-era website was created that laid out the crimes of Longlegs, giving a similar vibe to another viral horror hit: The Blair Witch Project.

• A final teaser showed actress Maika Monroe, who plays protagonist FBI Agent Lee Harker, seeing Cage as Longlegs for the first time while attached to a heart rate monitor — her resting heart rate jumped from 76 beats per minute to 170.

Budgeted at $10 million with an equivalent marketing spend, Longlegs had the biggest opening of the year for an original horror film and the best opening for an indie horror film in about a decade. Additionally, only 15 indie studio releases (in any genre) have opened above $20 million in that time frame.

Never underestimate the power of a compelling mystery.

55.5% of you voted Yes in yesterday’s poll: Do you like immersive theater?

“It makes the performance more interesting.”

“Don’t like crowds and love the diversity in content.”

“I do not go to the theater to participate… leave me alone to enjoy the play’s meaning and the actors’ skill in conveying it.”

.A WORD FROM OUR FRIENDS AT MEM.

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Media, Music, & Entertainment

• GentleMinions, rise up: Following the release of Despicable Me 4, the Despicable Me series is the first animated franchise to cross $5 billion at the global box office. [Read More]

• Nielsen reports that streaming accounted for 40.3% of all TV viewing in June — a new record for streaming and the most amount of viewership for any category in three years. [Read More]

• Hacking group NullBulge stole and leaked a trove of internal Disney Slack communications in protest of the company’s handling of artists’ contracts and its use of generative AI. [Read More]

Fashion & E-Commerce

• Balenciaga released an app for the Apple Vision Pro that puts users in the audience of a runway show. [Read More]

• Startup CrowdVolt wants to bring a bid-ask model (similar to StockX) to the secondary ticket market. [Read More]

• Nike has sued The Shoe Surgeon, famous for remixing silhouettes of Nike sneakers, for $60 million in damages for infringing on its copyright. [Read More]

Tech, Web3, & AI

• Sam Altman has floated the idea that governments may need to institute AI client privilege to safeguard private information (to say nothing of how AI firms access personal information). [Read More]

• Space startup Interlune has received a grant from NASA to develop a technology that could harvest gas from the Moon’s surface and bring it back to Earth. [Read More]

• Startup Exa has raised a $17 million funding round to create a Google for AI systems. [Read More]

Creator Economy

• Marketing platform ShopMy is launching “ShopMy Opportunities” to facilitate sponsorship deals between brands and influencers. [Read More]

• Instagram is giving users the ability to add up to 20 songs on their Reels at a time… so prepare for videos to get crazy. [Read More]

• PBS is getting in on the livestreaming craze with a new edutainment-focused Twitch account. [Read More]

.ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.

AI firms have scraped thousands of YouTube videos

The Future. Investigations by Wired and Proof News have found that firms like Nvidia, Anthropic, Apple, and Salesforce have trained their systems on copyrighted YouTube videos. If YouTube decides to take any of these companies to court, it could radically alter the development of AI systems and put power back in the hands of creators.

Swipe software
AI companies have been very busy scraping content off the internet under the veil of it being “publicly available.”

• Wired and Proof News discovered that top AI firms have trained their systems on a dataset that includes the plain text subtitles of 173,536 YouTube videos from 48,000 channels in various languages.

• Those channels include Khan Academy, MIT, Harvard, WSJ, NPR, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, MrBeast, and PewDiePie.

• The dataset, called “YouTube Subtitles,” was collated by EleutherAI and included in a release called “The Pile” — a dataset that Big Tech has admitted to using for AI training.

• Additionally, OpenAI has been vague on whether its upcoming video generator, Sora, was trained on the video of scraped YouTube content.

Of course, all of this is strictly against YouTube’s protocol, and likely, copyright law (several lawsuits are making their way through the courts).

But, it looks like if your content is anywhere online, AI firms now consider it fair game.

• Interact: The Pudding put together an interactive map, dubbed Climate Zones, that lets people check how the climate is expected to evolve over the coming decades wherever they live.

• Read: WSJ has a handy guide to determine whether the online account you’re interacting with is actually a human, scammer, or bot.

• Watch: Forbes chats with Seven Seven Six founder Alexis Ohanian about the firm’s new investment in women’s track, as women’s sports (in general) is seeing a surge in popularity.

Emotionally, we’re all here.

LATEST PODCAST EPISODE

Today we get into a recent study on the digital habits and informational literacy of Gen Z, how the secondhand clothing market is struggling to maintain their popularity online, and the most recent updates on the Paramount Skydance merger.