This article contains spoilers for Nope. Marketing for a film has the potential to make or break the audience's reception, as well as its overall success. Posters, teaser trailers, and merchandising can often spoil some of a film's most intense moments or hopeful surprises. However, some filmmakers have mastered the art of concealing some of a film's most pivotal details to give its viewers a surprise. The latest example of this is Jordan Peele's newest film, Nope.
Nope is the third film that Peele has directed, written, and produced. Since his directorial debut with Get Out in 2017, Peele has been nominated for four Academy Awards and won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Early reviews of Nope have credited it as Peele's most ambitious film to date, and it is certainly unlike anything Peele has done before. Part of Nope's polarity amongst Peele's previous films is due to the misguiding qualities of its marketing.
Following his 2017 directorial debut, Peele's films have generated a mass amount of online buzz. The releases of both Get Out and Us were met with mass dissection of what greater metaphors Peele may have had in mind. Nope, meanwhile, has generated a slightly different kind of buzz due to the strategic marketing of the film. Both Get Out and Us allowed viewers to discover the threat the protagonists would have to overcome through their trailers and posters. Instead of giving away its problem, Nope used its trailers and posters to create an unsettling level of ambiguity that forces viewers to guess what the threat actually is. Instead of revealing the threat outright, the marketing for Nope leaves the audience in the dark, and viewers question themselves a third of the way into the film.
.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=1500&dpr=1.5)
Prior to its release, Nope had a number of thrilling posters. Its first was a simple cloud with a flagged banner descending from it. Stage lights were spotted in the background and its vague, isolated setting provided an eerie concern around the film. Posters that followed shifted the attention from the cloud to the animals and characters involved. One poster featured a horse floating in midair, while Nope's character posters put each individual in the spotlight, with each one gazing up at the perceived threat. Those that have seen Nope know that these details are all slightly misleading, given the discoveries made throughout the film.
Leaving out significant details on a printed poster may seem simple, but Nope also conceals its secrets in all of its trailers. The film masterfully constructs each teaser to mislead viewers about what Nope actually has in store. The sight of what appeared to be a U.F.O. saucer led many to believe that Nope would revolve around aliens. This theory isn’t entirely wrong, but the film doesn’t deal with aliens the way that audiences had been led to believe. Nope’s countless trailers included shots that supported this, including merchandise of pale alien heads, eerie shadows, an unfamiliar bloody hand reaching toward a human hand, and a creepy audience patron who appears quite alien-like. All of these things appear in the trailer to lead viewers to believe they’ll see Peele’s take on an alien movie, but the film never actually has one.
With these misleading clues, Peele and Nope’s marketing team are able to hide the film’s actual threat in plain sight. Rather than worrying about what is on board the U.F.O. craft, Nope’s actual threat is the saucer-shaped object itself. There are no tiny aliens or metaphors exploring the human condition looped in with the explanation for Peele’s antagonist this time. For the first time, Peele delivers an antagonist that terrorizes his characters without some otherworldly motive. Instead, Nope continues to use Peele’s tactic of making the atmosphere of his films the most terrifying component.
In Get Out, Peele’s protagonist was escaping a threat from his world. In Us, the Wilson family was haunted by their tethered counterparts from a world below them. In Nope, the Haywoods are taunted by an organism from the clouds above them. Without knowing everything before viewers head into the theater, they get to embark on the mystery alongside OJ (Daniel Kaluuya), Emerald (Keke Palmer), and Angel (Brandon Perea). Because of its masterful marketing, Nope easily becomes Peele’s most immersive film.
Many filmmakers could benefit from Nope’s marketing strategy, preventing themselves from giving too much of their films away, and taking away from its audience’s viewing experience. Peele has learned from marketing mistakes made with his previous films and has used that knowledge to help craft the spectacle that is Nope. The reason Nope is such an effective vision is because of the layer of mystery that clouds the film, as its marketing refused to spoil what Nope had in store. From the tragic backstory of Ricky Park (Stephen Yeun) to the true nature of the threat each of these characters is up against, Peele delivers a truly original "don’t look up" spectacle with Nope.
Nope is now playing in theaters.