How pre-release consumer buzz drives box office performance
Pre-release consumer buzz drives box office results by shaping audience anticipation through communication, search and participation behaviours
The film industry globally is a highly competitive business. With production budgets frequently exceeding US$100 million and potentially reaching US$300 million for a single film, studios face enormous financial pressure in an environment where approximately seven out of ten movies fail to break even, according to the American Motion Picture Association. The theatrical window to recoup these investments continues to shrink, with most films generating the majority of their revenue within the critical first three weekends of release.
In March 2024, for example, Dune: Part Two soared at the global box office with an impressive US$714 million in revenue, dwarfing Mad Max: Furiosa’s US$173 million despite remarkably similar foundations. Both films featured A-list stars (Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya versus Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth), comparable production budgets (US$190 million versus US$168 million), and both belonged to established franchises with pre-existing audiences. Yet Dune’s performance exceeded Furiosa’s by more than 400%.
What explains this vast disparity in commercial success between the two big-budget science fiction spectacles? The answer lies largely in the realm of pre-release consumer buzz. Dune: Part Two generated a massive spike in audience anticipation months before its release, creating a towering mountain of consumer excitement that peaked in February-March 2024. In contrast, Furiosa’s pre-release buzz remained relatively modest, with a much smaller peak occurring just around its May 2024 release.
This stark contrast in pre-release excitement illustrates a phenomenon that entertainment marketers have long suspected but struggled to quantify: the buzz generated before a product launch can fundamentally determine its market performance. Behind these divergent trajectories lies a scientific reality about how consumer anticipation works.
The Dune versus Furiosa comparison raises a fundamental question that studio executives and marketers must answer: How can firms effectively stimulate pre-release consumer buzz to achieve market performance more like Dune and less like Furiosa?
The billion-dollar battle for audience attention
The film industry operates on a front-loaded business model where early adoption is paramount. Movies typically generate most of their revenue within the first weeks after release, creating an extremely short window to achieve financial success. On a global scale, cinema advertising spending reached an estimated US$2.55 billion in 2024 (though this figure includes all cinema ads, not just those from film studios). A meta-analysis also found that increasing film advertising spend by 1% increases revenue by 0.33%, nearly three times the effect seen in other industries.
In this environment, pre-release buzz serves as a form of “shadow diffusion” – the accumulation of latent demand for a product before it becomes available. This buzz reflects potential adoption intentions and can materialise as actual demand upon release.
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Pre-release buzz isn’t simply word-of-mouth; it’s a multi-dimensional phenomenon encompassing several distinct consumer behaviours that build anticipation. Recent research conducted by UNSW Business School’s Professor Harald van Heerde and Dr Thomas Schreiner, together with Associate Professor Timo Mandler from TBS Business School and Carolin Haiduk, Brand Manager at Henkel AG & Co., provides groundbreaking insights into how these behaviours interact and impact market performance.
Anatomy of pre-release buzz
The research, published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, examines three key components of pre-release consumer buzz:
- Communication: Consumers expressing views about an upcoming product on platforms like X (formerly Twitter)
- Search: Consumers actively looking for information via search engines like Google
- Participation: Consumers engaging in experiential activities like watching movie trailers on YouTube
In their paper, Dynamics of pre‑release consumer buzz: Driving communication, search, and participation for market performance, the researchers analysed data from 330 movies released in the US between January 2016 and December 2017, each generating at least US$3 million at the domestic box office. They collected daily communication, search, and participation data for each film during the eight-week pre-release period, as well as information on studios’ marketing activities and post-release market performance.
Using sophisticated statistical models, they examined not only how these buzz behaviours affected box office results, but also how they influenced each other over time and how different marketing approaches stimulated each behaviour.
“While pre-release consumer buzz may drive new product market performance, little is known about the importance of its distinct behavioural manifestations: communication, search, and participation,” the researchers explained. “This paper not only studies how these three pre-release buzz behaviours affect market performance but also their dynamic interplay and how firms can drive pre-release buzz.”
The hierarchy of buzz impact
“We started this research by observing that in the lead-up to a major movie release, the online world is buzzing with anticipation," Prof. van Heerde explained. "We wondered how much of an impact buzz has on box office sales, whether the over-time pattern in buzz matters, and whether it matters what kind of buzz it is.”
The study delivers several key findings with significant implications for marketers. Most notably, not all forms of pre-release buzz are equally effective in driving box office success. Communication – consumers talking about upcoming movies on platforms like X – emerged as the most powerful driver, with a 10% increase in communication activity translating to an approximate 2.3% increase in opening weekend box office performance.
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Participation and search follow as secondary but still significant drivers, with each contributing less than half of the impact that communication delivers. “Box office sales depend mostly on communication, followed by search and participation,” said the researchers, who pointed out that this hierarchy can help provide clear guidance for marketing resource allocation.
The self-reinforcing nature of buzz
The research delivers a particularly fascinating insight into how pre-release buzz evolves over time. Far from being static, the three buzz behaviours dynamically influence and amplify each other through what the researchers term “action-based buzz cascades” – a concept rooted in the theory of informational cascades developed by economists Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer, and Welch.
“Buzz breeds buzz,” the researchers explain, describing how these cascade effects emerge when “consumers who observe other consumers’ excitement about a forthcoming product might start engaging in buzz behaviours themselves. Their anticipatory behaviours, in turn, may affect others, which incites further cascading effects.”
Communication emerged as the dominant driver, demonstrating the strongest “spillover effects” across all buzz behaviours. When consumers talk about an upcoming movie on platforms like X, this activity significantly increases both search activities and participation behaviours. These spillover effects work in both directions but with asymmetrical strength. While search and participation do increase communication, these reverse effects are consistently weaker. For example, the effect of communication on search is nearly 50% stronger than the reverse effect of search on communication.
Communication also shows the strongest “self-enhancing effects,” with a cumulative self-reinforcing impact, meaning that communication today drives significantly more communication tomorrow in a compounding pattern. Search behaviours show similar self-reinforcement, while participation demonstrates somewhat weaker self-reinforcement.
“Communication plays a central role due to its powerful spillover effects on search and participation,” the study notes, highlighting how strategic stimulation of communication can trigger broader buzz dynamics that ultimately create momentum toward release.
What marketing activities actually generate buzz?
For studios looking to maximise pre-release buzz, the study delivers concrete, data-driven insights about which marketing approaches most effectively stimulate each buzz behaviour. The findings challenge several conventional assumptions about marketing expenditure and provide clear direction for tactical resource allocation:
1. Social media posts: Non-trailer related social media content from studios emerged as the most powerful driver of communication and search behaviours. The research quantified these effects precisely: movie-related social media posts were three times more effective at stimulating communication than trailer releases and five times more effective than trailer-related posts. Similarly, for driving search behaviour, movie-related posts were twice as effective as trailer releases and three times more effective than trailer-related posts. These posts, which might include behind-the-scenes content, cast interviews, character profiles, or thematic material, create rich conversational fodder that audiences actively engage with and share. The researchers note that “firms should direct resources to the creation and dissemination of product-related content on social media far before a new product is released” to maximise these cumulative effects.
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2. Trailer releases: While less effective for generating communication and search, trailer releases proved substantially more powerful for driving participation behaviours. Trailers were twice as effective at stimulating participation as trailer-related social media posts and movie-related social media posts. This finding aligns with the experiential nature of trailers, which provide audiences with a tangible “taste” of the upcoming film. The visual and emotional impact of well-crafted trailers appears to motivate viewers to engage more deeply through comments, shares, and other participatory activities.
3. Mass media advertising: Perhaps the study’s most surprising finding concerns traditional advertising. Despite accounting for the lion’s share of marketing budgets – often 50% or more of a film’s total production cost – mass media advertising showed no statistically significant effect on any pre-release buzz behaviour. The data revealed a complete absence of impact across communication, search, and participation metrics. Interestingly, advertising did maintain a direct influence on box office sales, suggesting that while it doesn’t stimulate pre-release buzz, it still serves an important function in conversion.
These findings represent a profound challenge to conventional marketing wisdom in the entertainment industry. “For driving communication, movie-related social media posts are by far most effective,” the researchers conclude. This evidence strongly suggests studios should recalibrate their marketing mix, potentially shifting substantial resources from traditional advertising toward strategic online engagement.
The data also indicates that marketing activities should be temporally sequenced for maximum impact. Starting with movie-related social media content to stimulate communication and search, followed by strategic trailer releases to drive participation, creates the most efficient pathway to generating comprehensive pre-release buzz.
Implications for entertainment marketers
The research findings offer several practical recommendations for movie marketers:
- Prioritise communication: Given its superior elasticity and powerful spillover effects, marketing activities should primarily aim to stimulate audience communication about upcoming films.
- Deploy social media strategically: Movie-related social media posts are the most efficient tools for generating critical communication and search behaviours.
- Release trailers early: Trailers drive participation most effectively, but their impact extends beyond just viewing. They create experiential engagement that contributes to broader buzz.
- Reconsider advertising allocation: Traditional mass media advertising, while still directly impacting sales, plays no significant role in generating pre-release buzz.
- Think dynamically: Buzz isn’t static – it reinforces itself and cross-pollinates across behaviours. Early stimulation creates cascading effects that multiply impact over the pre-release period.
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The research demonstrated that pre-release buzz not only affects opening weekend performance but continues to influence a film’s total box office performance. This suggests that the buzz generated before release establishes momentum that carries through a movie’s entire theatrical run.
For industry professionals, these findings emphasise the need to start building buzz early – ideally at least eight weeks before release – to benefit from the self-reinforcing nature of buzz dynamics. “Setting buzz cascades into motion underscores the importance of generating buzz early in the pre-release phase to benefit from cumulative effects,” the researchers explained.
Specifically, Prof. van Heerde said marketers in the film industry should direct resources to the creation and dissemination of product-related content on social media far before the movie is released. "To boost dynamic effects, the content needs to be engaging and easy to share, causing consumers to like it, comment on it, and forward it to their peers," he said. "As buzz evolves dynamically over time, we recommend that marketers prepare social media content for distribution at least two months before release. Additionally, marketers can deploy social media posts in the last days before release to ensure that buzz reaches top levels right when it matters the most."