The movie viral advertising boost: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012) and his ‘transmedia’ essay

Abstract

Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012 ) has put on the stage of advertising creativity a previously unpublished information online that virally appears, gradual and growing exponentially and it has generated an expectation unseen before on the Internet. The promotional power of these resources has led significantly to a film with a budget of 130 million dollars and has collected almost four times (400 million dollars) at the box office. And this has contributed significantly to the fact that this movie has released four different versions of the trailer, with over 16 million downloads of the official trailer on YouTube, uploaded on December 22, 2011, six months before that the film was released in the United States (6/6/2012). This communication analyzes structurally how, from the current concept of viral marketing, Ridley Scott challenges and seduces his spectator with encrypted messages, subliminal previous sketches of the film, discarded sequences, extra content, original videos (David 8) as well as simultaneous sites (Weyland Industries), all under an extraordinarily attractive atmosphere inherited from Alien (1979), an unbeatable icon of film history.