Is there any correlation between a good campaign and opening weekend?

From the top of my head I can only recall District 9 and Cloverfield and the opening weekends were successful.

As for upcoming movies, Inception has started some sort of campaign and apparently Repo Men as well. Is there one for Alice in Wonderland/Tron Legacy?

I think Surrogates had one? But failed?

Any insight ?

Cloverfield.

the dark knight...

Other movies attempting/attempted:
(I searched 'viral' on ComingSoon.net

Iron Man 2
The Crazies
2012-> Might have had an effect?
Sherlock Holmes-> Might have had an effect?
9-> Limited effect
Terminator Salvation-> No effect
Watchmen-> Possible effect
Wanted-> Possible effect
Dark Knight-> Not sure if it even had one
Hancock-> Might have had an effect?

paranormal activity

Ya, I'd argue Paranormal Activity tops them all.

Alice in Wonderland has a pretty good campaign going on Facebook right now. Each main character has his/her own page, and everyone is encouraged to friend every page, as each character will be posting pics/video related to their specific characters.

It started with Mad Hatter vs. the Red Queen; whoever got the most page-followings by a specific time, that page would give its "followers" the trailer first (of course, they got scooped by another website, but it still worked in terms of getting followers).

the dark knight had all of those fan sites revealing pictures, trailers, ect...

again, paranormal activity had the best i've seen. ever.

The Blair Witch Project actually.

Whenever I think of viral campaigns, I think of The Dark Knight before any other film. Loads of other films have attempted this sort of thing. Most fail, though, because they think viral campaigns are easy and therefore just half-heartedly do one (usually just releasing a few posters around town for the villain's corporation within the movie). Successful viral campaigns are incredibly hard to achieve, and only the best ideas make a spark with fans.

Yeah I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned earlier.

It's the grand daddy of all viral campaigns.

Days of Future Past and Prometheus had the only ones that ever really did anything for me.

In general I don't think they ever really do anything except for the weirdest of people, Like Graffiti bullshit is going to be the deciding factor why I'm going to see TDK.

Blair Wtich did in fact make people think it was a real thing at the time so any really small film to blow up on the internet is really the only time you can say the film had an effective viral campaign. That was on par with like the original War of the Worlds reading.

And such a shit film! I'd rather watch a home movie of fat people doing swimming exercises than watch Blair Witch again.

Cloverfield is my favorite use of a viral campaign. It was so fantastic.

Barbenheimer joins the list and is probably going to be a masterclass or business case example of brands running a successful marketing campaign. I could see them teaching about this weekend in MBA courses.

Barbenhiemer was not marketing campaign by the studios.
The fans took it over and ran with it. So much memes
or am I wrong?

Mattel and WB set up 100+ partnerships that put Barbie everywhere. Fans ran with it but they effectively got Barbie EVERYWHERE. You had a Barbie AirBNB influencers were posting about staying in. They engaged with fans and effective partnerships that were also an important ingredient here.

I Think Reloaded was one of the first, and I remember Bill Murray joining the NBA for Space Jam.

I don't think WB had anything to do with Barbie, so I can't really credit them.

As much as we've been bashing WB for DC, it would be hard to pull something like this off without them. More insights here:

https://variety.com/2023/film/box-offic ... 235677922/

The WB marketing team hit gold here. The whole company was behind it since the start of the year from Zazlav down. They were willing to put all their eggs in the Barbie basket and it paid off.