How did “Wicked” and its sequel “Wicked: For Good” reach box office heights and take over the zeitgeist two Novembers in a row? By engaging fans and beyond with a truly comprehensive — and epic — marketing campaign.
“We started with a mission of we want to take over culture. We want to shape culture,” Suzanne Cole, NBC Universal’s EVP of Domestic Media, explained to TheWrap’s Andi Ortiz on Tuesday during TheWrap’s 2025 Power Women Summit, presented by STARZ #TakeTheLead.
“There isn’t really model culture anymore, and so we were trying to establish that in part because, if you think about musicals, there’s only a handful that have had meaningful box office successes, unfortunately. But there’s absolutely an audience who’s hungry for it, and we’re clearly hungry for ‘Wicked.’”
She continued, saying that while she and her team knew they could depend on their die-hard fans to fly out on broomsticks to theaters, they wanted to get in front of those who hadn’t walked down the yellow brick road already.
“We definitely wanted to start by engaging the fans. They are legion, and they have thoughts, and we respect them, and they were tremendous advocates for us, but we needed to make sure that we got beyond the fans,” Cole explained. “We wanted to make sure we allowed for the entire audience to be excited about it, all moviegoers. You don’t have the kind of outcomes we were looking for if you’re not going beyond the fans.”
She continued: “And our very first step was actually to launch in a place that was unexpected, which was the Super Bowl. We did treat the campaign as one long campaign, knowing that there two movies with a number of individual theatrical windows in between the two. But we basically never acted as if it weren’t an event. We were an event for people and we owned it. That was sort of the mission that continues, at least for now, for at least another week or two.”
Cole participated in the TheWrap’s panel discussion “Ahead of the Curve: Women Shaping Entertainment Marketing,” which featured co-panelists Briana McElroy, SVP and head of Worldwide Digital marketing at Lionsgate Motion Picture Group; Danielle Misher, head of Global Theatrical Marketing at Sony Pictures Entertainment; Ingke Purrmann, co-founder and CRO of JustWatch Media; and Kim Granito, CMO of AMC Networks.
The discussion was centered on women who are redefining how stories reach and resonate with audiences through marketing and communications strategies.
While opening up about how AMC balances marketing campaigns for several projects, including its long-running “Walking Dead” universe and its upcoming third season of “Interview With the Vampire,” Granito explained that it’s all about playing to your viewers’ wants.
“I think there’s no two audiences that are alike,” Granito shared. “We have a pretty wide array of brands within the portfolio, from Shudder for horror, Acorn for international mysteries, and then AMC, which has big, broad, original content.”
To drill down this point, Granito explained how the Anne Rice universe doesn’t necessarily intersect with fans of the “Walking Dead” franchise.
She continued: “When we acquired the rights for that universe, we thought, ‘We do franchises really well. Look at ‘Walking Dead. It’s been around for 15 years, it has successful spinoffs,’ and what we found was Anne Rice is not necessarily the same thing. It is a very colorful and layered universe with so many different types of shows, and I think we underestimated how different the audience layers were between them.”
She went on to say that they learned that you can’t tackle series marketing in the same way even if they share the same genre, because their fan bases are different.
“I think marketing has come from being just one-to-one promotion to being something that’s much more participatory,” Granito explained while teasing that AMC is going all-out for “Interview With the Vampire” Season 3, which adapts “The Queen of the Damned” and sees Lestat becoming a rock star.
“I can’t give too much away, but we are definitely leaning into the Lestat is a rock star persona, and having him show up as that in the real world,” Granito. “So performances, merch, album drops, we might have a fashion line. I mean, there’s going to be a lot of really fun layers to this campaign that’s built very specifically for the fans of that show. And the audience has broadened a lot since the show has gone up on Netflix too, so we’re seeing this as a big opportunity for the universe.”
Throughout the conversation, the panelists all chimed in on how they’re not just listening to fans, they’re interacting with them.
“Audiences are now being invited to participate in the marketing, and I think social media specifically is a big driver of that,” McElroy said. “Previously you had campaigns where brands would talk to the audience, and now I think really smart brands are talking with the audience, it’s become a bit of a conversation, and so inviting them into the room and also in the conversation, and having them identify things that they love, and then having the ability to respond to them within a campaign, it’s been a lot of fun.”
Fresh off the success of “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t,” the Lionsgate exec added: “I think we have the ability to have inside jokes with our fans now, and they know when to anticipate certain trailer drops, or you’ll see them kind of like scouring the box office reports. It’s opened up so much more, and it’s making our jobs a lot more fun.”
TheWrap’s Power Women Summit presented by STARZ #TakeTheLead is the essential gathering of the most influential women across entertainment and media. The event aims to inspire and empower women across the landscape of their professional careers and personal lives. PWS provides one day of keynotes, panels, workshops and networking. For more information visit: thewrap.com/pws.
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