All cinemas closed due to pandemic? No film shooting far and wide? An ideal time to catapult yourself to the top of the cinema charts without competition with a clever hack. Namely like this: You quickly write a script that can be implemented via the video conferencing software Zoom, in this case the plot line is "Five YouTuber take part in a video call and are confronted with an internet troll".
The finished no-budget thriller is then performed in an empty, but specially rented cinema, for which - an important detail - you simply buy all the tickets yourself (i.e. get the entrance fees back). Since otherwise only a handful of films are shown in drive-in cinemas, you end up at the top of the cinema charts for a moment.
Pretty clever plan, and a true story, too, because that's how "Unsubscribe" by Christian Nilsson made it to number 1 on the American Box Office list on June 10th (and only on June 10th). The 29-minute film can now be watched on
Vimeo On-demand, which makes the whole thing a successful PR stunt...
By the way, "The Wretched", a low-budget horror movie that started on May 1st and has so far earned almost 1.5 million dollars in drive-in cinemas, according to Box Office Mojo, was number 1 on the cinema charts in Corona lockdown times for weeks. While the big Hollywood studios prefer to have their expensive movies start with a delay, because they can only bring in their budget when all the cinemas are open again, the small indie distributor IFC Films jumped into the gap and released several movies in drive-in cinemas during the Corona crisis -- partly with retro advertising and with considerable success, as
Variety describes.

Unsubscribe Filmstill