"Pure Fun": How Lionsgate Successfully Marketed Knives Out in 2019
With its playful attitude across the entire marketing campaign, Lionsgate convinced audiences that Knives Out was a modern whodunnit worth watching.
I’ll be honest: I’m not the kind of person who needs clever marketing to convince me to go watch a movie. All I need to know is who made it, and to see a trailer. A good poster helps; and positive word-of-mouth convinces me to give the film my time and money.
In other words: I’m the worst customer for marketing.
Still, I can appreciate a clever marketing campaign when I see it, and the work that went into marketing Rian Johnson’s Knives Out really deserves some kudos: in 2019, it convinced people to turn out to watch a contemporary whodunnit mystery film, which in turn led to a multi-million dollar franchise1.
Which begs the question as tantalizing as the film’s mystery: How did the marketing team get Knives Out, well, out there?
When Lionsgate’s President of Worldwide Marketing Damon Wolf and his team pitched their sell for Knives Out, they had two words: pure fun.
“Lionsgate didn’t try to sell the movie on what it’s not. They loved the script and what we made. Lionsgate believed from day 1 that we could go wide, not just to a sophisticated adult crowd, but reach everyone,” says Knives Out producer and Johnson’s T-Street partner Ram Bergman, “They came up with a really clever (marketing) campaign; they killed.”
The result was a mix of digital marketing, traditional advertising, and media and press, all cohesively sticking to the pure fun angle.
Digital marketing
A playful social media campaign
In Knives Out, various members of the Thrombey family are involved in different businesses, so part of the social media campaign was to bring to life these three fictitious businesses: Blood Like Wine Publishing (book publishing), Thrombey Real Estate (real estate), and Flam (beauty/lifestyle).
This involved a series of innovative advertisements and campaigns aimed at different demographics through creative online hubs, including:
A give-away paperback novella;
Branded website portals;
A pop-up Beauty Boutique;
And social videos directed by Johnson as part of a ‘Meet the Thrombeys’ promotion; actors Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, and Toni Collette gamely appeared to promote their characters’ fictitious businesses, each one filled with “slashing” puns to reinforce the murder in the film.
You might notice that each video has a ‘Get Your Cut’ theme going on. Prior to these videos, a ‘Get Your Cut’ contest was arranged where it was announced that Harlan Thrombey had kept aside $250,000 of his fortune to be given to fans who found clues and hidden meanings in the posters and trailers.
As part of the promotion, Frank Oz reprised his role as Harlan’s attorney Alan Stevens in a recorded message…
… and so did Harlan himself2.
It didn’t stop there.
Johnson recorded an old-fashioned movie trailer that evoked the trailer for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho3, extending an invitation to the viewers— “an invitation… to murder”.
It’s a perfect way for the director to pay homage to the films that inspired him, while keeping in line with the ‘pure fun’ angle around which the entire campaign was built around.
Not all marketing is planned; sometimes, if the stars align, something can happen to boost a film’s appeal all on its own. Chris Evans, who plays Ransom, spends a good portion of Knives Out in an off-white, knitted Aran sweater. The sweater went viral on social media4, delivering the kind of organic boost that marketers would kill for; the team quickly took advantage of it, renaming the official Knives Out Twitter account to ‘Chris Evans’ Sweater Stan Account’ for a day, with a merchandise giveaway to boost publicity; and the film’s costume designer, Jenny Eagan, started giving interviews that “built up the mythology of the sweater”. Meanwhile, after the film’s release, the indie cinema Alamo Drafthouse hosted a “sweaters only” screening— which benefited the film even more.
Website
The Knives Out official website also played a key role in heightening anticipation. Although the site no longer works, records indicate that:
“… the front page of the site lets you click on the faces of the main characters, allowing you to see the poster they’re featured on along with a bit more background and some photos to download. It’s not much, but it’s something and a nice element to include given the cast. In acknowledgement of the film coming out around Thanksgiving there are also place cards with each character and their defining trait that can be printed out for your holiday table, including one with Johnson labeled “The murder mystery master.” Last month there were pumpkin design stencils available as well.”
Traditional advertising
The first real promotion occurred in March 2019 when Lionsgate brought Johnson and the cast to CinemaCon. Two months later at CineEurope, an extended scene from the film was played to audiences.
In July 2019, Knives Out was announced as one of the films in the “Special Presentations” lineup at the Toronto Film Festival— this was crucial as it would be the first time that the world saw what Johnson had in store. When the screening drew critical praise for the story, performances, and direction, it only built more buzz and anticipation. The film also played at the London Film Festival5, and screened at the Chicago International Film Festival, with appearances by Johnson and Shannon.
TV advertising began in mid-October. Different spots focused on different aspects of the Thrombeys, their motivations, and the search for the killer, all of them reinforcing the same message: this is a fun star-studded whodunnit.
Posters
When most film posters are generic and Photoshopped bores, the Knives Out team went in the opposite direction. One poster cleverly used a magnifying glass motif with a knife for a handle, and just the cast list, along with the copy “Everyone has a motive. No one has a clue.”
Without using any images from the film or pictures of the cast, the magnifying glass in the poster immediately sells Knives Out as a classic mystery movie by associating the tool with another famous fictional detective: Sherlock Holmes.
But just to make sure nothing is ambiguous, the tagline right at the top declares Knives Out as “A Rian Johnson whodunnit” instead of the general “A Rian Johnson film”.
Later in September, Johnson unveiled a series of colorful character posters, each one showcasing the character in a different part of the Thrombey house and their role in the story— ‘The Desperate Son-in-Law’, ‘The Trust Fund Playboy’, and so on. All of them share a clever tagline: “Nothing brings a family together like murder”.
In October, a theatrical poster assembled the entire cast together, retaining the playful attitude of the previous poster with the new tagline reading, “Hell, any of them could have done it.” It’s a fun breezy way to attract audience interest and communicate that Knives Out is meant to be a fun time at the movies, not a scary horror film.
Media and Press
The traditional media and press tour allowed the cast and crew to dive into detail about the film6. During the TIFF screening, Johnson shared in an interview about his love of the murder mystery genre and following up Star Wars with Knives Out, which was a passion project7; in the same interview, he discussed the possibility of making sequels if the first film did well8.
The cast also hit the circuit, commenting on how Knives Out was a good alternative to family dinners during its Thanksgiving release window. They also shared their favorite moments from the few scenes they were in all together; in another interview, Curtis spoke with Johnson about the movie’s intentional commentary on issues of wealth and privilege.
They also appeared on talk shows— Don Johnson on “Kimmel,” Daniel Craig on “The Late Show,” and Evans9 and Shannon on “The Tonight Show”.
Maintaining the mystery
Something that the campaign did very well is not giving away spoilers. That might sound like common sense, until you see plenty of movie trailers that give away key twists. Lionsgate’s marketing team did this by promoting the film as an ensemble instead of revealing that the protagonist is really Marta the caretaker played by Ana de Armas.
Johnson says, “You’re typically leading with the biggest, most appealing thing in the film. We could sell it effectively while hiding this big element in the movie. You don’t get to do that with movie marketing.”
The marketing got the attention of older and younger males, its prime audience— “total awareness among males [was] 54% with younger males at 48%”— but it also showed strong appeal with older women “at 46% definite interest, younger at 44%”, possibly the Agatha Christie fans. This could also be due to the multi-generational cast appealing to different audiences—from veterans like Lee Curtis and Don Johnson to younger stars like de Armas.
In order, the first choice for Knives Out was men, followed by older women, then younger women.
Director Rian Johnson was a key hook for the marketing since the film lacked a recognizable brand to latch on to, so to speak, since Knives Out was an original story. Johnson gamely put himself front and center throughout the campaign, acting as the film’s public face— similar to how Ryan Coogler took to the spotlight to promote Sinners in 2025.
The entire campaign promotes the idea that this murder mystery will be a good time at the movies instead of a brooding psychological affair; this actually lets them hide the fact that Knives Out also examines class privilege and class warfare without making everything about it. If ‘fun’ was the angle that Lionsgate was going for: they passed the test with flying colors.
Thanks for reading! If you liked this essay, you can sign up here for more issues. If you’d like to support Three Left Feet Media, share this newsletter with a fellow film lover you think would appreciate it.
Long live the movies!
D.L. Holmes
Rian Johnson and Ram Bergman sold the sequel rights to Netflix in 2021 for an eye-popping $469 million deal, but despite their quality, I feel that Glass Onion and Wake Up Dead Man lacks the same pop culture oomph that the first film had.
Sadly, though, it doesn’t seem to be voiced by the late Christopher Plummer.
The Psycho trailer is six-minutes long, only featuring Hitchcock giving a tour of the Bates Motel, which then ends in a clever hook. Do stick around to the end.
From an article in The New Yorker: “‘The only thing I will say about Knives Out,’ the critic Anna Menta tweeted, in a sentiment that has since racked up more than fifty thousand likes, ‘is that, upon seeing Chris Evans in a sweater, the girl next to me gasped and said very softly and tenderly, “Sweater.”’”
The sequels would play at TIFF and London Film Festival, too, turning it into a kind of tradition.
Okay, even though I’m indifferent to all the other kinds of marketing stunts, the interviews done in traditional media absolutely gets my attention. I guess I’m not immune to the effects of marketing after all.
Johnson was actually going to make Knives Out after Looper, but delayed it when he was offered the Star Wars gig.
Narrator: It did.
It didn’t hurt that Evans was riding the high of Avengers: Endgame that also released in 2019, creating intrigue among fans eager to see what the Captain America star could do outside of Marvel movies.