2. Cloverfield
As we've seen throughout this list, building a new brand is no easy task. A well executed campaign is all that stands between audiences recalling that your movie was named Cloverfield and your audience recalling that your movie was "the one with the monster in it, you know, in New York and all". The funny part about the Cloverfield strategy though is that for the first couple of months, that's exactly how people referred to the film, and it wasn't out of mockery. When the first trailer dropped in front of Transformers back in 2007, nobody knew what to expect when a random home video of a bunch of hipsters filled the screen. All of that changed when the lights flickered, something roared, and an explosion kicked off a miniature thrill ride that would hook audiences into wanting more. 1-18-08.com would give them more than just the name they were looking for to describe this monstrous mystery, it would give them an entire story parallel to the film's own narrative. 1-18-08.com told the story of Teddy and Jamie, two kids in love who were separated by the fact that Teddy had kinda gone missing. As it turned out, Teddy was involved with a corporation that was deep sea drilling where it shouldn't have been, and had awoken a gigantic organism from its slumber as a result. That gigantic organism would rise from the ocean and proceed to play havoc with the inhabitants of New York City, and the rest was indeed history. This was J.J. Abrams' Mystery Box principal at work, as he laid the groundwork for the world that Cloverfield would inhabit. While he made the same choice A.I. did with it's ARG, Abrams' decision not to focus on the characters of the film only served as a blessing to the actual film itself. This was already an unknown quantity, and if he were to reveal too much about any of the characters at this early stage, expectations would have been formed and compared to the film itself. Therefore he played it safe and kept the expectation factor focused on the monster, which paid dividends once the film was released.