10 Creative Ways Movies Got You To See Them

Between 1982’s Tron and its 2010 sequel Tron: Legacy, original protagonist, computer programmer, and video game icon Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) went missing. Appropriately, for a film that involves leaving reality and entering a game world, this turn of events was marketed as a real-life mystery, transplanting various fictional elements from Tron into the real world.

While there were several low-key ways the marketing team managed to achieve this, including launching a conspiracy website and making various in-universe games available to play, the big news came when they launched a live protest at a press conference, where fans disrupted the event insisting that Flynn was alive.

The press conference, held at the Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco, was for the fictional ENCOM software company and its Executive Creative Consultant Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner). Fans stormed the event stage after Bradley/Boxleitner was hustled off, waving placards and chanting about conspiracies, before Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), Kevin’s in-universe son, was parachuted in and the event was shut down. While the fans were real, the whole thing was staged. 

This made local, regional, and national news, achieving the kind of coverage that managed to penetrate the mainstream and attract a much broader audience than just the fans of the original movie.