10 Creative Ways Movies Got You To See Them
5. Launching Will Smith’s Music Career – Men in Black (1997)
“Men in Black” may be a household name today, but back in the mid-‘90s it was still a fairly obscure Malibu Comics property that, despite the recent acquisition by Marvel, wasn’t exactly doing big things. And while the film adaptation’s stars Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones had some mainstream draw from Smith’s performance as one of the leads in Independence Day (1996) and Jones’ turn as Two-Face in Batman Forever (1995), this alone wasn’t enough to sell the thing to sceptical audiences.
How best, then, to reach a much wider audience, if the studio didn’t think posters, trailers and brand tie-ins were going to give them the audience numbers they were after? Music, of course.
Banking on the star power and street cred Smith had built up with younger audiences from his time on the Fresh Prince TV show, he was commissioned to perform the film soundtrack’s title track, "Men in Black". Marking his solo debut single, the hip-hop track hit the top 10 charts of all major global markets in the run-up to the movie's release and went platinum within a matter of weeks, supported by a super cool music video that teased the film and got audiences intimately familiar with the property.