10 Movies That Are Actually Good Besides The Marketing Gimmick
8. The Mystery Of "What Is The Matrix?" - The Matrix
Not entirely unlike The Crying Game, the marketing for The Matrix was focused on its focal enigma - "What is the Matrix?"
The original teaser trailer quite ingeniously showed off a flurry of stunning shots from the film with absolutely no context whatsoever - no dialogue from the movie, no voiceover narration, nor any text to speak of.
The trailer ended by directing viewers to WhatIsTheMatrix.com, a website which didn't do a whole lot to demystify what audiences had seen, but only sent them further down the rabbit hole of mystery.
The approach could've easily backfired, or been a cover to compensate for a film that just didn't make a lot of sense, but The Matrix of course became a massive word-of-mouth hit as viewers told their friends about it.
As Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) himself says, you really do have to see it for yourself.
The Matrix was one of the first films to take full advantage of the Internet's potential to help sell a movie to the entire world, and in this case it helped that the movie also happened to be a stone cold masterpiece in its own right.