Posted in: Disney, Movies, Pixar, Universal, Warner Bros | Tagged: Barbenheimer, barbie, hoppers, oppenheimer, pixar

Tom the Lizard & Barbenheimer: You Can't Fake Organic Viral Marketing

With the success of moments like Barbenheimer and Tom the Lizard from Hoppers, it's becoming more apparent that the best viral marketing forms organically.

Studios spend millions of dollars every year trying to figure out the best way to market their movies and shows to the public. As we've entered the digital age, we've seen marketing evolve beyond just trailers, posters, and commercials. Found footage films give filmmakers the opportunity to act like the movie we're watching is based in reality. All you need to do is ask someone who was around when The Blair Witch Project was released in 1999. They fully had people convinced they were watching real footage of real people who had really gone missing.

From there, marketing leaned further into blurring the lines between reality and fiction. Studios could release entire websites based on the events of an upcoming film to help with that sense of immersion. From The Dark Knight to The Grand Budapest Hotel to Weapons, studios began putting out viral websites for people to explore. Some of these were more intricate than others, but it was still another evolution. Once the pivot to video happened, studios began to release in-universe videos. A more recent example that was really well done was The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. Lionsgate released multiple in-universe videos that were basically Capitol propaganda.

Social media also began to play a part in all of this.  No one is better at using all aspects of the internet than The Boys, for example, and their team has changed the game with how they have utilized in-universe social media. So studios continue to throw things at the wall to try and figure out how to get people into theaters and how to become a talking point on the internet in the process. The problem is that the real, true, cultural touchstone moments are not thought up by a marketing team, but formed organically by people.

Barbenheimer was unlike anything anyone had seen before. What started off as a way to encourage people to go and support both films, which could not have been more different in terms of intended audience, morphed into something else. It started organically, online, but caught fire, and everyone was talking about it. Studios picked it up and began to lean in the best they could, but when something like Barbenheimer happens, the best thing you can do is let this thing happen and hold on. And hold on Universal and Warner Bros. did, to great success for both films. It was pure joy for the love of movies as filtered through pink and the atomic bomb.

However, attempts studios have made to try to create another Barbenheimer have not gained traction. Audiences these days love authenticity above all else, and they can see right through a studio attempt to make that lightning strike twice. Barbenheimer became what it was because it was born and thrived organically, and not created in a boardroom. In another organic example, when We Don't Talk About Bruno went absolutely buckwild insane following the release of Encanto, Disney was caught off guard because while they knew for months they had one hell of an earworm, that song took on a life of its own.

For all of the success stories, there are going to be some spectacular failures, and the biggest failure would be how Blumhouse and Universal reacted to the unexpected viral success of M3GAN. For all of its faults, the first film was taking an insane concept and trying to play it relatively straight. That earnestness meant that when everyone went crazy for the dancing, it didn't feel like something anyone from the film intended. As previously stated, people these days value authenticity, and they will rebel if they feel like someone is trying to push them in a certain direction. Blumhouse and Universal tried to make lightning strike a second time with M3GAN 2.0. The second film completely changed the genre of the film, and instead of playing this horror concept relatively straight and getting something fun out of it, they built the entire second film around the moments that went viral to the point that it basically changed genres.

And they were so sure they had a winner that they opted to open this horror sequel in June, one of the busiest months at the box office, when everyone is fighting for a place at the table. The first film was a decent hit because of its release date, early January, when mid-tier horror is beginning to thrive.  M3GAN 2.0 got mediocre reviews from critics after the first film was a hit, and the box office difference between the two was over $100 million. Blumhouse and Universal tried to replicate what happened with M3GAN, and audiences weren't interested.

An Organic Viral Named Tom the Lizard (Lizard. Lizard. Lizard.)

It's happening again for Disney, and this time it comes in the form of a lizard. At the end of Elio, a film that almost no one saw and one that Disney seemed keen to release and forget, there is a brief scene of a lizard, hitting the lizard emoji, and every time he does, the phone says, "lizard." And that's it, he just hits the button a bunch of times, picks up speed, pauses for a second and his eyes go a little cross-eyed, one more "lizard" for the road, and cut to the logo of Hoppers, the next Pixar original film set to be released in theaters on March 6, 2026. This entire thing was born of people recording the post-credits scene of Elio and sharing it on social media, but even Disney and Pixar can't fight against the onslaught of the lizard, and quickly realized they wouldn't want to fight it. A portion of the scene has officially been released, and we learned his name is Tom.

This is the kind of viral, organic marketing that people would cut off limbs for. Pixar got the short end of the pandemic stick and has been struggling to come back ever since. It had three releases that went to Disney+, a spin-off flop with Lightyear, a slow, steady, but not massive winner with Elemental, a juggernaut with Inside Out 2, and a spectacular crash and burn with Elio. This Tom the Lizard scene, which is less than 30 seconds long, has put more eyes on Hoppers than maybe any Pixar movie in years. The sound can he applied everywhere, and there are some banger remixes on TikTok. They are spectacularly stupid, but it's the kind of esoteric humor that borders on dadaism that no one in their right mind could have ever predicted would hit.

Disney and Pixar will spend the next six months reaping the benefits of this scene going viral until Hoppers is released, and they will probably try to lean in as much as possible. People are going to spend thousands of dollars on ad agencies trying to ask them why Tom the Lizard is so viral, and how they can replicate it. And someone is going to try to replicate it the same way studios tried to make another Barbenheimer and it's probably going to fail.

This is another evolution of marketing in the digital age and is a thing apart from the strategies we've seen like pretending a found footage movie is real or releasing in-universe proproganda. Tom and his moment is a happy accident where the internet decides to do something amusing for the lols.  But watching someone try to make their own Tom is going to be incredibly funny because it's not going to work.  People don't want manufactured viral moments in the age of social media.

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