Spiderman "Night Monkey"

A joke the studio let us play straight.

In Spider-Man: Far From Home, Peter Parker spends a night in Prague in a black stealth suit, and Ned covers for him with the first name that comes to mind: the Night Monkey. It is a throwaway gag. When Sony came to us for the film's digital release, we asked the question nobody else had: what if the Night Monkey were real?

We cut a full parody trailer for a film that does not exist, edited exactly the way a studio would sell it. Real footage, a real trailer structure, a straight face from the first frame to the last. The joke is never explained. The tagline, "La scimmia notturna!", is delivered with total conviction, and the piece ends on the only thing that is true: Far From Home, now on digital.

Sony released it as the official digital-release trailer. Within days it had 6.2 million views on YouTube, the film went to number one on iTunes within 24 hours, and the press wrote about it as a piece of marketing in its own right. Gizmodo said you had to give Sony a tip of the cap. ComicBook.com called the Night Monkey an instant legend. The Outerhaven called it the best digital release announcement of all time.

That is what we mean by studio-level storytelling. The idea came from inside the film. The craft came from twenty years of cutting trailers. And the result was a home entertainment campaign that people chose to share, because it was worth sharing.