PR has always been about building awareness first. That has not changed. What has changed is that the channels studios relied on to generate that awareness, reliably, predictably, at scale, have collapsed or fragmented beyond recognition. The ones figuring out what replaced those channels are winning.
The infrastructure that built film marketing is gone
The traditional press tour was architected around channels that worked in parallel: a newspaper profile the week before release, a morning show appearance, a late night slot, a magazine cover. Each one reached a different slice of the same general mass audience. That architecture has collapsed in sequence.
Print is functionally dead as a mass awareness vehicle. The top 25 US dailies circulated 1.97 million copies daily in 2024, down 12.7% year over year. No single US newspaper has a circulation above 500,000. The LA Times lost 25% of its print circulation in a single year. Less than a fifth of US dailies still print seven days a week. Entertainment Weekly, the most obvious film marketing outlet for a generation, is digital only.
Late night is structurally broken as a reach vehicle for the audience studios need most. The 18-49 demo across all major late night shows fell 17% in 2025 year over year, and 70-80% since 2015. Fallon dropped 29% among 18-49s in a single year. Colbert canceled. Kimmel suspended. The shows that remain reach an older, smaller audience than at any point in their history.
A fragmented ecosystem of creator channels and podcasts, each with a distinct audience, a distinct format logic, and a completely different relationship to the content they carry have replaced the old press tour.
Studios are booking them. Most are not yet thinking about them correctly.
What the new landscape actually looks like
Reece Feldman (@guywithamoviecamera, 2.8M TikTok) went from PA on set to embedded studio social consultant. Sony partnered with him for 28 Years Later. NBCUniversal put him in their first Creator Accelerator. THR called him "Hollywood Studios' Gen Z Whisperer." He interviewed Danny Boyle about where the film ranks in his own filmography, the kind of question a publicist would never allow in a controlled junket room. His value is genuine on-set access that no manufactured press interview can replicate.
The Criterion Closet puts actors on camera selecting films from the collection. Cillian Murphy, Julia Fox, and Andrew Garfield have all done it. It reaches a cinephile audience that traditional entertainment press has never reliably accessed and positions actors as culturally credible rather than commercially compliant, two different things that both serve awareness.
YouTube channels like Jolly (Josh and Ollie) have built their celebrity work from studios wanting movie promotion, pitching authentic experiences over pop-up events. Their Avengers cast video got 30M views in Korea. For Heads of State, John Cena and Idris Elba did a British vs. American breakfast battle across platforms.
The studio originally wanted a pop-up event. Jolly proposed a thematic fit instead. The difference is the content did not look like an ad.
The podcast circuit is now as important as any of this
Joe Rogan runs 40M+ listeners, the single largest audio platform in the country. Alex Cooper's Call Her Daddy averages 10M listeners per episode. Rolling Stone called her "the new generation's Barbara Walters." Her audience is female 18-34, exactly the demographic that drove Wicked, Challengers, and is the core for Prada 2. Any studio promoting a female-led film without a Cooper booking is leaving the highest-reach female audio slot on the table.
Amy Poehler's Good Hang launched in March 2025 on The Ringer and won the inaugural Golden Globe for Best Podcast in January 2026, beating SmartLess, Call Her Daddy, and Armchair Expert. Guests have included Ryan Coogler, Dakota Johnson, Jennifer Lawrence, Ariana Grande, and Jack Black. It has become an A-list destination almost immediately, and its SNL/prestige comedy axis gives it a cultural credibility that traditional entertainment press slots no longer carry. Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers' Las Culturistas has been running for a decade, won Podcast of the Year at iHeart two years running, and has hosted Lady Gaga, Nicole Kidman, Charli XCX, and Tina Fey. Vulture praised it specifically for "avoiding guests that might rehash stories told elsewhere." It is the pipeline to a queer and pop-culture-literate audience that is deeply loyal and chronically underserved by mainstream film promotion. Jake Shane's Therapuss is where Glen Powell went to promote Hitman, preceded by a UT football game with Powell, Shane, and Kaia Gerber that seeded the episode's virality before it aired. The social moment and the podcast episode functioned as one campaign.
The tier below that matters too. SmartLess reaches older male and female demos with high trust. Theo Von's This Past Weekend runs male 25-40 with deep loyalty. Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard builds credibility through longform. These three collectively cover demographics that FilmTok and Hot Ones largely miss.
What all of these have in common is format logic. Hot Ones forces authentic moments because the wings escalate. You cannot brief against them. The parasocial intimacy Shane has built with his audience, the trust Cooper has accumulated with female listeners over a decade, the genuine access Feldman has from being physically on set: these require completely different content thinking than a junket. The format owns the interview, not the studio.
The studios getting it right are asking a different question entirely: not which channel has the most reach, but which channel already has our specific audience and what is native to how it works. The clearest example in recent memory is The Housemaid. There is a scene in the film where Sydney Sweeney and Brandon Sklenar watch an old episode of Celebrity Family Feud. On set, Sweeney told director Paul Feig: "We've got to go on Family Feud." Feig called Lionsgate, they made it happen. The full cast, Sweeney, Seyfried, Sklenar, and Feig, competed against Real Housewives on the December 4 holiday special. The episode generated 1.5 million video views within the linear window. The film grossed $399M worldwide on a $35M budget. A sequel is already greenlit. Lionsgate chair Adam Fogelson: "Sydney understands her brand as well as anyone I've ever met, and her willingness to go on Celebrity Family Feud should not be treated lightly. You could imagine somebody with that level of star power saying I'm not sure I want to do that."
The Prada 2 Wintour/Vogue cover is the same logic applied to a different audience: fashion press for a fashion film's fashion-native demographic. 632K Instagram likes in hours. Not a podcast, not a creator channel, but the exact same underlying principle. The channel already had the audience. The content was native to how that channel works.
The fragmentation is real and it is permanent. But fragmentation is not the problem. It is the condition. The studios mapping which fragment already has their specific audience and making content native to that fragment's format are replacing the infrastructure that collapsed. The ones still writing Fallon slots into plans for a show that is functionally off the air are generating awareness for audiences that are no longer there.
Movie marketing intel: This week in trends
EXHIBITION 🎬 CinemaCon 2026: studios revealed their full slates this week in Las Vegas (Deadline / Variety) CinemaCon is where studios pitch theater owners, and the marketing framing of every major fall and 2027 release gets established in those rooms. This week's presentations from Disney, Universal, Warner Bros., Sony, and Paramount showed what the industry is betting on for the next 18 months. The Legend of Zelda showed footage for the first time. Avengers: Doomsday confirmed its full scope. What studios choose to show, and how they position it to exhibitors, is film marketing in its most unfiltered form.
GEN Z VIEWING 📊 Gen Z is now the most active moviegoing demographic, averaging 7 theater visits per year (Variety / Fandango) Fandango's survey of 7,000 adults found 87% of Gen Zers saw at least one film theatrically in the past year, compared to 82% of millennials, 70% of Gen X, and 58% of boomers. Cinema United's separate report found Gen Z theater attendance grew 25% year over year, with 41% attending six or more times. The two genres driving them in: video game adaptations and anime. For studios, this is the generational flip everyone feared would go the other way. The audience is there. The marketing challenge is that they discover films through creators, not the channels that built the traditional press tour.
SOCIAL DISCOVERY 📊 57% of moviegoers now discover films through creators, not trailers (Snapchat) Snapchat's latest moviegoing research found more than half of respondents said creators helped them discover new films, overtaking traditional trailers as the primary channel. The same study found 30% of audiences want to see a film on opening night while a nearly equal share go whenever they have time, meaning campaigns need to sustain intent well past the premiere weekend. This number is awareness data, not conversion data. Knowing a film exists and buying a ticket for it are two different behaviors. The press tour's job has always been the former.
This week's movie review: The Drama ★★★½ (3.5/5)
Zendaya and Pattinson have real chemistry even when the film is deliberately withholding what it wants from them. It earns its weirdness and makes for good discussion.
