From Little Fires Everywhere to The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu has plenty of experience adapting hit novels into original series after their publication. But the streamer was already working on Interior Chinatown, which follows an Asian American actor who witnesses a crime that leads him to Chinatown’s underworld, before the novel arrived in bookstores.
Jordan Helman, EVP, drama programming, ABC Entertainment and Hulu Originals, told Marketing Brew that when the manuscript came across his desk prior to publication, “it just felt so wildly distinctive and unlike anything else we had ever read or seen before in any medium.” As an added bonus, author Charles Yu, who has also worked as a screenwriter, “was someone who was already on our radar and someone that we desperately wanted to work with,” he said.
Interior Chinatown, which won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, arrives on Hulu as an original this week, and the adaptation and the way it’s being marketed highlight how Hulu’s originals strategy has evolved over the years, sourcing IP from different genres and employing tailored marketing campaigns for each original while getting a Disney bump.
“There’s no one-size-fits-all mentality for the marketing team…it’s really on a title-by-title basis,” Helman said.
Spread like wildfire
For Interior Chinatown, Hulu has run ads across OOH, digital, and social, according to the company, and Hulu’s digital efforts have included creating custom Snapchat and TikTok lenses for the show. Hulu also targeted outreach to AAPI audiences, which included a collaboration with Eater focused on Chinese restaurants and partnerships with AAPI-focused groups like Gold House.
In a move that is increasingly commonplace between publishers and the streamers who adapt their books, Hulu partnered with the book’s publisher, Pantheon Books, to run advertising on the literary website LitHub, roll out promotions across Amazon Kindle, and send out influencer mailers.
Interior Chinatown has also received some promotion across other Disney properties, including call-outs on GMA3 and Jimmy Kimmel Live! and partnering with ESPN on linear billboards, according to Hulu.
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That cross-company promotion is something that the marketing team has deployed for other titles as well. For Only Murders in the Building, costars Selena Gomez and Martin Short made an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in June to promote the show’s latest season.
A little bit of everything
Like in the case of adaptations like Interior Chinatown, Helman said Hulu is focused on sourcing originals with diverse plots and genres to help the platform stand out among its competitors.
“We’re fairly genre-agnostic,” he said. “We’re constantly on the lookout for stories that feel fresh, surprising, and have that addictive quality that is absolutely essential in bringing viewers back week after week.”
Hulu has in the past picked up adaptations based on books from authors whose novels it has previously adapted into shows: Take author Sally Rooney’s debut novel Conversations with Friends, which Hulu adapted after the success of the adaptation of her third novel, Normal People. The streamer did the same with author Margaret Atwood, who wrote both The Handmaid’s Tale and its sequel, The Testaments, which Helman said Hulu is still in the process of adapting.
Hulu also looks to BookTok and leverages its relationships with agents and publishing houses when looking for inspiration for its next original, he said.
While Hulu’s open to most genres, there’s one that’s proven to be particularly popular as of late: “female-driven stories, primarily soaps and thrillers,” Helman said. Just this year Hulu released shows with similar themes, including Under the Bridge, which centers on the murder of a teenage girl, and Season 2 of the college drama Tell Me Lies, both of which are also book-to-series adaptations.
The aim, Helman said, is “to ensure that we are not duplicating what some of [Disney’s] other brands, like FX, ABC, Onyx, Freeform, etc., are doing, but are really complementary to those brands.”