How ‘Napoleon Dynamite’ rewrote the indie movie marketing playbook

The year 2004 was memorable for many reasons: Ken Jennings’s 74-game Jeopardy! winning streak, the introduction of Gmail, the founding of Facebook, Nipplegate. It was also the year you could see Napoleon Dynamite free of charge in theaters, over and over again, before the movie was released.

The screenings, held nationwide, were part of an against-the-grain marketing campaign for the unconventional indie film that was acquired by Fox Searchlight Pictures at Sundance in January 2004 for $4.75 million (MTV Films and Paramount Pictures came aboard shortly thereafter) and released that August.

Twenty-one years later, the popularity of Napoleon Dynamite, which went on to gross $45 million at the domestic box office, might seem inevitable, but for those working to build an audience for the film around its release, its success was anything but certain. “Nobody possibly could say, ‘Oh, we knew exactly what was going to happen; we knew it was going to become culturally iconic,’” David Gale, then EVP of MTV Films, said. “No way.”

With a budget of $400,000 (entirely from the founder of 1-800 Contacts) and no big-name stars, the movie—about a tall, awkward, low-energy teenager living in Preston, Idaho, and his unusual friends and family—is not for everyone. It’s “this totally wackadoodle, insane comedy,” Stephanie Allen, former SVP of creative marketing at Searchlight, said, and with its offbeat humor, awkward pauses, and absence of obvious laugh lines, it posed something of a marketing conundrum.

“It was hard to convey the film’s vibe and unique use of humor that sucks you into its world over the course of the film,” recalled Nancy Utley, who was president of marketing at Searchlight at the time. The movie “looked odd in traditional trailers and TV spots,” she said in an email.

But the team at Searchlight believed that the movie could take off, if only it could find the right audience. So how were they to get people to see an oddball movie about an oddball kid with an oddball name?

Getting pretty serious

Cristi Lima Sliter, who was VP of field operations at Searchlight, said the answer was rooted in the marketing team’s own experience with the movie. “We found that as we saw the film the second and third time, the Napoleon Dynamite character was just so lovable,” Sliter said. “We thought, ‘Okay, you know what? Repeat viewing is the key to this.’ And so we knew we had to do a screening program.”

That revelation, and the particulars of the movie itself, led the Searchlight team to dream up an ambitious marketing campaign: It would screen Napoleon Dynamite for free hundreds of times and incentivize attendance by offering merch and clout while building out a website and online fan club designed to create a community around the movie.

Megan Colligan, who worked in publicity at Searchlight and came up with the idea for the fan club, said giving audiences ways to fall in love with the film and proselytize to others about seeing it was central to the campaign.

“To become part of the zeitgeist, you have to kind of get ahead of the wave and make a wave for yourself,” Colligan said.

Making that wave wasn’t exactly easy, Andrew Lin, then head of digital marketing at Searchlight, recalled.

“We would always do screening programs, but this was the most massive screening program we had ever done,” Lin said. The program began 10 weeks before the movie’s wide release, spanning 350 free screenings in 65 US cities over the spring and summer. Attendees received swag, including the soon-to-be-iconic Vote For Pedro T-shirt and tubes of chapstick labeled with an ultra-quotable line from the film, “My lips hurt real bad!”

They also received frequent-viewer cards, which Sliter likened to a frozen-yogurt shop stamp card, incentivizing return visits. Those who got their cards stamped at three different screenings could cash them in for prize packs from Searchlight.

The screenings were also a way to re-create a phenomenon that Gale said he experienced when he saw the movie for the first time at Sundance. “If you watch that movie in a vacuum with nobody else around you, I think you’d be, like, ‘I’m not sure…am I supposed to laugh? Is this pacing right?’” he said. “But when you watch it with a crowd,” like he did, “it is almost infectious in its weirdness and exuberance.”

By June, the screenings were increasingly popular; at one in Hollywood that month, hundreds of people were turned away after the theater reached capacity. A month later, Searchlight announced that more than 1,000 people had attended at least three free screenings. Like the marketing team had hoped, viewers became walking billboards for the movie in their Vote for Pedro and liger T-shirts. The campaign began to take on a life of its own. “One thing that’s true of all great campaigns is that there’s some piece that you almost don’t have complete control of,” Colligan said. “You sort of give over to fanship when that happens.”

I reckon you know a lot about cyberspace

Beyond the screenings, promotion for Napoleon Dynamite extended to the internet, in one of the earlier examples of online film campaigning. At the time, the social web was still largely in its infancy: “Friendster was around, MySpace was around, but we didn’t use that,” Lin said. “Texting wasn’t that big. This is before smartphones…the internet basically was just desktop computers.” But Lin said that, even then, he knew that the internet would be a crucial marketing tool for all movies going forward.

To take advantage, Searchlight hired design studio Ted Perez + Associates to build a custom website that included the Napoleon Dynamite Fan Club, which functioned like an early social network. The fan club was “like a Napoleon Dynamite Geocities,” Lin said, where each user had their own page.

A few years later, deeper into the Web 2.0 era, when user-generated content and social media became the coin of the realm, the Searchlight team would’ve been able to lean on established platforms to promote Napoleon Dynamite, but at the time, that infrastructure didn’t quite exist. They got a considerable budget for the website and associated creative materials, anyway. Lin recalled having at least $100,000 to work with, more than double the amount he’d had for most other Searchlight movie websites. The website was about more than just the fan club, though: it was also where users could find out about and register to attend free screenings in their area.

Like the screenings, the fan club began to catch on. At one point, it boasted 250,000 members—a perhaps paltry figure in comparison to the user bases of major social platforms today, but a significant milestone for the time.

Taj Tedrow, founder and COO of Ted Perez + Associates, described the project as a career highlight. “It was just super fun,” Tedrow recalled. “It was a ton of hours a day for weeks, months. And, you know, we’d do it again.”

Tedrow said he did much of the website art—which included pencil sketches of mythological creatures like CentaurClaus (Santa Claus, but a centaur) and pages designed to look like sheets of loose-leaf paper—himself, and after it went live, he spent hours every day moderating content on the fan club and “making sure that everything was cool.”

That summer, there was a contest to crown the president of the fan club. Members could rack up points, which helped their chances of winning, by inviting others to join, seeing the movie, voting for fellow members, and playing online games created by Tedrow’s team, including Ask Napoleon (a chatbot providing Magic 8 Ball–style responses), Don Quote-O-77 (where users had to match audio clips to stills from the movie), and a timed trivia game called The NAT, or the Napoleon Aptitude Test. By the end of July, 25,000 people were competing for the honor, and, like the best student council elections, it was tooth and nail.

There was a lot at stake: In addition to bragging rights, the winner would receive a private, hometown screening along with an undisclosed prop from the film (later revealed to be Pedro’s Sledgehammer bicycle) that would be delivered by a mystery member of the cast (which turned out to be Jon Heder, who played Napoleon).

As it got down to the wire, “we started to realize that people were literally playing these games 24 hours a day,” Tedrow recalled, and there were even unfounded accusations of some participants cheating: “I just had to keep saying, ‘You can’t [cheat]...these are manual tasks.’”

Over the course of the summer, to help with content moderation, Tedrow deputized trusted members who, he said, “became like local celebrities amongst the group.” The combination of user involvement and the intense competition inspired by the contest amounted to a singular experience for Tedrow that felt like a first. For other movies, even those with cult followings, fans “would be someplace else,” he said. “[They] would hardly ever be on the website.”

Pretty sweet

Like the film itself, Napoleon Dynamite’s success is an underdog story, and when the movie began to morph into a classic, it felt both surprising and validating for those involved. “The first time I saw someone out in public wearing a Vote for Pedro T-shirt, I almost lost it,” Sliter, who was in charge of promotional items, said. “I was, like, ‘Oh my God. I made that shirt!’”

Searchlight was “sort of this little engine that could,” she said, and the Napoleon Dynamite campaign was proof that “we can do big things.” Allen agreed. “One of the things that we at Searchlight did particularly well was pay attention to the experience of watching a movie,” she said. “I think we were able to authentically capture the essence of that experience in our marketing materials.”

For Kevin Mackall, who ran the on-air promos department at MTV, the movie’s success signified something larger. “You’re happy that a movie of substance and quality and uniqueness and charm and an unsuspecting, surprising, new approach to filmmaking is hitting,” he said. “It achieved cult status…That’s the best you can hope for.”

Could a campaign like the one rolled out in 2004 happen today? Most of the people we spoke to said no, at least not in the same way, but they emphasized that the most important variables in the campaign’s success, aside from the quality of the movie itself, were the freedom they had to pursue big, out-of-the-box ideas and the encouragement they received from execs, including Utley and Allen.

“Everybody had a say in what they thought would be best for the film,” Sliter said. “It was very much up to us to craft what that would look like. Nancy [Utley] was unbelievably supportive and just said, ‘We all feel this. Let’s do it.’”

Utley told us her philosophy was simple: “A good idea can come from anywhere”—and the best ideas may even come from junior executives, who, she noted, “are less tied to the way things have typically been done, and more likely to be in touch with the latest pop culture trends.”

And of course, there was perhaps the greatest teen-viewer audience tool of all at their disposal: MTV, which was, “with rare exceptions, the greatest place to work in the entertainment business,” Gale said. “It was just fantastic. Nobody says that anymore.”

Gosh!

Plenty else has changed in the movie business since Napoleon Dynamite’s unconventional marketing success story.

Even at the time, the winds of change coming to entertainment and marketing were palpable. “We were standing on the precipice of something that felt a little foreboding. Culture was changing, and gosh, if we could have only ever predicted where we’d be now,” Mackall said. “But it felt like, ‘Wow. What an amazing time for this piece of creative work to come.’”

That’s not to say that creative movie marketing doesn’t—or can’t—exist anymore (some we spoke to said that A24 is carrying on the tradition), but it’s a different beast. It was hard enough to market a movie to the masses when it seemed like everyone was paying attention to the same media; now, in an age of individualized algorithms, it can be a challenge to grab a moviegoer’s attention for longer than a few seconds.

In some ways, the Napoleon Dynamite campaign was prescient. The movie was promoted on MTV when people still watched MTV; it became an IRL, word-of-mouth phenomenon through the free-screening program; and it started as a niche movie that a select group of fans championed on the internet. But it was proof, then and now, that if a marketing team wants to get something in front of as many people as possible, it can’t be overly reliant on one channel. And by embracing new tools like social media, while putting its own twist on tried-and-true experiences, like the screening program, the Napoleon Dynamite marketing team managed to pull off a campaign that could, with some tweaks, almost seem at home in 2025.

While the campaign was, at least for Searchlight, unique in its scale and scope, the core idea behind it remains the key to most good marketing, for an indie film or otherwise: create marketers out of your audience.

“You have to hand them the right kind of tools that inspire them to want to talk about something, that makes it feel exciting and organic,” Colligan said. “You’re trusting in the idea that the fans are going to take it over and go do something with it. And they did.”

This is one of the stories of our Quarter Century Project, which highlights the various ways industry has changed over the last 25 years. Check back each month for new pieces in this series and explore our timeline featuring the ongoing series.

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