When you’re doing a movie trailer launch nowadays and need to grab everyone’s attention, it helps to throw a concert.
Universal’s trailer for F9 (aka Fast & Furious 9), since dropping its near four-minute trailer on Friday ahead of the Super Bowl, has clocked a massive 439.3 million global views across YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. And that number is growing. The ninthquel doesn’t open until May 22, Memorial Day weekend.
Before we delve into more trailer stats, all of this has resulted in advance tickets sales for F9 through its first four days on Fandango outstripping Fate of the Furious by 50% over the same period. In addition, F9 has sold nearly four times as many advance tickets as Hobbs & Shaw over four days. At $541.9 million, Fate of the Furious is the third-biggest global opener and Universal’s biggest worldwide debut of all time; the pic opened to $98.7M stateside in April 2017.
Tickets for F9 went on sale following Friday’s concert in Miami with pic’s stars Cardi B, Ludacris and Ozuna as well as Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth, who were behind the Furious 7 Paul Walker theme “See You Again.” The livestream concert’s viewership has clocked 12 million views in its first 72 hours.
Uni with recent Fast & Furious movies has traditionally made an event out of their trailer drops, and for numbers to be this big for a sequel of a 19-year-old franchise, well that’s pretty impressive. When Uni dropped the trailer for Furious 7, there was a 30-minute cable special on E!. For Fate of the Furious, the studio took over all the digital screens in Times Square timed to a drop during Sunday Night Football. In the case of F9, with the comeback of Han Lue and the reveal of John Cena’s character as Dom’s brother and foe, the studio cranked up the volume, especially since it’s the last event pic to drop a trailer prior to summer.
But get a load of some more F9 trailer records: In its first 72 hours it amassed 262M global views, which bests Avengers: Infinity War‘s first trailer drop over the same period (that movie having done 238M in its first 24 hours). And at 151M, F9’s nearly 4-minute trailer is a 24-hour record for a Universal movie.
Also, let’s not forget about the Super Bowl. The 30-second spot of F9 drew 8M views in its 24 hours following the game. According to social media analyst RelishMix, the combination of the 30-second spot plus the full trailer churned out 110.9M views in the 24 hours following the Super Bowl across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, dwarfing the online postgame traffic for a slew of upcoming event pics including Black Widow (18.1M), Mulan (12.4M) and No Time to Die (10.1M) among many others (see the chart below).
In fact, F9 sucked up all the air online: Last year’s four top trailers clocked over 19M+ viewers in the 24-hour period after the Super Bowl, with Hobbs & Shaw (85.5M), Avengers: Endgame (59.1M), Alita: Battle Angel (34.1M) and Captain Marvel (19.2M). This year, a majority of trailers outside F9 drew less than 19M views, with many in the single digits; Black Widow did less than Captain Marvel. It should be noted that the pregame trailer traffic is low depending on how far ahead the airtime is for a spot before the game, i.e., Uni’s Invisible Man aired an hour and a half before kickoff, hence its 600,000-view postgame result.
The F9 trailer’s post Super Bowl draw bested the postgame day traffic of Furious 7 (23.9M), Fate of the Furious (42.2M) and Hobbs & Shaw last year (85.5M), according to RelishMix.
Leading into Super Bowl weekend, Uni dropped various marketing elements that swelled the F9 conversation, starting with Vin Diesel dropping a 15-second teaser trailer, followed by character one sheets, then a cast group photo, plus the trailer drop and concert livestream, culminating in the in-game spot.
The trailer made up close to half of the conversation on Twitter in its first 24 hours on Saturday, with Fast 9 trending No. 2 worldwide and in the US. #HanIsAlive trended No. 12 worldwide with various other Han hashtags ranking high in the U.S. (#HanIsBack ranked No. 9 stateside).
How did everyone like the F9 trailer? Very well, thank you very much, with sentiment above all comps at a combo of 93% positive and neutral, the great word of mouth making up half that number.
