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Issa Rae is “just getting started in so many ways” with her production company Hoorae, fresh off the success of its film “One of Them Days.” Speaking Thursday during a panel at the Variety Entertainment Marketing Summit presented by Deloitte, Rae teased more to come from the prodco: “This is our first studio film — our first film as a company, period. And there’s a lot in the pipeline that we’re really excited about.”
“One of Them Days” scored more than $51 million at the box office after its January release by Sony. The buddy comedy was up against a very condensed marketing and PR window and still managed to pull off a viral campaign featuring film stars Keke Palmer and SZA.
The trailer for “One of Them Days” debuted in late October, just months before the film’s Jan. 17 launch. That meant the Hoorae team didn’t have long to roll out a social media and marketing campaign, the majority of which needed to launch after the holidays.
“Of course, we want to speak to our core audience and really activate and excite the Black women that this film speaks to — but it’s more universal than that,” Hoorae head of marketing Monique Francis said during at the summit, held at NeueHouse in Los Angeles. “So, we tied into this universal theme of friendship. And we were able to leverage a breakneck-speed marketing campaign, being able to use the incredible talent and content that we were able to get with our stars and with Issa as well. But then also create unique content that spoke, again, to those themes.”
Francis said the Hoorae film produced over a hundred pieces of content for the “One of Them Days” campaign, and that work put them up as a finalist for this year’s Shorty Awards.
“It was really scrappy, just leaning into our creativity and what we do really well, which is understanding connect with our audience,” Francis said.
Also on the panel, alongside Francis and Hoorae founder/CEO Rae, were president of development and production Montrel McKay, ColorCreative president Talitha Watkins, and Raedio head of music supervision and creative sync Stephanie Diaz-Matos. Variety‘s senior artisans editor Jazz Tangcay served as moderator.
McKay said a good chunk of the credit behind the “One of Them Days” campaign should also go to Palmer, SZA and the film’s other stars. McKay lauded them for making themselves “so available and so willing” to promo create content.
“That’s half the battle, is getting people to show up,” McKay said. “And so we just needed more because that’s what it demanded of us. And I think that’s where we’re uniquely positioned. Because you can easily water down your stuff and just get people clicking, not interested in your algorithm, right? But they were able to figure out how to keep that interest and engagement to allow the movie to spread to reach the audience that it did.”
Rae noted how proud she was of the “One of Them Days” marketing team, as well as the soundtrack her production company and Sony were able to lock down for the film.
“Since this was such an LA movie and we were so lucky that Sony allowed us to shoot in actual LA, we wanted to make sure that we had that sound,” Rae said. “We wanted to have the female energy. There are a couple tracks that I still wish we had — I’m always gonna lament — but I’m really proud of even just having Flo Milli on the ending credits. And we even had an original Kiki Palmer song, and she’s such a force and a huge part of this film’s success, just in terms of her triple threat. When we talk about even the digital content, she goes viral every day when she wants to. She’s such an asset to have. Long story short: love the tracks we had, could have had more!”
So, is a sequel to “One of Them Days” in the works? Now that Variety‘s Tangcay has publicly posed the question, Rae said: “They want a sequel! So yes, we’ll make that happen because you asked on stage.”
English (US) ·