Trailer: Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Leak or Viral Marketing

The age of YouTube doesn't seem like it's slowing down any. Just this year we were witness to the amazing and innovative Old Spice campaign, the crazy and infectious Bed Intruder videos and uncountable (and unwelcome) parodies of Rebecca Black's horrendous hit, Friday.

Earlier this week, the red-band trailer for David Fincher's American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was leaked, and if you haven't seen it by now, well, you're obviously not glued to your computer screen like I am. The trailer is so blatantly 'bootlegged', I mean, someone is holding a hand-held camera to a screener of the trailer. Or wait...is it?



Usually if something like this leaks, it's taken down right away so the production team can release it officially when they're ready. If you don't watch it right away, you're screwed because it's already gone by the time you get around to watching it. So either Sony is all lax about it since it's already out, or perhaps they leaked the trailer themselves, to generate some buzz around the movie's release.

Take a look at what The Hollywood Reporter has dug up from watching the trailer - one thing for sure is the sound seems too good for a cam-copy (and thank God for that, because the Trent Reznor and Karen Oh track wouldn't be worthy of poor sound quality). But, if that's the case and Sony did 'leak' their own trailer to kick off some viral marketing campaign, was it a clever move on the their part or should things 'go viral' more organically? Is it really something worthy of a 'leak' considering a novel and previous (hard to live up to) film version already exists? And did we ruin everything by pointing out that it may have been a marketing tactic?

If you're interested in viral marketing and want to know more about how and why videos go viral, take a look at this post from Sysomos.

UPDATE:
As you can see, as of Wednesday morning, the trailer has been taken down, with a copyright claim from Sony. Hmm, so maybe the conspiracy theories were wrong and it was just a bootleg. Still, maybe not...