Feargal McKay investigates internet movie marketing, from The Blair Witch Project to Snakes on a Plane.

2006 seems unlikely to go down in the record books as being a vintage year for cinema, with the year's releases once again being filled with rethreads (The Omen), franchise fillers (Superman Returns, Mission: Impossible III) and dodgy sequels (Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction). Add in the remakes of foreign films we've already seen in another language (The Departed), and films borrowed from the stage (The History Boys) and the printed page (The Da Vinci Code) and you're left wondering if there is any creativity at all left in the film industry.

Somewhat perversely, one of the year's few original projects will be remembered less for its creative impact and more for the manner in which it was made and marketed. Snakes on a Plane may be an unlikely candidate for anyone's top ten lists come the bangle and bauble season, but it did at least achieve something a lot of other films released this year totally failed to do: It got noticed.

Snakes on a Plane is, as we all know only too well, the film the internet wrote. For more than a year before its release, it was the talk of the internet. It leapt aboard the digital convergence bandwagon, wrestled the driver to the floor and sped off down the fast lane of the information superhighway like it was Vin Diesel in The Fast and the Furious. In SOAP, the futurologists are claiming to see the future of the silver screen, an alchemical convergence of media channels.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 113.