Paramount Lets Cities Duke It Out On Twitter To Get 'Paranormal Activity 3' Early

OK, folks. Batten down the hatches.

Whether you call home the extreme that just doesn't like it, or the one that considers it an entertaining throwback, one thing cannot be denied about neither the "Paranormal Activity" franchise, nor its pioneering found-footage predecessor "The Blair Witch Project": for their divergent roads' respective differing scenery, both micro-budgeted films rode unique and effective marketing straight to box-office hauls that made back each film's budget several times over.

"Paranormal Activity" opened in 2009 in 13 U.S. college towns and director Oren Peli directed those intrigued by word-of-mouth praise onto Eventful.com to request that the movie make its way to fans' respective home theaters.

By Oct. 3, 33 sold-out screenings in 20 markets sold out and earned over $500,000. The next day, Paramount unleashed it into 40 markets with more screenings, and by Oct. 6, the distributor announced that they would put the film into theaters everywhere if the Eventful demand-count hit 1,000,000 votes. That took a whole four days, the film released nationwide, and the $15,000-budget project ended up grossing $193.4 million.

Now a trilogy, the trend is about to evolve. Paramount has announced a "Tweet To See It First" contest hosted at Paranormalmovie.com in which the top 20 cities with the most tweets demanding "Paranormal Activity 3" will get a special three-days-early screening Oct. 18. The contest officially opened at the stroke of 8 AM ET/PT Sept. 28, with voting closing at 11:59 PM ET/PT on Oct. 13. Winning cities will be announced Oct. 14.

Voters select their respective cities from a map at the website, and can then create a unique tweet pushing for the early screening. Once a tweet posts, that's a vote.

It's really boggling how far Internet marketing has come. With respect ot budget-to-gross ratio, "Paranormal Activity" and 1999's "The Blair Witch Project" have stood up just fine to big-budget blockbusters that other studios have shoved down fans' throats.

Did either movie's technique or story necessarily set the world ablaze? Well, no. In fact, "The Blair Witch Project" admittedly hasn't really aged well, and its jerky handheld camera became the butt of many a motion sickness joke. But both capture curiosity with word of mouth.

I can't name a movie before "Blair Witch" that played up the Meta-movie concept of instilling doubt in some minds about whether or not this was, in fact, real found footage just because the website launched to promote the movie stayed so well in-character playing it up as a true story. As a result, a $500,000 movie grossed $248.6 million largely because it had great word-of-mouth from a fresh promotional approach.

Almost 10 years later exactly, along comes "Paranormal Activity" with an approach the shove-the-movie-down-their-throats types probably never imagined would work: let the movie speak for itself, then let the fans speak for the movie.

It doesn't always, but in this case, the bottom line speaks for itself.