Moviepilot is a relative newcomer to Hollywood, but it has already captured the imagination of movie marketers.
A hybrid digital fan club and social media agency, Moviepilot is now neck and neck with IMDb as the top site for movie buffs.
Moviepilot is just 1.4 million shy of IMDb’s 14.5 million unique monthly visitors, according to Quantcast’s most recent data. Not bad for a startup that moved from Berlin to Los Angeles just two years ago to take on the quarter-century-old IMDb.
Unlike IMDb, however, Moviepilot aspires to be more than a database. It’s first a Web site for film enthusiasts that also pushes its content — mostly user-generated — to registered fans on Facebook.
This open-posting system produces more than 4,000 posts per month and draws on more than 2,000 contributors. It’s also creating its own stars.
A piece penned earlier this year by Jon Negroni speculated that Andy’s mom in Pixar’s “Toy Story” is also Emily — the original owner of cowgirl-doll Jessie, who in the animated movie’s sequel befriends featured-toy Woody.
In its first week, Negroni’s post got 20 million reads.
“A total nerd story gone mainstream,” Moviepilot co-founder Tobi Bauckhage told The Post. “Not only was it one of the biggest entertainment stories of the year, but it got picked up by USA Today and Huffington Post.”
Bauckhage has seen so many Moviepilot posts go viral that he has a theory: “All these genres — superhero, sci-fi, zombie — it’s not the stuff professional critics like to write about.”
But to many members of Moviepilot’s Facebook community of 27 million, these critic-neglected genres put the pop in pop culture.
And when they register for Moviepilot updates on Facebook — as 2 million already have — they constitute what Bauckhage calls “the world’s biggest focus group of moviegoers.”
For the studios far removed from their end consumers, this focus group has already proved to be a gold mine.
Bauckhage recalls meeting with Paramount right after moving to LA, only to hear a horror film set for release was tracking so badly the studio considered taking it straight to video.
But when Moviepilot tapped into its social network, it found major buzz for the film in minor segments — most notably from fans of “The Walking Dead,” which tracked three times the normal interest index.
For that reason, much of the production’s ad budget was allocated to the cable series.
When the low-budget film “The Devil Inside” was finally released in early 2012, it scored the biggest opening of all time for early January, pulling in a record-breaking $34.5 million.