A quick scroll through Riley’s personal X feed will reveal several days worth of these posts, alongside retweets of praise for his sophomore feature and fans holding tickets to the film, excitedly proclaiming they’ve been “marked safe” from Riley’s online admonishments.
Starring Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, and LaKeith Stanfield, I Love Boosters follows a group of women who steal clothes from an expensive retailer owned by a wicked fashion mogul (Demi Moore) and sell them for much cheaper prices. Riley’s vibrant visual and thematic style lends itself perfectly to this Vogue-ready, NEON-produced comedic crime thriller.
Riley’s most recent outing hit theaters May 22, and was met with rave reviews but hasn’t made a huge dent at the box office. Its earnings have been largely propelled by word-of-mouth marketing, a charge led by the director himself. The traditional marketing for I Love Boosters has been minimal at best, making these posts not only stand out but necessary for the film’s success.
NEON posted a seven-minute video of Riley describing how I Love Boosters came to be and why you need to see it in a theater. All of Riley’s personal social media feeds — not just his X account — have been dedicated to promoting his full-length fashion feature for several days. His tireless fervor to promote his film has spread to other internet users, creating a mass network of I Love Boosters fans attracted to the director’s personal and cinematic brand.
Despite the entertainment value of Riley’s posts and the overall online engagement with the film, it is not necessarily a good thing that one of the freshest voices in film today has to rely on social media to promote his newest production. Marketing a movie in the digital age has proven difficult; fractured between seemingly infinite streaming services, a superabundance of social media platforms, and shortening attention spans. Crafting a promotional strategy that consistently works and is also cost efficient has proven to be next-to-impossible in that environment.
Additionally, massive mergers and political censorship have put more provocative stories in a hot seat in Hollywood, and promoting them online often drives more vitriolic engagement than positive. For Riley, whose body of work is chock-full of extravagantly surreal stories lambasting the racist exploitation of labor under capitalism, these trends do not bode well for his creations. While he is lucky to have NEON in his corner for I Love Boosters, a studio that has created and supported some of the most daring, critically successful films in recent memory, the barebones promotion of I Love Boosters remains a troubling sign for current film marketing practices.
