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Wearing a ratty bathrobe and a pair of wired headphones, the actor Nathan Shoop is living inside a 3-foot-deep by 25-foot-wide billboard shaped like a house, some 30 feet above Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Below him a sign reads: \u201cHow Long Can You Survive?\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Shoop, 34, has spent 24 hours up there since early Thursday morning, stretching, reading, listening to music \u2014 all in the name of promotion, specifically Netflix\u2019s newest film, \u201cThe Last House.\u201d<\/p>\n
The stunt is a rare marketing play from a streaming company that otherwise lets its vaunted algorithm do the heavy lifting for promoting its films. The scene has prompted visits from local news crews and other curious onlookers wondering why and how a man is living in a billboard to promote a movie.<\/p>\n
I connected with Mr. Shoop early Friday afternoon via whiteboard \u2014 I was on the sidewalk with mine, and he had one in the billboard \u2014 while a drone and a news helicopter hovered overhead. (He had no phone, a nod to a plot point in the movie.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The actor is playing his part well. He\u2019s not bored. \u201cOnly boring people get bored,\u201d he wrote to me on his whiteboard. He\u2019s not scared. His biggest complaint is he\u2019s running low on Sour Strips.<\/p>\n
Oh, and he\u2019s got no Wi-Fi and therefore no Netflix. I asked what he\u2019d be watching if he did. He quickly replies \u201c72 Hours\u201d \u2014 the Kevin Hart movie that came out on July 24 and has been atop the company\u2019s film chart for the past two weeks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
I teased him with the comment, \u201cCorporate Shill\u201d on my whiteboard. He replied: \u201cCorporate Chill!\u201d<\/p>\n
Netflix could use a little more chilling on its site from its subscribers lately. The marketing stunt comes at a moment when the company is struggling to land a summer hit. Last year at this time, it was riding high on \u201cKPop Demon Hunters,\u201d which a year later still hovers in the company\u2019s global Top 10 list. No film from Netflix since has reached such heights. Even tried-and-true talent, like Mr. Hart, can\u2019t seem to generate the viewership numbers that his previous films managed on the service.<\/p>\n
Mr. Hart\u2019s last Netflix comedy, \u201cMe Time\u201d with Mark Wahlberg, debuted in 2022 to 59.23 million views in its first three days. In contrast, \u201c72 Hours,\u201d earned less than half that many views in the same period.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
A report last month pointing out a decline in viewership numbers between the first and second seasons of popular shows has concerned investors, a fact reinforced in the company\u2019s earnings call last month. Netflix offered weaker-than-expected revenue guidance for the next quarter, and shares dropped some 8 percent on that news.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
This isn\u2019t Netflix\u2019s first promotional stunt. In April, the company hooked Charlize Theron<\/a> to a climbing rig and had her scale a rock wall attached to a billboard in the middle of Times Square to advertise her action-thriller \u201cApex.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you do something like this and it connects, the value is immense,\u201d said Jonathan Helfgot, a vice president of marketing at Netflix. \u201cThat\u2019s not just because of the press or social media coverage of it on face value, but because there\u2019s actually an emotional connection between the stunt and the movie that it\u2019s for.\u201d<\/p>\n