You can watch the first 7 minutes of Smile 2 online, but you have to smile the whole time
No, seriously. They're watching you.
Image: Paramount Pictures/YouTube
Forget about the creepy smiling actors at baseball games or the entire fake album promo video for pop star Skye Riley. Those might have seemed like brilliant marketing schemes at the time, but they’re nothing compared to Smile 2‘s latest gambit, which may genuinely go down in history as one of the most inspired of all time. The concept is so galaxy-brained that it almost sounds like something Nathan Fielder would have dreamed up. The plan: release the first seven minutes of your movie totally free online for anyone over the age of 17 to watch. The catch: make the experience so inconceivably annoying that people would rather just buy the $20 ticket anyway.
If you’re one of the people who likes to cover your laptop camera with tape, you should probably just click away now. To watch the preview, you have to first give Paramount access to your webcam and then smile the entire time it plays. Yep, you read that right; you have to grin at your computer for the entire seven minutes. Your glee (or horror) is captured in a small window on the bottom right corner of the screen, and if your smile falters for even one second, the video stops playing. For the sake of transparency, this writer made it about 35 seconds before rushing to close the screen. One minute is really, really long when you have to keep the same damn expression plastered on your face, much less for seven. But like we said—brilliant.
It will be years before we truly uncover the narrative possibilities of something like this. A piece of media that can watch and punish you for not enjoying it enough? Absolutely chilling. (Charlie Brooker, pick up the phone!) If the Smile producers have any sense at all, they should also be scouting the handful of people that actually make it to the end of this thing as future extras and baseball game menaces. All in all, it makes the movie 10 times scarier; smiling that much is hard, folks. What a terrible fate.
You can try it out for yourself here.