‘Hunting Matthew Nichols’: From Guerrilla Marketing to Directly Pitching Theater Owners, This $275K Indie Turned a Profit Before it Even Was Released

Markian Tarasiuk and Sean Harris Oliver were two Vancouver-based artists who ran neighboring theater companies. But when the pandemic hit in 2020, they came to a bleak realization.

“Theater’s dead — really dead — right now,” Tarasiuk says. “What can we do to stay creative?”

One day, while the friends were playing tennis, Tarasiuk shared a delicious idea: What if we made “a Netflix true crime documentary that turns into a horror movie?” Oliver took the idea and ran with it, writing up an early 50-page outline for the film “Hunting Matthew Nichols,” the finished version of which is opening in theaters today via Moon7.

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The film’s hook is simple and quickly engaging: Decades after her brother’s disappearance, documentarian Tara (Miranda MacDougall) is joined by her cameraman (Tarasiuk) to solve the cold case. With Tarasiuk as director, the small production team was able to shoot the film in just 12 days in Dec. 2023, on a tiny $275,000 budget.

But then things got really interesting.

Enter Jacob Crawford, one of the founders of Canadian distributor Moon7, who saw an early festival screening of the film and envisioned its commercial potential. From there, the team dreamed big, and hit some lofty goals: The indie Canadian production will be premiering on more than 1,000 American screens this weekend, and due to presales, it made back its budget even before it opened.

Their strategy was fueled by a curiosity about the theatrical model. First, the team reached out to former National Association of Theatre Owners head John Fithian, whom they knew about from the trades. They were able to contact him and send a copy of their film while they were approaching distributors, and he advised them to push for a theatrical release.

“He said, ‘This movie could really do well in theaters. Why don’t you guys hold off on taking a distribution deal?'” Oliver says.

From there, Crawford, Oliver and some other Moon7 members went on a “traveling roadshow” to meet with the heads of the key American theater chains, including AMC and B&B Theatres, both headquartered Kansas, Regal in Knoxville, and Marcus Theatres in Milwaukee.

“We were expecting, ‘Maybe they’ll give us 200 or 300 screens, and we can do a little indie release,'” Oliver says. “But Regal Cinema was our first meeting, and said, ‘We think 1,000 to 1,200 screens is a good starting place for this film.'”

Crawford says they were also able to speak to the theater owners’ anxieties about opening new, unknown films for fickle audiences.

“They voiced a lot of their frustrations and some of the stresses that they’re feeling with the industry and said, ‘Here’s how you can help us,'” he says. “‘Let’s find a new model, let’s find a new way to bring you a film like this to a ton of screens across the nation.’ In parallel, they know that we’re not a studio, we don’t have a huge P&A budget, but for them, they wanted to understand, ‘Do you know who your audience is? And do you have a plan to get to them?’ That’s when we pitched an innovative marketing plan.”

The plan that impressed theater owners was the team’s shoestring-but-effective guerrilla marketing campaign, which tipped its hat to indie forebears like “The Blair Witch Project.” Leaning into the true crime aspect of the film, the team launched a flyover near L.A.’s iconic Griffith Observatory with an interest-piquing banner: “Help Us! FindMatthewNow.com,” which led to online ticket sales.

The team also posted hundreds of missing fliers tied to the film posters, which drew 5,000+ organic scans to QR codes. Additionally, there was an in-depth online component that tied into the film’s mythology, including a website ARG-style trail of puzzles and clues that allowed fans to help solve the mystery themselves, which is still available to play here.

The clever advertising gambits — done at a fraction of the price of studio fare — have already helped fill screens before the official release. Additionally, Reddit sleuths predicted it would be a part of AMC’s Scream Unseen preview series, which afforded the film more word-of-mouth buzz nearly two weeks before its release.

Tarasiuk believes that the team’s position as passionate outsiders allowed them to ask the right questions that opened doors to find success.

“I think my naïveté and lack of experience with a theatrical rollout has been really eye-opening, because I look at it from this point of, ‘I feel like all these things have been done wrong and I’m new at this,'” he says. “‘Am I crazy in saying that maybe it’s some of this other stuff, too?’ It’s been fun to point out all these things. When everybody’s like, ‘Well, that’s just how it’s done,’ I ask, ‘Can we just change it? Can we just try something else? If it’s not working for you guys, instead of complaining, let’s be part of the change to get audiences to engage with our art.'”

But perhaps the most impactful moment for the cast and crew was the April 2 sold-out hometown premiere of the film in Vancouver, which felt like a true celebration of Canadian film, a community that can feel othered compared to American cinema.

“We’re such a service town for so many American productions, specifically in Vancouver,” MacDougall says. “We’re all so excited, and we really believe in the content and writing and vision that is alive, outside of productions coming to Canada to get their stories made on a tax break or with a ‘cheaper can do’ attitude. We love championing Canadian films.”

Watch the “Hunting Matthew Nichols” trailer below.