The question is, “How do you market a movie?”

A hotel suite. A release window. A star in rotation. A row of interviews designed to move a film through the publicity machine as cleanly as possible. The room did its job. It generated quotes, clips, and coverage. But it was built for a media world that no longer exists in quite the same way.

In the same way that the Video Killed the Radio Star (Cue The Buggles)

The Internet changed everything. The audience. The architecture of attention.

Films no longer arrive only through trailers, critics, and traditional press. They arrive through creators, niche communities, fandom discourse, live activations, social clips, and the people who know how to translate a film, whether theatrical or streaming, into the language of the internet without draining it of meaning. The goal is no longer only to secure coverage. It is to generate cultural motion.

The old media room and the creator room are no longer separate. They are on a collision course.

For this issue, we wanted to widen the room inside The Lantern News itself and bring in perspective from a creator in the Lighthouse community who works directly at this intersection. Naz Perez, an entertainment journalist, host, creator, and Cultural Conversationalist put the shift more clearly than most.

“The junket used to be the event. Now it’s one note in a much longer song. The shift hits hardest in the audience. They no longer wait for the press cycle. They’ve already seen the trailer reaction, the Letterboxd early reviews, the cast on a podcast they actually listen to. By the time the satellite tour runs, the conversation is already happening somewhere else. Studios are reaching for people who live where the audience lives now, which is mostly not in a junket hotel ballroom.”

That gets to the heart of it. The release moment is no longer contained to a single room, a single format, or a single publicity beat. By the time the traditional junket begins, the conversation is often already in motion. The audience has already encountered the film through social response, fan culture, creator-led interpretation, or the swirl of media that now surrounds a project before the formal cycle has fully kicked in.

So the room has changed. Or at least, it has to.

Naz sharpened that distinction too. “Creators are not a marketing channel. They are cultural translators. They take a film, a song, a story, and they move it into the language and texture their audience already speaks. A studio that treats a creator like a billboard wastes the actual asset. The job is translation, not transmission.”

That difference matters because traditional entertainment media and creator media are not doing the same thing, even when they are talking about the same film. Traditional media still offers reach. It offers record, legitimacy, scale. But creators often offer something else, a relationship and trust built over time, a recognizable worldview, and an audience that has already opted into how they see. One speaks outward. The other often speaks inward and across. The first delivers information. The second helps shape cultural meaning.

And increasingly, that shaping is happening at The Lighthouse.

The campus has become a gathering point for a different kind of release moment. Universal’s Him. Tony Tost’s Americana. National Geographic’s Pole to Pole with Will Smith. Most recently, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. Different genres, different audiences, different campaign needs, but a recognizable pattern. These are not static press stops designed only for traditional media capture. They are creator-facing, conversation-led, format-aware environments where filmmakers, talent, press, and digital voices share the same physical context.

That distinction matters in practice. The room now has to do more than hold a celebrity and a schedule. It has to help a project move across communities. It has to help traditional theatrical voices and creator culture meet without either one flattening the other. It has to produce not only interviews, but atmosphere, interpretation, and a reason for people outside the room to care.

Pole to Pole offered one version of that shift. The event itself pushed further than that. Will Smith did not only arrive to repeat a familiar press narrative. The conversation widened into science, fear, vulnerability, exploration, and creativity itself. He didn’t just sit on a stage riser with the producers and wail on about how it changed him. He arrives four hours earlier and spends time with a hand selected slate of creators and joins in on their content not as just a face but an ally in culture translation of the reason Pole to Pole was created.

Naz’s own experience with Universal’s Him makes the practical shift even clearer. “[For the] HIM creator day at The Lighthouse I was invited to, I got more time as a creator than I ever did as a traditional journalist. Back when I worked for Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes, I’d get eight minutes tops at a junket for a film like this. As a creator, I got twenty minutes alone with the cast of Him to ask what I wanted from my point of view, and what my audience wanted.

That detail says a lot. Not only about access, but about what access is now expected to do.

Naz continues: “I chopped those twenty minutes into multiple social bites that got picked up by Complex and other outlets and hit hundreds of thousands of views. I uploaded the full conversation to my YouTube and my own social channels. I also clipped a piece for my new segment NazFlix for Noovie that runs in every Regal, Cinemark, and AMC theater before the previews nationwide. Universal got way more bang for their buck having me host as a creator than they ever did having me host as an employee for a traditional press outlet.”

That is not a small adjustment to the old system. That is a different logic. The value is no longer just the interview itself. It is the afterlife of the interview. Its portability. Its flexibility. Its ability to travel across formats, communities, and levels of audience trust.

The Mummy activation offered a different version of the same turn. There, the room held Lee Cronin alongside James Wan and Jason Blum in a conversation that felt more like a cultural unpacking of horror than a standard promotional cycle. They spoke about approaching the franchise from “a different perspective,” about making the film feel like an “event,” and about backing a filmmaker’s distinct take rather than simply chasing trend. That is not the language of a dead format. It is the language of a release strategy trying to become legible to a more discerning, more online, and more taste-driven audience.  

The event itself reflected that logic. The room was not only there to receive talking points. It was built to hold atmosphere, audience reaction, and physical experience. A horror conversation was paired with a specially designed sarcophagus activation, with fans and creators responding in real time, with the film not only discussed but staged into the room’s energy. The campaign was not only being presented. It was being translated live and then shared to the audiences who don’t get to be there.

This is what the new press junket asks for.

Not less media. Better rooms.

Naz put it well again when talking about where the smartest convergence is happening. “The smartest convergence is happening when legacy outlets stop treating creators as a novelty and start treating them as colleagues. And when creators get the access press has historically gatekept. Live formats are where I see it cleanest. A real audience, a smart host, a film on the line, and a clip that lives across both worlds afterward. That is the new junket. We just haven’t given it a real name yet.”

That feels exactly right. The old architecture of publicity is not disappearing. It is being absorbed into something more layered, more social, and more porous. The release room now has to function as a press line, live conversation, community gathering, and content engine all at once. Not because the industry wants it to, but because that is how culture now moves.

And if that is true, then what matters is not only who gets invited into the room. It is how the room is built.

Naz again: “The lazy ones are still putting talent in front of a creator and calling it strategy. Putting Timothée in front of a podcaster does not automatically make a moment. Building the right room, and hiring the right person to host and create around them does.”

That may be the cleanest way to describe why spaces like The Lighthouse matter in this shift. The campus is not a neutral white-box venue. It is not merely an events business with better branding. Its whole editorial and physical logic is based on collision, on the idea that the room itself matters, that proximity matters, and that culture moves differently when different disciplines are asked to share space.  

That becomes especially useful in a release environment. Because films now compete inside a much louder ecosystem than they did even ten years ago. To break through, they need more than a press line. They need context. They need creators who can translate them to audiences that trust their taste. They need spaces that understand both cinema and internet culture without reducing either one to cliché. They need environments where old media and new media do not just coexist politely, but sharpen one another.

What used to be a controlled publicity room is becoming something more alive and layered. A place where the goal is not only access, but interpretation. Not only coverage, but momentum. 

And it is why The Lighthouse keeps ending up inside this story.

Not simply as a host for activations, but as one of the rooms helping redefine what a modern release environment can look like. A room where creators and theatrical voices meet in public. A room where campaigns become cultural exchanges. 

If the old press junket was built to move films through the system, the new one is being built to move films through culture.

And as Naz put it, “The next era belongs to the people who can translate, not just transmit.”

Find Your Place.

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