Capstone: Strategic Marketing for Zoltar, an Independent Screenplay

SEPTEMBER - DECEMBER 2024 — For my senior capstone under directed study with Seounmi Han Youn, I developed an original screenplay, and designed a qualitative research study to explore what audiences look for in a movie poster. I was curious whether audience preferences could help reverse engineer elements of a screenplay itself and how marketing shapes a film’s long-term reception.

My research included literature reviews, case studies, and interviews with 12 moviegoers, and was driven by a fascination with the fact that many cult classics once flopped while today’s box office hits often have marketing budgets that far exceed production costs.

Based on my findings, I refined key elements of the project, including a promotional deliverable (a movie poster) and the script itself. The project blended creative storytelling with audience insight to better understand how to strategically position a film in today’s entertainment landscape.