We know this much about The Wolverine director James Mangold: He has an iPhone. The filmmaker tweeted six seconds of footage from his film about the Marvel Comics character in the form of a Vine post on Twitter, embedded below. The post—like a .gif but with optional sound—doesn't exactly contain a bunch of spoilers, but it's a unique way to grab attention and hundreds of immediate retweets without actually shooting anything new or buying airtime.
The Vine post is also the teaser for the teaser, which will show up on Wednesday on MTV and, of course, iTunes. The film is a big swing for Twentieth Century Fox. It has a July 27 opening date, a budget of more than $100 million and principal photography in 3-D, so the studio obviously expects big things from it. While other genres have scaled back marketing budgets, superhero movies have grown famous (or perhaps infamous) in recent years for expensive and elaborate marketing campaigns, notably the alternate-reality game for The Dark Knight (and, to a lesser extent, The Dark Knight Rises) and the extensive cross-promotion between films for all the non-Fox Marvel movies.
The tweaser. vine.co/v/bDExaiMjJ1F
— James Mangold (@mang0ld) March 25, 2013
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