One night in early December, Matt Landsman concocted a silly Christmas gift idea. Over the previous few months, he and his three friends had attended dozens of movies together at Los Angeles-based AMC movie theaters. As a result, they’d grown overfamiliar with the chain’s $25 million promotional campaign, in which a glamorously-dressed Nicole Kidman waxes poetic about the power of cinema while sitting inside an empty theater. Like his buddies, Landsman initially found the commercial puzzling and uncanny, gawking at its intense sincerity before each feature presentation. But the more he saw it, the more he relented to its unique, campy charm. “It was just funny and awkward and strange in this way I couldn’t quite explain,” Landsman says. “I instantly loved it.”
As a comedic tribute, he began customizing four T-shirts, which featured Kidman’s mesmerized face above her most memorable line, and presented them to his cinephilic crew at various holiday parties. Of course, “no great joke is complete without sharing it to the internet,” Landsman says, and later that night, his tweeted gag went viral. By mid-January, he’d shipped off hundreds of shirts to eager buyers, a labor of love that prompted even more fan orders, proving the ad’s collective online grip. “That was a huge undertaking,” Landsman says. ”But I was happy to do it because people loved it.”
Since it debuted last September, the minute-long spot has sparked similar kinds of fanatical expressions—everything from loud cheers to unironic script recitations. And what started as an unlikely pitch from an Australian megastar has quickly become a pop-cultural artifact, taking on meme status and a cult reputation among the theater company’s loyal “A-list” subscribers.
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It’s all because of the way Kidman steps into a reflective puddle, pulls down her Jedi-like hood and smiles at a glowing marquee; how she struts through an empty auditorium to explain the “indescribable feeling we get when the lights begin to dim”; or the halo of light the projector casts around her enraptured face as she absorbs clips of Jurassic World and Wonder Woman. And then there’s the dramatic pause preceding her look right into the camera, as she intimately attests to the power of the theatrical experience. “I think she touched on a little piece of all our recollections and nostalgia of movies in a time when we’re all kind of weak and hadn’t been [to a theater] in so long,” says cinematographer and co-director of the spot Jeff Cronenweth.
Much of the campy magic is down to Kidman and her authentic memories of moviegoing, the former collaborators she pulled into the creative process, and the fervor of her fans, who have turned her glowing smile into an unabashed signifier of cinematic heaven. “I can’t tell you why it worked or why it’s gone viral,” Kidman wrote to GQ in an email. ”But what I can tell you is that the reaction is a direct result of the amount of people going back to theaters to enjoy the movies. And that is exciting.”
When AMC Chairman and CEO Adam Aron decided to advertise his own theater company, he knew he needed a major Hollywood star as his spokesperson. Kidman stood atop his list, and upon her agreement, the Oscar-winner immediately took part in the creative process. The ad agency’s initial static script had no directional cues beyond its PSA copy, so she suggested bringing in Jeff Cronenweth, who had recently wrapped filming with her on Being The Ricardos, to spice things up and direct with his brother and filming partner, Tim. They pitched Aron a more cinematic vision. “You want to make even a commercial into a movie,” Tim says. “So we had this challenge of honoring the integrity of the Nicole brand while trying to recreate the story.”
They storyboarded an ad that began outside the theater, transitioned inside and then ended in Kidman’s seat, “so now it made sense from an audience standpoint, and made sense for Nicole’s character to share her journey back to the movies,” Tim says. ” Kidman tapped writer Billy Ray to channel her voice and sync to the Cronenweths’ new vision. “The creative mindset was to remind myself of what it was that made me love going to movies in the first place—and the things that I missed most about them in the pandemic,” Ray says. “I wrote it in an hour, sent it off, they had a couple notes, they refined it, and off they went.”
The Cronenweths decided to shoot everything north of Los Angeles at AMC Porter Ranch, a modernized, community-oriented theater “that best represented where they want their theater chain to head,” Jeff says. Its unique, barn-like marquee invoked a mysterious allure, accentuating the choice to initially hide Kidman in a large, hooded cloak. “It’s a reveal that grabs hold of the audience, that shakes them to pay attention,” Tim says. Inside, they illuminated the atmosphere with particulates and built a platform for Kidman to sit on, raising her high enough to capture multi-colored light beams around her head. “She’s immersed in the projection of the movie,” Tim says. “It may just be an image for people, but we always try to find a deeper meaning.”
Kidman’s isolation in the theater was partly a COVID-related necessity, but Jeff felt it packed a more dramatic punch anyway. “You would have been distracted by so many faces and it would have been harder to focus directly on her,” Jeff says. “That experience you have with her is undeniable and I think that’s what makes it different.”
Near the end of the commercial, Kidman sits back in her chair while her hushed voiceover attempts to explain the pleasures of the theater. “Dazzling images on a huge silver screen, sound that I can feel,” she says, before making her boldest assertion: “Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.” It’s a melodramatic, hilarious, and honest earworm. “It’s totally immodest to say this, but that’s the best line I ever wrote,” Ray says. “No question.”
Indeed, the line has become synonymous with the commercial itself, capturing the essence of its goofy sincerity and unexpected sentimentality. It’s why Landsman chose to put it on his T-shirts, why Katya Zamolodchikova created an entire spoof of it, and why clumps of AMC crowds—specifically in L.A.—have responded with loud cheers upon its utterance. At a special screening of C’mon C’mon last month, development executive and producer Wes Ambrecht watched as dozens of cinephiles began reciting Kidman’s words in unison, as though he were “at a mass where they were saying a prayer,” he laughs. At a screening of The Batman, Ambrecht observed “a guy that legitimately stood up in an IMAX theater and tried to conduct the audience like he was Gustavo Dudamel” during the spot, he says.
Because the ad begins after 20 minutes of trailers, most ticket buyers have already taken their seats by the time it plays. At an AMC in Burbank, the AMC A-lister Clayton Walter remembers a couple taking advantage of their captive audience to hand out copies of Kidman’s script to the entire theater before a December screening of Red Rocket. “My first thought was that they were religious people who were handing out anti-porn material or something since Red Rocket is about a porn star,” Walter wrote in an email. “I almost cried when I saw it because it was so much better than I could’ve imagined.” When a woman stood up to start reciting, only to look around and see that no one had joined her, “It was honestly a bummer,” he says.
The ad reached its internet peak around the release of Spider-Man: No Way Home, thanks in large part to the anonymous comedy writer behind the Americana at Brand Memes Twitter account. As an AMC A-lister who has been repeatedly poking fun at the ad over its entire campaign, he remembers being tagged numerous times in late December after AMC swapped in a 30-second version that cut out the “heartbreak” line. As a joke response, he made a Change.org petition page, asking AMC to restore the original “Kidman Cut,” and quickly received more than 600 signatures in support. “I did not think more than five people would sign this thing. It really took off,” he says. Though Aron admits to replacing the original ad “because we didn’t want people to get tired of it,” he says, he was inspired by the petition and eventually returned the full spot to theaters. “We didn’t take that as criticism,” Aron says. “We took that as the highest form of flattery that we could possibly have imagined.”
Diehard fans will admit that the commercial’s strange power mostly rests on the contradiction of seeing Kidman dressed up in a sparkly blue, pinstriped outfit inside a national theater chain. It’s “so absurd to imagine her going into an AMC to watch a new Jurassic World movie,” notes Walter, citing the “high camp” of the presentation.The roller-coaster response (which has included fans faux-campaigning to nominate Kidman for another Oscar) has overwhelmed its creators, who couldn’t have imagined the in-person and online engagement the ad has received. “It’s very, very weird, but in the greatest possible way,” Ray says. “When you sit down to do something like this, you just don’t think it’s going to be seen by hundreds of millions of people. You don’t know that it’s going to catch fire.”
Of course, the point of the whole thing is to get people back in movie seats, an experience which many movie-lovers fear is on the way out. Whether it works or not is hard to say at this point, but Landsman feels that the ad “did serve its intended purpose of creating this sense of unification of being back at the movies. It’s this shared inside joke that we’re together. It’s a wonderful energy wave that you feel being in a theater again.”
The commercial is due to run at least through the end of August, when AMC’s contract expires with Kidman. However, Aron hopes to sit down with the actress later this spring “to talk about if we all want to let these commercials run for another year, or maybe film some new ones,” he says, “but it’s hard to imagine we could top this.”
Indeed, it continues to inspire moviegoers in unexpected ways. Last month, L.A.-based high school teacher Lauren Hussey, another A-list subscriber, convinced her friend to take a 30-minute “pilgrimage” to Porter Ranch to recreate Kidman’s footsteps. “I made a joke like, ‘We have to go, we have to honor Nicole and the commercial that we love so much,’” she says. Before reciting Kidman’s lines inside her specific auditorium, she stopped in its numbered hallway to grab a photo and imitate a shot from the ad.
“I’m sure people thought we were ridiculous: ‘Why are they taking a picture in the hallway?’” Hussey says. “We were like, We’re here in the spot where it was made! That kind of stuff was exciting.”