Test Screenings, Premieres and Press Junkets: Stopping the Leak Before the Release Date

A test screening is the most dangerous room a film ever plays in. The cut is not locked, the effects are not finished, the score is temporary, and the audience is a few hundred strangers recruited off a list. If forty seconds of an unfinished VFX shot gets out, it will be judged as if it were the finished film, and the discourse will be set months before anyone in marketing gets to say a word.

Premieres and press junkets carry a different version of the same risk. The embargo is the strategy. Everyone in the room has agreed to it and most of them will honour it, but agreement is not enforcement, and it only takes one person deciding that a clip is worth more than their invitation.

A phone-free film screening handled by Before the Internet works the same way at a hundred-seat research screening and a thousand-seat premiere. Guests seal their own phone in a lockable phone pouch on the way in, the pouch stays with them, and unlocking bases sit at the exits so the room clears quickly at the end. Because nothing is collected, there is no cloakroom, no chain of custody, and no queue of people arguing with a junior publicist about where their phone went.

For an unfinished cut, most distributors take the Fully Sealed pouch, because the screen itself needs to be unreachable for the full running time. For a premiere with a red carpet, the Semi-Frosted pouch is usually the better call: guests can still take a call or pay at the bar, while both camera lenses stay covered from the moment the lights go down.

Written by the team at Before The Internet, a Toronto-based phone-free event company renting lockable phone pouches across North America.