Last night we were able to shift gears a bit and hang out with Jonathan Fong, founder of Cyclonemovies.com. Cyclone Movies if you don’t already know, is a Sacramento based company that provides and promotes special movie screenings that covers a large area of Northern California. But it wasn’t always that way…
Jon started about two years ago. He first promoted Cyclone Movies out of a yogurt shop in Sacramento. His first movie was, “Shorts”. Since then, he quickly acquired more studio contacts beneath his belt and left the yogurt shop (which I’ve been told is out of business). I believe Jon’s reason and rapid growth for success, besides having a great personality, is his acknowledgement that the screening industry in general was boring. Instead of the “traditional” call in to a radio station or “waiting” online on certain websites for free screening passes Jon has taken an old formula and rewrote it. Cyclonemovies.com’s site is easy to navigate and selecting free screenings is very simple. After you choose your movie, you’re asked to answer a trivia question in order to enter a chance to win forcing you to actually do some research online to find the answer, for me this was pretty entertaining.
Play nice.
After speaking with Jon before the screening of Sucker Punch, he told me several stories where shenanigans were involved in the free screening applications, duplicates, 10 people in a row with the same last name, and “copy & pasters” to name a few. Even a story of a time where the trivia question on the site was true or false. The person put “Answer” in the answer field. Heaven forbid that Jon wants to encourage the masses to think. Shame on you!
TLH had the pleasure of attending the screening of Zach Snyder’s Sucker Punch last night. I never knew that screening companies had “groupies.” Good job brother, Team LoveHATE needs a few of those. Cyclone Movies’ “STREET TEAM”, Jeremy and Allen, the one’s I met, were both very kind and helpful. I watched them maintain crowd control and they all did their part to keep the spirits of the general audience happy. As the night neared, I went outside to see a line that wrapped around the side of the theatre and down past a few shops. Surprisingly, no complaints emanated from the line as the rain continued its drizzle.
Once we were inside the theatre, I watched Jon setup his table with all the promo items from the studio and get ready for the crowd. Once the general public came in Cyclone Movies provided a card game called high/low for anyone to play. If you guess 6 times correct you got a bag or could go on. 8 correct guesses got you a Sucker Punch t-shirt, 10 got you a New Era Sucker Punch hat. Then Jeremy of the “Street Team” did a raffle from some Source Code screening passes and did a trivia question for 1 free pass to Decepti-kon!!!
I’ve been to a few movie screenings and Jonathan Fong’s CycloneMovies.com is truly a breathe of fresh air in an otherwise robotic and stagnant industry. Our hats off to you.
- Posted by Jazel Gonzalez
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