After reading some reactions to the Lights Out trailer, Owen ended up looking at a couple of memes that had nothing to do with it.
After scrolling for an indeterminate amount of time, he locked his phone and got to his feet.
'I'll go bother her a little,' he thought with a faint smile.
He was already completely ready. White T-shirt, black blazer, and dark pants. The blazer gave him a somewhat more formal or business-like appearance, though without a shirt and tie, the outfit still felt fairly relaxed.
With his new mission in mind, he headed toward the master bedroom, crossing the spacious room at an easy pace. Beside the floor-to-ceiling windows that flooded the room with the last traces of afternoon light, a short hallway led directly into the walk-in closet.
Owen moved forward unhurriedly. The dressing room was a display of shelves reaching all the way to the ceiling, built-in drawers, clothing racks packed with outfits, and perfectly aligned rows of shoes and accessories. At the end of the corridor, a solid wooden door connected directly to the en-suite bathroom.
Owen walked up to it and stopped. Through the wood, not only could he hear the steady patter of water striking the tiles, but also a melody. Jenna had a habit of listening to music while she showered.
'Is she still showering?' Owen thought, furrowing his brows slightly.
He stopped hesitating and knocked on the door several times with his knuckles, insistently. "Ma'am, hurry up!" he called out, raising his voice.
A response came from inside, but the echo of the water and the rhythm of the song rendered Jenna's words completely unintelligible. Without thinking much about it, Owen turned the doorknob, opened the door slightly, and poked his head inside.
The bathroom was spacious and modern, featuring a double vanity, a huge mirror surrounded by LED lights, and a private toilet area. At the back, the enormous glass-enclosed shower was completely fogged up, trapping a dense cloud of steam that was already beginning to spill into the dressing room.
"What did you say? Speak louder!" Owen said, staring at the blurry silhouette behind the glass.
The shower door slid open a few inches, and Jenna's head emerged through the haze, wearing an expression somewhere between amused and resigned.
"Don't bother me. I don't bother you when you're showering," she said, her soaked hair.
"That's because I do it quickly," Owen replied.
Jenna let out a soft laugh, not bothering to deny the accusation, and asked, "What time is it, Mr. Impatient?"
Owen raised his left wrist to check his watch. "Almost six-thirty."
Jenna huffed, letting out a sigh that dispersed some of the steam around her. "Don't be so anxious. Your mother said seven-thirty. It's Friday, let me shower in peace... or join me."
Owen fell silent for a second, processing the suggestion. The offer was extremely tempting, and the mere idea of taking her up on it already sounded appealing, but he glanced down at his clothes: he was already showered, groomed, and fully dressed.
"I can't, I'm already ready," he replied with a mixture of regret and amusement, before realizing what she had said. "And wait, did you say seven-thirty? You're wrong. Dinner's at seven."
"No, seven-thirty, sir," Jenna said, shaking her head. "Check your mother's messages."
Owen opened his mouth, ready to argue that he was absolutely certain it was at seven, but Jenna beat him to it with a faintly competitive smile.
"If you want, we can bet on it."
The moment he heard the word "bet," Owen closed his mouth. Knowing she was rarely wrong about details like that, he decided not to risk it. Muttering something unintelligible that sounded like grumbling to Jenna, he turned around and walked out of the bathroom.
Back in the bedroom, Owen pulled his phone out of his pocket to confirm the information. He opened his chat with his mother and there it was: dinner had been scheduled a little later than usual.
Since it was Friday, the family's plan was to stretch the evening past midnight and welcome his father's birthday right there with a toast.
That meant they weren't running late.
Owen put his phone away, dropped onto the bed on his back with his arms crossed behind his head, and stared up at the ceiling.
Several minutes later, he heard Jenna calling him from the bathroom.
"What is it?" Owen asked, sitting up and walking back toward the dressing room.
The bathroom door opened just a crack. "Could you hand me my dress?" Jenna asked from inside. To give him directions, she stuck out a damp hand and began gesturing vaguely. "It's over on the..."
But Owen had already found it. With a quick motion, he took the garment off the hanger and placed the metal hook directly against Jenna's fingers. Her hand paused in the air, felt around for the hanger, and immediately pulled the door shut again.
Instead of walking away, Owen decided to get ahead of the next request.
He approached the central island of the walk-in closet, where Jenna usually left her accessories preselected in a small crystal jewelry box. His eyes landed on a specific pair of earrings, and he picked them up. Then he stood beside the door and waited with his arms crossed.
Two seconds later, the door cracked open again. Jenna's voice came out along with a stream of steam.
"And, um, my earrings... those little moon ones..."
She was already extending her hand to receive them, but she didn't even finish the sentence before Owen dropped the tiny moon-shaped earrings directly into the center of her palm.
The door closed for a moment, only to swing open again three seconds later.
"And could you get me my little ankle bracelet? The one you gave me—"
Owen didn't let her finish. He placed the ankle bracelet into Jenna's fingers.
This time, Jenna didn't just stick out her hand. She poked half her head out through the doorway, staring at him with pleasant surprise at the speed.
"Thanks..." she murmured with a faint smile.
Owen merely shrugged and headed back into the bedroom when it became clear there was nothing else she needed.
Jenna wasn't far behind.
She crossed the room with a light step and sat down in front of the vanity, settling onto the cushioned stool. In front of the large illuminated mirror, she laid out her cosmetics and began applying her makeup.
Owen, meanwhile, sat right on the edge of the bed, crossed his legs, and himself entirely to silently watching her.
Noticing the intensity of his stare in the mirror's reflection, Jenna tilted her head with an amused smile without interrupting the eyeliner she was applying.
"What is it? Are you going to complain that now I take forever with makeup too?" she asked teasingly, searching for his eyes through the mirror.
"No, not at all," Owen replied, resting his elbow on his knee and his chin in the palm of his hand. "I'm just watching."
Jenna liked that answer. Secretly pleased to have his full attention, she continued applying her makeup. After a few seconds of silence, she asked, "Since you had so much free time to procrastinate, what were you doing? Or did you just spend the whole time scrolling through TikTok and frying your brain?"
"That one," Owen admitted, and Jenna laughed softly.
That was simply how the app was designed. And no matter how much of a workaholic and indie genius he was, he too could spend an eternity swiping through videos while the algorithm fed him things he liked.
"But it made me want to upload short videos," he added.
Jenna stopped her brush midway and looked at him again through the mirror.
"Like an influencer?" she asked curiously, suddenly imagining him inside the ecosystem of Instagram Reels and TikTok.
"I wouldn't use that word," Owen said, unsure of how to describe it specifically.
Owen thought the industry wasn't taking full advantage of the internet.
Social media in Hollywood was used for a cold marketing strategy. With constant fear of saying something that could be misinterpreted because of cancel culture.
Figures like Timothée Chalamet, Austin Butler, and others had their social media locked down and managed by public relations teams. The same was true for Tom Holland, Zendaya, The Rock, Jenna herself, and most famous actors and actresses.
Every post on their profiles was carefully planned: red carpet photos, official trailers, luxury brand campaigns, and pictures when filming wrapped.
Others simply deleted the apps altogether to protect their mental health or because of the paralyzing fear of making a mistake with a single poorly worded comment.
Of course, there were younger actors from popular TV shows who occasionally filmed a TikTok following a trend or using a viral audio clip, but it generally aligned with a marketing strategy.
Then there were cases like Jack Black or Ryan Reynolds, who squeezed every ounce of value out of the platforms, but even that was marketing designed by an advertising agency working behind the scenes.
Owen had seen firsthand that genuinely connecting with an audience on the internet held tremendous power. He only had to look at his own vlogs.
When he uploaded videos of his experiences at Cannes, Sundance, and the Oscars, showing in a close way how he navigated that film world alongside Matt, Tyler, and the rest of the group, the metrics exploded.
Each vlog averaged more than fifty million views. People loved the group's natural chemistry, the inside jokes, and the sense of closeness.
Because of that, when he uploaded the Lights Out trailer today, it managed to pull in eight million views in just over six hours.
You could say there were two types of marketing for a movie.
On one hand, there was Release Marketing, known as P&A, the type everyone paid attention to when reading in the press that a blockbuster had cost one hundred million dollars to make and another eighty million dollars to promote.
This massive expense was concentrated in the final two to four months before release and was usually covered by the distributor, often matching or even exceeding the original production budget.
On the other hand, there was Development Marketing.
This began much earlier and aimed to put the project on the map: announcing casting decisions, leaking subtle set photos, showing behind-the-scenes footage, and planting stories in outlets such as Variety or The Hollywood Reporter.
This stage was usually paid for by the studio financing the film, which was why production companies maintained publicity departments dedicated exclusively to shaping public perception of the movie from its very conception.
Owen didn't have that in his production company.
He didn't need it.
He had simply pressed the upload button on his channel, and the impact he achieved for a movie that had cost six million dollars, a low budget by Hollywood standards, was already colossal.
To put it into perspective, the trailer Blumhouse had uploaded to its official YouTube channel for a massive franchise like Halloween Ends had barely scraped together five hundred thousand views after an entire year on the platform.
Owen, with a single post and without spending a cent on advertising, had surpassed them in a matter of hours.
With that level of traction, combined with the positive reception the trailer was receiving, the odds of Lights Out becoming a commercial success were practically guaranteed.
The real question was no longer whether it would recoup its investment, but how much money it would make at the box office and how many times it would multiply its budget.
All of this made him think that maybe the internet was the answer to reviving the dying concept of Star Power.
Decades ago, Star Power had been an infallible asset: the ability of a top-tier actor to draw audiences into theaters and guarantee commercial success through the weight of their name alone on the poster.
If Will Smith, Brad Pitt, or Leonardo DiCaprio starred in a movie, it was going to be a box office smash, regardless of whether the script was bad.
Nowadays, that no longer existed.
The modern box office was filled with spectacular failures starring all-star casts.
Today's audiences were no longer loyal to names, they were more loyal to intellectual property, to franchises.
And even that loyalty was beginning to wobble dangerously, as demonstrated by the obvious superhero fatigue affecting giants like Marvel and DC.
That wasn't to say that Tier A stars didn't still retain millions of fans who helped push ticket sales, but they no longer possessed that mythological force from the past, capable of saving a movie from commercial collapse if the marketing failed or if social media word-of-mouth turned negative.
The problem was that the internet had a short memory.
The platforms were insatiable monsters that punished anyone who posted sporadically with obscurity. If too much time passed between one piece of content and the next, the algorithm buried you.
That was why he needed to stay active.
On the Second Take Films channel, he couldn't limit himself to uploading trailers. That would make the account predictable and boring, and people wouldn't get excited when a new video notification appeared, wondering if it might be a fun vlog or a short film.
So he needed to keep making festival vlogs, the nearest one being Fantastic Fest, or other types of vlogs. He also needed to continue uploading high-quality short films.
But a short film took more than a month of work. And a festival vlog took just as long.
So one solution was to stay active on his personal social media accounts, such as Instagram, where he currently had more than 17.5 million followers.
Back in June, just before the release of Good Will Hunting, Owen had been sitting at around 12 million. Now, barely a month and a half later, with the film having grossed more than 230 million dollars at the box office, his follower count had exploded, gaining more than 5 million new users.
Owen laid out this entire analysis to Jenna, linking one thought after another. She continued applying her makeup calmly, enjoying the extra time and listening attentively as her boyfriend went off on tangents.
"Either way, I'm not going to become some TikToker who does ridiculous dances or jumps on trends with whatever viral audio is popular that week," Owen clarified. "My idea is to make something like ultra-short films. Comedy or suspense sketches that are at most two minutes long, but filmed with the production quality of a movie."
After all, even if a reel creator made one-minute videos for a phone screen, at its core it was still a micro-script, and a script nonetheless.
Jenna set her brush down on the vanity, subtly turned on the stool, and looked directly at him. A faint smile, somewhere between amusement and amazement, formed on her lips, "Your hyperactive mind never ceases to surprise me."
Instead of passively procrastinating, Owen had been analyzing the reels interface and studying the market as if he were preparing a business plan.
Owen wrinkled his nose and narrowed his eyes, pretending to be offended by the label of "hyperactive."
However, Jenna didn't give him a chance to protest and continued speaking.
"It's a compliment, don't make that face. And don't even bother denying it, you already have a thousand projects running at the same time. Two episodes of a series about to start filming, your revenge against DC with Chronicle, the release of Lights Out getting closer every day, your next short film, and now you want to add filming weekly reels to the list?"
Owen closed his mouth and remained silent, swallowing his rebuttal. She had a point. His schedule was already packed.
"So? Do you already have an idea for your grand debut as an Instagrammer?" Jenna asked, arching an eyebrow.
"Yeah, I have a few," Owen replied, choosing not to elaborate in order to preserve the mystery.
In reality, the main idea was already perfectly mapped out in his head: the first short video he planned to use to break the algorithm was a micro adaptation of one of his favorite comedies from his past life, Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
In this universe, the series didn't exist, and while Owen would have loved to produce all eight seasons, launching a project like that would take far too much time and money.
So he had decided to extract self-contained comedic sketches from the show and upload them as standalone clips, with no need for any additional context.
The segment he chose was undoubtedly one of the most famous: the iconic "I Want It That Way" scene.
In it, Jake, the protagonist, turns a tense police lineup into a Backstreet Boys a cappella performance, forcing the suspects to sing the melody so that the witness can identify the voice of her brother's killer.
There was no need to explain who the character was or which precinct he worked in.
Owen would play Jake, and the audience would immediately understand the setup from the set design alone.
But what excited him most was the acting opportunity.
He could do comedy.
It was an acting side of himself that he hadn't had the chance to show yet, having been typecast so far in more serious and prestigious roles.
Jenna nodded, letting out a quiet laugh before turning her attention back to her reflection. She almost felt a little sorry for traditional content creators who made their living uploading short videos to the platform.
"And I also have another vlog for Second Take Films on the way," Owen added, steering the conversation in a different direction.
He knew perfectly well that if he sat around waiting for Fantastic Fest or for the release of his next short film, which he hadn't even decided on yet, it would take far too long before he uploaded something to his channel.
That was why he already had an intermediate piece of content planned, something that could go live this very month.
"And you can be part of it," he added, pointing at her with his finger.
"Oh, interesting... What's it about?" Jenna asked.
"Going to the Oppenheimer premiere this Monday in New York," Owen replied with a smile.
Jenna recognized the project instantly.
It was Christopher Nolan's new and ambitious film, a historical blockbuster about the father of the atomic bomb, featuring an all-star cast: Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Matt Damon, and Emily Blunt. A true cinematic event that everyone was already talking about.
Owen began explaining the details of the plan. Thanks to his current status in the industry, getting passes hadn't been difficult.
The event would take place at the legendary AMC Lincoln Square 13 in Manhattan, the temple of the IMAX format. They would walk the red carpet, see Nolan and the entire cast up close, and mingle with the Tier A guests attending the event.
"The idea of the vlog is to show the entire trip," Owen explained enthusiastically. "From us leaving LA to arriving in New York, the hotel, getting ready beforehand, maybe a bit of sightseeing, the red carpet, our reactions when we leave the theater, all that stuff..."
For the mass internet audience, it wouldn't just be a movie video, it would be an intimate look, almost a public date, into the lives of one of Hollywood's most talked-about couples.
Jenna remained thoughtful for a few moments. The proposal was extremely tempting. The idea of sneaking away to New York alone for two or three days to attend such a major film event sounded like a great plan.
Although she had never been particularly fond of having a camera turned on and documenting large portions of her private life, she had participated in Owen's vlogs before, and the truth was that she ended up enjoying it.
Besides, the reach and genuine connection they achieved with the audience were enormous. A video centered on the two of them at an event of that magnitude would shatter the view counter, collecting tens of millions of views while naturally strengthening her own fanbase.
"I'm in," Jenna finally said.
Owen leaned back a little farther on the bed, satisfied with the outcome.
"Great."
"And tell me, if I had said no, what were you going to do?" Jenna asked, genuinely curious about the backup plan.
"I would've invited Matt," Owen replied. "It would've been a vlog much more focused on bromance and cinema, with Matt compulsively and hyperactively analyzing every aspect of the movie and Nolan's direction."
The video with Matt would have been a tremendous success anyway, considering it was still the premiere of one of the most important films of the year.
But it was obvious the impact would be smaller than if Jenna appeared and their relationship was showcased in such a glamorous setting.
"Now I feel a little bad for taking that opportunity away from him," Jenna murmured with fake guilt.
The mere thought of having that two-day New York getaway with Owen to herself already ranked as the best plan of her entire week. She wasn't giving that spot to Matt for anything in the world.
At last, they were ready to head to Owen's parents' house.
Jenna stepped into the elevator first, adjusting the strap of her purse on her shoulder while carefully holding the wrapped gift she had prepared for Edward.
"I have some news too," Jenna said casually as Owen stepped in behind her.
"What is it?" he asked, reaching out to press the button for the ground floor.
"I think we should move in together and find a new place," Jenna replied, delivering the news with astonishing calm, as though she were commenting on the weather forecast.
'What?' was all Owen's mind managed to process.
Before Owen could make a single sound, the elevator's metal doors began closing in front of them.