'Serenity': Nine minutes of brilliant marketing

This is some really clever marketing... if you're not one of the hard-core fans of the TV show "Firefly," you may not have rushed out last weekend to see the movie based on the series, "Serenity." (The movie has grossed about $12 million so far.) So Universal Pictures, as an overture to non-converts who may nonetheless enjoy the flick, has made the film's first nine minutes available on the Net.

ComingSoon.net has a short post about it; you can watch the opening sequence here. On my Mac, it streamed beautifully at full-screen size when I clicked the link for the highest quality.

Here's another link about Universal's campaign to get bloggers talking about "Serenity." Shankar Gupta observes that the movie "Flightplan" beat out "Serenity," in terms of box office, but the latter film has been generating more buzz in the blogosphere.

As of Thursday afternoon, a Technorati search on the phrase "Serenity movie" returned almost 14,000 blog posts, compared to 1,538 posts returned on the phrase "Flightplan movie." The two films opened on the same date last week.

Intelliseek's BlogPulse also revealed a massive spike in blog discussions that peaked on Oct. 1--the day after the movie's official release--with 1.067 percent of the blogosphere buzzing about "Serenity," compared to the .054 percent buzzing about "Flightplan."