Simple Fixes for Friendship

Plugging the leaky bucket for the new A24 comedy movie.

Hello and welcome to the 6 new subscribers since my last email, where I discussed Emily Wilson’s comedy special release on both YouTube and TikTok. Today, I want to share some simple strategies for Friendship. No, I’m not talking about taking Improv 101 at UCB, or joining a West Side Highway run club, I’m referring to the new A24 comedy film starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd, written and directed by Andrew DeYoung. I saw it in theaters the other night, and figured this would be a timely moment to talk about their digital funnel.

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As I found my seat on Tuesday night, I couldn’t help but dissociate for a bit. I had the harrowing thought that everyone at the Angelika Film Center in NoHo essentially functioned as the Bushwick branch of Jerry’s at the Jerryboree in Rick & Morty, simultaneously lamenting how the factory tint setting is always too high on the TV.

Yes, we all mustered a knowing laughter of recognition when Conner O’Malley entered Craig’s garage, and yes, we’re caught up on The Rehearsal.

I’m not going to bore you with my personal review of the film, because ultimately all I ever want to know about a new movie is, Was it worth seeing?

The answer is a resounding “Yes” from me, and you can file this one next to Due Date, I Love You Man, and The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret. On to the socials.

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The movie’s Instagram account, @friendshipmovie, has 12.6K followers at the time of writing this, and links to tickets.friendship.movie in their bio:

Here’s what that site looks like on my end:

It’s pretty frictionless, intuitive, and mobile friendly.

The Instagram account only follows three accounts, Tim Robinson, A24, and Andrew DeYoung, the movie’s writer and director¹.

Robinson’s bio and link are currently empty:

I would add that same tickets.friendship.movie link and a simple, voice-aligned sentence above it to communicate that the movie is out now.

DeYoung’s bio links to a trailer for the film on A24’s YouTube Page:

I would change this to “out NOW” with that same tickets.friendship.movie link.

Here’s where that link goes to:

The trailer has over 5.5 million views at the time of writing this, but its video description is littered with a series of bit.ly URLs that implore the viewer to subscribe to the A24 YouTube channel², and to follow FRIENDSHIP on other social media platforms:

Here’s where each of the three FRIENDSHIP bit.ly links led me:

“Follow FRIENDSHIP on X”

I experienced similar landing pages on both desktop and mobile.

“Follow FRIENDSHIP on INSTAGRAM”

This happened after multiple refreshes, for the record.

“Like FRIENDSHIP on FACEBOOK”

Uhhhhhh…

So I probably would remove those for a variety of reasons, and replace them all with tickets.friendship.movie.

And don’t get me started on the rest of the video description:

@Whoever runs A24 social, I would seriously consider removing all of these bit.ly URLs across all your YouTube videos in one fell swoop. It is entirely possible they are downloading malware and viruses to your millions of fans.

Bit.ly in general feels like such a 2016 move. If it’s for tracking purposes, basically any website’s backend analytics can effectively monitor traffic source at this point. And if you absolutely must plug these other social channels, then embedded social links on a YouTube video description are far more functional and easier on the eyes in 2025.

But who cares if they follow the Twitter account? Isn’t the best case scenario for this YouTube trailer that some of the people who watch it, buy tickets to see the movie?

Why is there no bit.ly to do that?

Instead, the most likely outcome will be tens of thousands of people typing “Friendship movie tickets” into Google, wrongly prescribing a traffic source of “direct search” to all the people who came from the YouTube trailer, which defeats the whole purpose of setting up all those trackable URLs in the first place.

I do find it strange that the movie has a X account with 70 followers, and a Facebook page with 320 likes, but no presence on TikTok, a video-first medium where it would be significantly easier to grow, post trailers, clips, set up paid promotion, and so on.

They likely set up a Business account to run paid spend through, as the A24 account did upload a TikTok where they tagged an unclickable @Friendship Movie account in the caption, which you can see at the bottom of this screenshot:

I also got fed this alternate trailer for the movie that doesn’t exactly stick the landing, but does at least have a “Get showtimes” action button that leads to a similar version of the tickets.friendship.movie site, although it's through Fandango:

Now that the movie is playing beyond select theaters, I’d run paid ads of the full trailer – and several alternates – across every digital platform. I’d test and measure which versions create the highest CTR, and double down on what works.

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At a time when so much great comedy flies under the radar, Friendship is exactly the kind of movie you want people to experience in a packed audience, surrounded by their fellow Jerry’s.

But a well-made film and a broken digital funnel don’t cancel each other out, they just create missed opportunities.

1. (Paul Rudd does not have any social media, likely because he is smarter than the rest of us).

2. Directly below a big “Subscribe’ button, mind you.