Nick Temple ’99, Founder of Wild Card
We live in the golden age of the movie trailer, where every tiny revelation of a would-be blockbuster has the potential to go viral. That first teaser for Star Wars: The Force Awakens? Forty million views in just three days. And when the trailer for Deadpool debuted on Conan, Ryan Reynolds’ potty-mouthed mercenary character rode the ensuing buzz to a $132-million opening in February, a record for an R-rated film.
Last winter, another movie about a uniformed marksman—American Sniper, starring Bradley Cooper as real-life Navy SEAL Chris Kyle—became every studio executive’s dream: a “four-quadrant film” that connects with men, women, and the over- and under-25 audience, boosted by an edge-of-your-seat trailer. “They didn’t sell it as a war movie,” says Nick Temple ’99. “They sold it as a story about a man in an incredibly difficult situation.”
Temple’s advertising agency, Wild Card, worked on the campaigns for both American Sniper and Deadpool—as well as The Martian, Jurassic World, Black Mass, and a host of forthcoming releases that barely fits on a single whiteboard in his Culver City, California, office. By his measure, there are as many as 70 trailer shops in the business, but maybe seven “wind up doing the lion’s share of the big movies”—Wild Card among them.
Growing up in Chatham, New Jersey, the U.K.-born Temple majored in German with a minor in film studies at Middlebury. He got his first exposure to feature filmmaking through an internship on the Rutland set of Icebreaker (basically Die Hard at a ski lodge). Temple shot some short films on video for his classes, a process he found enjoyable, “but ultimately what I loved was the editing and assembly of it.”
After college, Temple drove across the country with a friend, picked up some odd jobs with film crews around Los Angeles, and finally scored steady work at a postproduction house in Burbank. “I took a job running tapes around town—you get the lay of the land that way,” he recalls. “And at night I was bothering people in their edit bays.”
In short order, Temple went from runner to managing runners to assistant editor to junior editor. He jumped over to Trailer Park, the world’s largest entertainment marketing agency, as an editor in 2003, and there his career took flight. Temple cut a Super Bowl commercial for Steven Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds starring Tom Cruise, which spawned ongoing relationships with both Spielberg (he’s worked on all of his films ever since) and Cruise (most notably the Mission: Impossible franchise). And the connections “tree-branched out from there,” says Temple, who got the entrepreneurial bug in 2007.
Wild Card was founded as an LLC with two partners, a couple of edit bays, and 1,400 square feet of office space in Burbank. (Temple later bought out his partners and is now the company’s sole owner.) Since moving to a 7,500-square-foot office in Culver City in 2010, Wild Card has nearly tripled its space and quintupled its staff. “There’s a threshold: how do you sustain a creative culture without compromising your work?” says Temple, who still cuts anywhere from five to eight trailers a year himself.
Just a few short years ago, a brilliant marketing campaign would guarantee a solid opening weekend for even a stinker but now, with social media, if a movie is bad, the word gets out after Friday’s matinees. Conversely, positive word of mouth can propel a hit like The Martian to a final gross of $228 million domestically—four times its opening weekend numbers.
But it all starts with that first impression of the trailer. Temple still likes to get out to the multiplex with his wife, Alison. “When we used to go to the movies I’d want to watch all the trailers and gauge people’s reactions,” Temple says. “Now with two girls, ages three and five, we’re lucky if we get to the theater on time. And more often than not, it’s Alvin and the Chipmunks.”