SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from A24’s “The Drama,” now playing in theaters.
Last Thursday night, Zendaya glided onto the black carpet at Regal Union Square in New York City wearing a strapless black-and-blue feathered Schiaparelli ballgown. Fresh off the runway from the fashion house’s spring 2026 collection, the striking look marked the culmination of her wedding-coded wardrobe for “The Drama” press tour with “something blue.”
“I was brainstorming with [stylist Law Roach] about how I would theme dress for this film, and I remembered the saying, ‘Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,’” Zendaya told Variety’s Marc Malkin in March at the A24 movie’s world premiere in Los Angeles, where she recycled the white Vivienne Westwood gown she first wore to the 2015 Oscars.
For the Paris premiere a week later, Zendaya donned “something new” — a silk crème dress with a long, black bow and train, custom-designed by Louis Vuitton. For the Rome screening, two-time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett loaned Zendaya a black Armani Privé gown, with its plunging embellished neckline, from her personal archive — “something borrowed.”
Fashion fans noted how the looks transitioned from light to dark, mirroring the trajectory of the film, a dark rom-com from director Kristoffer Borgli (“Dream Scenario”).
“There’s something compelling about the suggestion of darkness gradually encroaching upon and consuming the being,” one user wrote on X. “Even the first makeup look being more angelic, as if it exists just before the descent begins.”
This level of attention to fashion detail is expected from Zendaya — as the actress and Roach popularized the concept of method dressing for the red carpet — but A24’s matrimony-focused promotional strategy multiplied that idea exponentially.
In “The Drama,” Zendaya and Robert Pattinson play Emma Harwood and Charlie Thompson, a couple navigating the stressful final days before their wedding. There are the usual dramas, like writing their vows, learning the choreography for the first dance and finalizing the menu.
At the tasting, the wine-drunk couple and their friends, Rachel and Mike (Alana Haim and Mamoudou Athie), play a game where they must confess the worst thing they’ve ever done. Everyone reveals something genuinely awful, but Emma’s secret is particularly haunting: as a shy and bullied teen, she’d planned a school shooting but didn’t see it through. Her fiancé and their friends are shocked by her admission, which jeopardizes the couple’s future marital bliss as Charlie struggles to reconcile that information with the woman he thought he knew.
A24’s campaign went to great lengths to conceal Emma’s secret, opting to advertise the existence of a dark twist without naming it outright. A24 did not respond to a request for comment.
Marketing efforts began, not with a trailer but a save-the-date. Last December, the studio planted a mock engagement announcement in the Boston Globe beside the paper’s romance advice column, Love Letters. There was no studio logo or promotional language on the ad, written in the style of a traditional society page with a candid photo of “Charlie” and “Emma” (sporting a massive diamond ring) — two invented people announcing their spring wedding, set for April 3, the film’s release date.
The following day, A24 dropped a teaser trailer that revealed the tense circumstances around this meant-to-be happy occasion. The clip showed the shocked aftermath of Emma’s revelation, as well as Emma wielding a knife and Charlie with a bloody nose.
Promotion for the film ramped up in earnest in February. Keeping with the love theme, on Valentine’s Day, A24 launched the website charlieandemmaforever.com, presenting itself as the official RSVP portal for Emma and Charlie, complete with engagement photographs, ceremony logistics and a travel guide to Boston (where the film is set. The website also featured a collaboration with Nuuly, a popular clothing rental website.
Then, the studio opened a one-day wedding chapel in Las Vegas, inviting lovebirds to get married “the A24 way.” Haim was the DJ while Zendaya made a surprise appearance to serve as a witness to the nuptials. There were also souvenirs on site, including “The Drama” hoodie, which features garbled text outlining the plot and a garish, oversized graphic of Pattinson as his “Twilight” character Edward Cullen alongside Zendaya from a “Challengers” red carpet.
A24
The film’s posters charted their own arc. Early versions of the one-sheet presented the couple warmly lit and mid-laugh. By the final image, that pretense was abandoned entirely, showing Pattinson battered, bloody and bruised while Zendaya looks on with something closer to irritation than concern. It looked less like a wedding announcement and more like two people gearing up for their mugshots.
Overall, though, the marketing and press tour largely focused on love-themed shtick, like having the cast give fans advice on navigating their real-life relationship troubles. Zendaya and Roach also surprised an unsuspecting bride by buying her a wedding dress. With gags like this, A24 wasn’t just inviting audiences to the wedding; the studio immersed moviegoers in the drama itself.
On one hand, the tailored campaign is masterful marketing. But given the storyline’s controversial nature and the fact that it was never named outright, was the promotion misleading? Moreover, would audiences even mind a touch of bait-and-switch?
the marketing becoming more sinister as the release date approaches and in turn mirroring charlie and emma’s story leading up to their wedding… genius https://t.co/1GKvH5rQ4W
— h ❀ (@AY0DAYA) March 20, 2026
It doesn’t seem so. The twisted romance tale grossed $14 million in its opening weekend domestically, a figure in line with movies that appealed to similar demographics, like A24’s “Materialists” ($11.3 million opening weekend) and Zendaya’s last film “Challengers” ($15 million). Variety’s Rebecca Rubin reports “The Drama” also launched overseas with $13.6 million for a global tally of $28 million, which is an impressive start for the R-rated movie, which carried a budget of around $28 million.
Russell Schwartz, associate professor of film and media arts at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts and a veteran entertainment marketing consultant, described the approach as a deliberate construction of anticipatory tension, one closer to Hitchcock than to a standard genre campaign.
“You’ve got to promise there’s some big secret that’s going to be revealed,” Schwartz says. “Otherwise, people think it’s just a regular romantic comedy, and you lose half your audience.”
Dr. Laurena Bernabo, assistant professor at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications, specializing in entertainment and media studies, described the technique as “purposefully incoherent.”
“It’s not like the whole ad sets it up as a light and fluffy rom-com, and then we’re going to be surprised when we get to the movie and suddenly it’s darker. The theatrical trailers are doing what they should do: They build that suspense,” Bernabo says. “But getting people happily married in Vegas is a little skewed. I’m not sure what it really accomplishes in terms of tapping into the larger themes of the film. That approach is more rom-com-esque and generic.”
It’s effective to “draw audiences into the lore” with marketing, Bernabo adds, but awareness of “The Drama” was aided by two coincidences. The movie is the first of three films this year pairing Zendaya and Pattinson (followed by “The Odyssey” and “Dune: Part Three”), plus Zendaya’s engagement to her “Spider-Man” co-star, Tom Holland, did half the work in captivating the pop culture-literate and chronically online crowd.
“In the context of this film, the fact that Zendaya is engaged to Tom Holland and there are all the rumors about their wedding amplifies that aspect,” she explains. “The lore of Zendaya and our love for her and interest in her nuptials can blend.”
The challenge for the studio was always going to be navigating around the film’s major twist. During an appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Zendaya told the late-night host that she hoped audiences would go in “unknowing and really experience the drama.” But Emma’s reveal circulated online ahead of the release, leaked through early screenings. At that point, containment was impossible, and criticism began to creep in.
Tom Mauser, whose son Daniel Mauser was killed in the 1999 Columbine massacre, publicly condemned the film, calling the twist “awful” and accusing it of humanizing school shooters. At least one critic published ahead of the embargo specifically to alert readers. Others wrote that A24 owed audiences an apology for not including a content warning and for failing to alert press to the subject matter before screenings. March for Our Lives, the youth-led organization focused on ending gun violence, posted a warning on social media and criticized the studio for not warning audiences.
“The way this film has been marketed is deeply misaligned with the reality it engages,” the statement from the organization reads. “We expect better from A24 and the artists behind it.”
That criticism fits a recent pattern of films marketed as romances with their heavier themes obscured. One example is Sony’s “It Ends With Us,” which was based on Colleen Hoover’s bestseller. The movie’s domestic violence storyline was promoted so lightly that survivors spoke out about being blindsided in the theater, generating a backlash that nearly overshadowed the film itself. To a lesser degree, A24’s “Materialists” was critiqued for not quite delivering on the rom-com tropes the promotional materials played into; the film also included a sexual assault storyline. (Both “It Ends With Us” and “Materialists” were particularly successful at the box office, grossing $351 million and $107 million, respectively).
Schwartz suggested the controversy surrounding “The Drama” was inevitable. “I don’t know any other way they could have done it,” he says. “When a film is deliberately marketed around a secret, the backlash that follows its reveal becomes part of the conversation, and conversation, at this stage of a release, is indistinguishable from publicity. Word of mouth becomes the campaign.”
Plus, Zendaya and Pattinson’s general goodwill cannot be denied. “These two are so likable, they’ll probably get a much more positive reaction even if the movie doesn’t live up to expectations,” Schwartz adds.
Indeed, Bernabo says her students — whom she planned to take on a field trip to see the movie — were eager to see two of their favorite stars paired up on the big screen in an off-kilter story.
“This generation seems to have a lot of faith in A24,” she says. “I think the gamble is presenting this generation, that has grown up with school shootings, with having their beloved Zendaya be the one who was plotting something out. I’m curious to see how many students RSVP.”
