Coming 2 America Social Rollout
I served as lead creative director (copy) with 22Squared for the social-first launch of Coming 2 America — Amazon Prime Video's biggest bet of the pandemic era, after acquiring the film from Paramount for $125 million. Thirty-three years after the original became one of the most beloved films in Black culture, the assignment wasn't awareness. It was homecoming: activating a fanbase that had spent three decades quoting Zamunda.
The results made streaming history. Coming 2 America was the #1 streamed movie of its opening weekend and the #1 opening weekend of any streaming movie in the previous 12 months, per Screen Engine/ASI. The film drew 1.413 billion minutes of viewing in its debut week per Nielsen — topping every show and movie on major streaming services and handing Prime Video its first-ever #1 on Nielsen's streaming rankings. On social, it was the most talked-about movie released in 2021 on Twitter per ListenFirst Media, trending nationally across multiple conversation threads with posts from LeBron James, Regina King, Chance The Rapper, Alicia Keys, and Snoop Dogg.
At the center of the campaign was the Zamunda Royals account — a social presence run in-world, treating the kingdom as a real place with a real royal family returning to the spotlight. The work treated the original film's iconography as shared cultural property, amplifying infomercial-style content built around At the center of the campaign was the Zamunda Royals account — a social presence run in-world, treating the kingdom as a real place with a real royal family returning to the spotlight. The work treated the original film's iconography as shared cultural property, amplifying infomercial-style content built around Soul Glo, Randy Watson and Sexual Chocolate, and the My-T-Sharp Barbershop — social-native creative designed to be passed around, not just watched. As the campaign scaled, the account became the connective tissue for the launch's physical footprint, promoting a reimagined fleet of Amazon delivery vehicles, trucks, and a Prime cargo airplane across key U.S. markets, plus theatrical releases in Nigeria and South Africa — where the film opened at #1 in both countries, marking Nigeria's biggest March opening since Black Panther in 2018.,
