How Leo Burnett Turned a Romantic Comedy Trailer Into a Theatre de la Bastille Manifesto
Edgar & Kelly is a December 2013 cinema advertising campaign created by Leo Burnett for Théâtre de la Bastille in France, distributed as a trailer inside mK2 cinemas across Paris, designed to reframe the theatre as an exciting alternative to predictable Christmas-season romantic films, according to Screendaily.
The campaign deploys a single film asset structured to deceive before it reveals. Audiences settling into their seats at mK2 venues across Paris encounter what appears to be a conventional romantic comedy trailer, complete with the genre's familiar emotional scaffolding. Edgar and Kelly are fictional characters introduced in the idiom of a Christmas date movie. Then the narrative pivots. The scenario shifts into an absurd, unexpected direction that is, by design, impossible to anticipate — mirroring the programming philosophy of Théâtre de la Bastille itself. The message lands without a lecture: if you crave the unpredictable, the theatre is waiting for you.
In France, the theatrical and live performance sector has historically relied on institutional support and word-of-mouth rather than interruptive advertising. Théâtre de la Bastille occupies a specific position within that landscape: a venue in eastern Paris known for contemporary and experimental performance that deliberately resists the mainstream. Placing an ad inside a cinema — the very environment it is competing against for leisure time — transforms the medium into the message. The mK2 network, itself associated with independent and art-house cinema in France, makes the placement strategically coherent rather than incongruous. Production was handled by Blue Film Production, with Antoine Grujard serving as TV producer through Prodigious, and the film was directed by Jean-Marc Gosse. The campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100.
Théâtre de la Bastille targets an audience that already attends cinema, according to Pt Slideshare. The strategic insight driving Edgar & Kelly is precise: the Christmas holiday period in France is dominated by romantic comedies and family blockbusters, and live theatre must compete for the same discretionary hours and euros, not simply for prestige but for actual attendance.
In France, the Ministry of Culture, as reported by Culture Gouv, consistently documents the concentration of cultural spending and attendance in Paris and the Île-de-France region, where venues like Théâtre de la Bastille draw the majority of their audiences. The December holiday window is among the most commercially intense periods for French leisure and entertainment, according to Insee. Against that backdrop, competitors for the evening's entertainment include not only mainstream multiplexes operated by chains such as Pathé and Gaumont — France's two dominant commercial cinema operators — but also streaming services and seasonal cultural programming on public broadcasters. Placing the Edgar & Kelly trailer inside mK2 cinemas reaches an audience already self-selected for cultural curiosity, making the ask to cross the street to a theatre far less of a leap.
The global live entertainment market provides useful context. According to News Pollstar, Pollstar reported more than 120 million tickets sold and over 7.3 billion dollars in gross sales across more than 41,000 shows in its 2013 database. While those figures are global and heavily weighted toward concert touring, they indicate the scale of audience appetite for live experience that theatrical venues like Théâtre de la Bastille are drawing from, particularly in a culturally dense urban market such as Paris. Leo Burnett's strategic logic treats cinema-going not as an enemy activity but as an adjacent habit — one that can be redirected rather than disrupted.
Jean-Marc Gosse directed the Edgar & Kelly film for Leo Burnett France. The creative team was led by executive creative director Xavier Beauregard, with art direction by Jérôme Gonfond and copywriting by Hadi Hassan-Helou. Production was executed by Blue Film Production, with Antoine Grujard producing through Prodigious.
The craft of Edgar & Kelly is inseparable from its strategic intent. Genre fluency is the primary creative tool. The film opens inside the visual and tonal grammar of a Christmas romantic comedy with enough fidelity to the form that audiences familiar with seasonal cinema — which is to say, nearly everyone in the mK2 seats — will read it without friction. Casting, colour palette, performance register and editing rhythm are calibrated to trigger recognition before subversion. Hadi Hassan-Helou's copywriting and Jérôme Gonfond's art direction together sustain the illusion long enough for the pivot to land with genuine surprise rather than telegraphed irony.
The choice of the cinema trailer as the executional format is itself a creative decision with layered meaning. A trailer is a promise about an experience. By building and then breaking that promise inside the genre most associated with Christmas leisure, the campaign enacts the theatre's own programming logic — the idea that Théâtre de la Bastille offers something the audience cannot fully anticipate. Xavier Beauregard's creative direction ensures the film functions both as advertisement and as demonstration. The single media asset is efficient because it needs to be: a cinema trailer slot is brief, and the campaign carries no supplementary media to reinforce its argument. The film must earn its point in one pass, which places considerable pressure on the writing and the direction to execute the tonal shift cleanly.
No verified performance data for Edgar & Kelly is publicly available. Attendance figures, ticket sales uplifts, and audience recall metrics from the December 2013 campaign have not been published by Théâtre de la Bastille, Leo Burnett, or Blue Film Production, and no industry body in France has documented outcomes specific to this activation.
Structural analysis offers a reasonable proxy for effectiveness. The campaign's placement logic is sound: mK2 cinemas in Paris attract an audience that overlaps meaningfully with the cultural profile of a Théâtre de la Bastille patron, as both institutions operate in the independent and arts-oriented segment of French leisure, according to clapboard.com's editorial assessment. The single-asset discipline means the campaign's entire persuasive load rests on one well-executed film, which limits exposure frequency but concentrates creative impact. In the French market, where culture.gouv.fr data consistently shows Parisian cultural consumers engaging across multiple live and screen disciplines, a cinema-placed trailer for a theatre venue addresses a genuinely multi-format audience rather than a niche.
The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects a campaign that demonstrates clear strategic logic and credible creative execution — the genre subversion is coherent and the placement is purposeful — while falling short of the originality and cultural penetration that would characterise the most highly rated work in the recreation and leisure category. The absence of measurable outcomes and the narrow geographic and temporal scope of the campaign, confined to mK2 venues in Paris across a single December, limits the case for transformative effectiveness, even as the creative idea remains instructive for cultural institutions considering how to use competitive media environments as strategic assets.
Edgar & Kelly is a cinema advertising film created by Leo Burnett for Théâtre de la Bastille in December 2013. It was screened inside mK2 cinemas across Paris and structured as a romantic comedy trailer that shifts into an absurd scenario, positioning the theatre as an alternative to predictable Christmas entertainment in France.
Leo Burnett France created Edgar & Kelly in 2013. Xavier Beauregard served as executive creative director, Jérôme Gonfond as art director, and Hadi Hassan-Helou as copywriter. Jean-Marc Gosse directed the film, which was produced by Blue Film Production with Antoine Grujard as TV producer through Prodigious.
Edgar & Kelly launched in December 2013 and was screened as a cinema trailer in mK2 venues across Paris, France. The mK2 network, associated with independent and art-house cinema in France, was chosen for its alignment with the cultural profile of a typical Théâtre de la Bastille audience.
Edgar & Kelly opens as a convincing Christmas romantic comedy trailer before pivoting into an unexpected, absurd scenario. This genre subversion mirrors Théâtre de la Bastille's own programming philosophy and argues, through demonstration rather than description, that the theatre offers experiences cinema cannot provide during the French holiday season.
Edgar & Kelly received a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects coherent strategic placement and credible creative execution, while noting that the campaign's narrow geographic and temporal scope — mK2 cinemas in Paris during a single December — limits its claim to broader cultural impact.
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