The funny thing about Cloverfield is that people talk about the buzz and the before hype...but the genius of the movie is that all of the backstory
is the hype.
Newsmedia has been talking about the websites that sprung up in light of the movie being released, but none of them ever really paid any attention to what the sites were giving.
*There was
-- which gave these interactive pictures with insight to the actual movie
*Then there was
Slusho! - You Can't Drink Just Six.; which was a site dedicated to the ultra-delicious iced drink that has more to do with the origins of the monster than iced treats
*There was
TAGRUATO CORP. which happened to be the sister company to Slusho and had a couple of other websites that were linked to the origin of this monster
*There was also the fact that all of the characters of the movie had myspace accounts that were updated frequently with info that lead up to the movie date.
On top of that there were three major fansites (
cloverfieldclues,
project cloverfield and
1-18-08News.com) who constantly followed all information regarding the company.
In a sense, J.J Abrams tactic of virally giving the first half of the story to the masses backfired because you have a shitload of people who didn't get into the mele and figure out what was going on.
So...yeah. In a nutshell, the backstory was given...just not in the movie.