There is a peculiar moment in the life of an independent movie when everyone has done their job and almost nobody knows the movie exists. The editor has locked picture. The distributor has picked a Friday. A festival may even have put the title in a handsome program. Still, somewhere between the filmmaker's private certainty and the public's crowded calendar, the signal goes missing. KATRINA WAN PR operates in that gap.
The agency is based in Beverly Hills, but its natural habitat is less glamorous: the spreadsheet of interview times, the press-notes PDF, the journalist who needs a screener by noon, the actor whose window moved by twenty minutes, and the specialized horror site that understands why a practical-effects anecdote matters. Its customers are studios, streamers, distributors, producers, festivals, and filmmakers. Its product is attention made orderly.
Katrina Wan founded the company in 2011 after seeing the movie machine from several useful angles. She began in national publicity at Disney's Buena Vista Pictures, moved to E! Entertainment as a film-talent executive and segment producer, then held senior publicity jobs at Capitol/THINKFilm and Nu Image/Millennium Films/First Look Studios. One job taught the studio campaign. One taught the newsroom. The others taught distribution. The agency that followed could speak to all three.
“Rooted in strategy and creativity.”KATRINA WAN PR's own compact description of the work
The movie has five opening nights
KATRINA WAN PR does not describe film publicity as one blast of promotion. Its public service line runs from unit publicity during production to festival PR, theatrical release, VOD and digital, then DVD and Blu-ray. That sequence is the business. Each stage has a different audience, deadline, asset list, and definition of success. A set visit cannot do the work of a festival review. A festival review cannot book a late-night interview. A theatrical profile may not tell a viewer where to rent the film three months later.
The publicity relay / One film, five moments
This is especially valuable for independent releases, where continuity is fragile. A large studio can buy another burst of reach. A smaller distributor needs every piece of earned attention to lead somewhere. The practical play is almost boring: prepare complete materials, map outlets by actual audience, make talent easy to book, and give every release stage a new angle. Boring, here, is praise. Reliability is what lets the interesting movie remain interesting.
Horror fans are not hiding from horror
The agency's sharpest position is in genre film - horror, science fiction, and action. “Genre” can sound like a shelf at the back of a video store. In practice, it is a map of highly attentive communities. Horror fans follow directors, effects artists, festival programs, boutique labels, and specialist publications. They notice when marketing understands the movie and when it merely turns the volume up.
Look at the portfolio and the niche becomes tangible: Mandy, Terrifier 2, The Dark and the Wicked, Bone Tomahawk, Orphan: First Kill, Daniel Isn't Real, and The Blackcoat's Daughter. Yet the list also includes Miss Juneteenth, Paint, Clerks III, Bullhead, and Jimi: All Is By My Side. The specialty is not a cage. It is a clear front door.
When the audience got much bigger
Domestic opening weekend, USD. Publicity was one part of a larger distribution and marketing campaign.
Terrifier 2 supplies the useful caution and the irresistible number. Made for a reported $250,000, it earned about $15.7 million worldwide. KATRINA WAN PR lists the film among its campaigns, but no honest account can turn a team sport into a single-agency victory. Distribution, the filmmakers, fan response, theatrical partners, and publicity all met at the right moment. Two years later, Terrifier 3 opened at number one. Cineverse publicly thanked a campaign group that included Anti Agency Group for media, TriplePlay Studios for viral work, Kevin Childress Creative for the trailer, and KATRINA WAN PR for publicity. The credit list is the lesson: breakout attention has a supply chain.
Small enough to specialize, connected enough to travel
The agency says it has staff in Los Angeles and New York and describes itself as fully independent, woman-owned, LGBTQIA+-owned, and Asian American-owned. Public company data places the team around ten people. The model is conventional business-to-business service work: a studio, distributor, producer, or festival hires the agency for a campaign or release phase. Rates are private, as are most campaign budgets. The cost that can be seen is organizational. Someone must keep the story consistent while adjusting it for dozens of outlets and a calendar that refuses to behave.
A premiere creates heat, then the room empties
The agency bridges festival attention to a later commercial date with fresh hooks, interviews, and release information.
The movie is strange in a generic pitch
Genre fluency helps match a film's specific pleasures to outlets and communities already prepared to care.
Talent time is scarce and expensive
Scheduling, press materials, screeners, and prepared angles make each available interview easier to land and use.
The release keeps changing shape
One campaign spine can support production, festival, theatrical, digital, and physical-media moments without starting cold.
The client list shows where this fits in the market. Amazon, Lionsgate, Paramount, Blumhouse TV, MGM+, IFC Films, Shudder, AMC+, A24, Magnolia and Magnet, Samuel Goldwyn Films, XYZ Films, and many smaller distributors have appeared on the agency's roster. Some have powerful publicity departments of their own. They still use specialists when a slate is crowded, a release needs extra hands, or a particular audience rewards relationships built over years.
The competitive alternatives are equally plain: an in-house team, a larger entertainment agency, another boutique such as Prodigy Public Relations or Falco Ink, or a patchwork of freelancers. KATRINA WAN PR's argument is continuity plus fit. It knows the path, knows the genre press, and has repeated the work enough times that IMDbPro lists more than 600 film and video credits.
A useful playbook for anything hard to classify
A filmmaker cannot copy Katrina Wan's contact list, and a founder in another industry should not try. The portable part is the shape of the business. Start with an overlooked customer whose product repeatedly crosses awkward boundaries. Learn each gatekeeper's incentives. Build the documents and calendar that stop momentum from leaking. Then stay involved long enough to see the next handoff.
The part worth stealing
- Choose a niche with enthusiastic insiders, not merely a small market.
- Map the full launch as stages, with a different job for each stage.
- Turn expertise into routing: the right story, person, outlet, and moment.
- Make one successful engagement easier to extend than to replace.
- Let a recognizable specialty open the door to broader work.
The method depends on conditions. There must be a real audience to find, enough lead time to prepare assets and access, and a client willing to make talent or filmmakers available. Earned media cannot rescue a movie with no release path, no usable materials, or no distinct reason to care. Nor does specialist credibility substitute for paid reach when the goal is instant mass awareness. The boutique advantage is precision. It weakens when the assignment is pure scale.
That may explain the company's endurance better than any triumphant campaign anecdote. It has kept doing the unphotogenic work through more than a decade of changing formats: pitching, coordinating, packaging, monitoring, and following up. The cinema changed from discs to streams, from broad entertainment pages to a thousand specialist feeds. The central problem stayed put. A good film and its likely audience can occupy the same world without meeting. KATRINA WAN PR gets paid to arrange the introduction.