YoImagine you are sitting on your couch after work or on the weekend and you want to find a series or movie to watch, but you don’t know where to start. Instead of spending the rest of the night looking for what to watch on different platforms, how nice it would be if someone decided it for you. Well, Christian Dwarica has the solution.
By 2022, 85% of US households report having at least one subscription to streaming Of video. Each week in February of that year, Americans streamed 169.4 billion minutes of video content, a figure that has been increasing each year. But how much of this time do people spend searching and deciding what to see?
Dwarica decided to create an Instagram page called “The Film Zone” three years ago to help these eternal searches.
“It started as a page to give recommendations,” says Dwarica, a 26-year-old Mexican. “I wanted to make a list of movies that I thought I should be watching and that I thought people should watch to solve this problem, to know what to watch.”
The project has become one of the most famous film pages on Instagram for Generation Z and Millennials, and has more than 1.5 million followers.
Dwarica started The Film Zone while studying her final semester at the University of Texas, Austin. As Dwarica prepared to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in advertising, the page began to gain more and more viewers by simply uploading content one to two times a day.
“When I hit 30,000 followers, I thought ‘okay, this is really growing,’” Dwarica says. “[La cuenta] “It was something that could continue to grow, I just had to adjust the content and publish more than just recommendations.”
From there, The Film Zone began providing reviews, interesting facts, behind-the-scenes content and interviews, from a look behind the scenes and special effects of Avatar: The Way of the Waterthe artistic references in the Netflix series Squid Gamesto different color palettes in film, and even a live Q&A with director M. Night Shyamalan.
“People who love movies love this content because they can’t watch it while watching a movie,” says Dwarica.
The variety of content, her followers and the pandemic gave a big boost to the page that has now become Dwarica’s full-time job.
“I love cinema, even though I don’t know enough about cinema,” says Dwarica. “I’ve been running this page for a while and I still have a lot to learn.”
According to data from The Film Zone, each month organic account impressions are more than 55 million, accounts reached are more than 25 million, and new profile visits are more than 250,000.
Christian Dwarica, creator of The Film Zone
(The Film Zone)
Its aesthetics and way of editing help entertain and inform your audience in just a few seconds. Among his followers are celebrities such as Mark Wahlberg, Camila Cabello, Eiza González, Jason Momoa, Austin Butler and others.
He influencer and Mexican actor Juanpa Zurita says he loves following Dwarica’s page because it helps him learn more about the culture and the industry.
“I feel that it is a place where the effort behind the films is appreciated,” says Zurita. “I like it because it makes me feel part of a community that likes cinema.”
Another of the famous people who follow him is the Mexican soccer player Javier “Chicharito” Hernández, who found out about the page through the recommendation of his sister.
“I like the page because it has great, fun and interesting content about movies,” says Hernández.
The support of its followers has also helped The Film Zone have collaborations with companies such as Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, Tubi, Apple TV+, Starz, Showtime, Sony, FOX, among others.
Despite the numbers and collaborations, Dwarica acknowledges that people keep him motivated to continue creating content.
“People sometimes come back and say, ‘Hey, I saw you recommended this movie and it changed my life or this was what I needed to see,’” Dwarica says.
According to him, one of his favorite parts of running The Film Zone is when his followers message him asking for recommendations and he can connect with them and let them know what to watch. After all, that was his main goal.
Today, The Film Zone has over 2 million combined followers on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. He has also become his own social media agency with a team of ten. The agency offers services such as social media management, analytical reports, content strategy and production, among others.
“I love that I can help clients grow,” says Dwarica. “We can come up with a unique strategy for a client who wants to release a movie that goes back to the mission of our site.”
As The Film Zone continues to grow on social media and in its agency business, Dwarica says that at the end of the day what matters is the relationship and trust of its followers.
“The followers are the reason we have grown,” says Dwarica. “They are the ones who recommend the page to their friends. “They are the fans and they have been part of this growth.”
