It’s early 2021: NFT’s are in and, quite frankly, zombies were never out. Army of the Dead was already on many a cinephile’s radar but Netflix was looking to feed the frenzy even more across Germany. Luckily, the story of a ragtag group of mercenaries who enter zombie-infested Las Vegas to pull the heist of the century (that was a mouthful) gave us plenty to work with.

We created a web experience, NFT of the Dead, around one of the film’s iconic characters: German safe-cracker, Dieter, who manages to open the famed ‘Götterdämmerung’ vault while murderous zombies are hot on his tail. With NFT of the dead, we challenged visitors to find out if they’ve ears, and nerves, like Dieter’s, i.e. the traits needed to crack our digital safe. Inside the safe lies the most precious prize of all: a scene that was killed in the cutting room by director Zack Snyder — we resurrected it and turned it into crypto art that could only be claimed by the speediest safe-cracker.

We addressed two main concerns: creating an experience that resonates specifically well with the German audience and creating an experience that’s exciting to all visitors — regardless of whether you’ve seen the film or not. To tackle the first point, we zoomed in on Dieter, played by Germany’s own Matthias Schweighöfer. (The character was so loved that he got his own prequel spin-off.) The second point — a spoiler-free but universally exciting experience — was achieved through clever visual and sound design. We gave the experience a distinct Army of the Dead look-and-feel but didn’t need to disclose important plot twists to explain the assignment and make it a thrilling one — the ticking timer and eerie sounds do a fine job at that.

We crafted the whole experience to make it as captivating as the film itself. Launched on May 27th, 2021, nftofthedead.com lures people into a digital casino basement. As visitors face the giant vault door, the instructions come in over the radio: turn the four dials slowly and listen for the locks clicking to crack the safe. A seemingly easy task were it not for the horde of zombies snarling and screaming over the faint clicks. As the timer runs, and your time runs out, the task intensifies.

To make sure that our web experience wouldn’t go unnoticed, we called in a few favours with the cast and crew. With none other than Zack Snyder and Matthias Schweighöfer calling for people to compete in our competition, the site soon flooded with visitors eager to own a piece of Hollywood.

In just 3 days, over 50,000 visitors spent an average of 6 minutes trying to figure out the code to the safe and the press jumped on board too. While the verdict was still out on NFTs, we gave it our spin and got celebrated for our originality. Getting the chance to win an original Zack Snyder is something worth celebrating, of course.

The speediest cracker managed to secure their reward in an astounding 11 seconds, but the impact of the activation lasted much longer, seeing to it that Army of the Dead became one of the most-watched Netflix films in Germany to date.