At the 2019 San Diego Comic-Con, Arnold Schwarzenneger and other cast members of Terminator: Dark Fate joined a first-of-its-kind live-streamed Reddit AMA to discuss the latest film in the Terminator series. Paramount Pictures and Skydance hosted a traditional Comic-Con panel in Hall H, then the cast and director Tim Miller appeared on Reddit’s first Ask Me Anything live-streaming video broadcast, dubbed Hall-R, produced by Mirrored Media.

The Terminator: Dark Fate crew — including cast members Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Mackenzie Davis, Diego Bonetta, Gabriel Luna and Natalia Reyes — will participate in the AMA on Reddit, in a session hosted by Scott Rogowsky, formerly the face of game-show app HQ Trivia. The AMA also included new footage from Dark Fate, which went up on Reddit first before Paramount distributed the video through other social channels.

The Reddit AMA for Terminator: Dark Fate went live on the reddit.com homepage in a takeover ad unit. Fans were able to begin posting questions on the thread (available at this link) about two hours before the event; the body of the post was an embedded video, which then looped the film’s trailer until the live-stream started. 

It was Reddit’s first activation at Comic-Con and the first time the site had partnered with an entertainment franchise for a live-streamed AMA with a host. There was no audience for the Reddit AMA at Comic-Con: Rather, the aim was to bring the excitement of the convention to Redditors worldwide. “So much time and energy goes into creating these panels for Comic-Con, and we felt ‘Hall R’ with Reddit was the perfect digital extension for the Comic-Con experience,” said Tamar Teifeld, VP of digital marketing at Paramount.

Having the AMA live-streamed was important, “because you couldn’t do this with the whole cast in text format – it’s hard enough to follow AMA when it’s just one person,” Teifeld added. “We want fans to feel like they’ve gotten a personal glimpse into how this movie was made.”

Sure, Paramount could have live-streamed a session itself. But the studio wanted to tap into the site’s passionate fanbase. According to Reddit, more than 200 million of users on the site are TV and film fans.

Reddit is hoping to do more “Hall R” activations in the future, said Neal Hubman, Reddit’s senior director of West Coast brand partnerships. “We have started to invest more in our entertainment team to build true partnerships with studios like Paramount,” he said.