ComingSoon.net is 12 today! It’s been quite a ride and I wanted to give you a quick summary of how we got to this point.
I first realized how much people were interested in what’s coming to theaters in August of 1998. It was a time when the first Blade movie and The Avengers (starring Ralph Fiennes, Uma Thurman and Sean Connery) hit the big screen and a few weeks later the first Rush Hour movie would enter theaters. Back then, there was no high speed internet and many people depended on America Online, Prodigy and CompuServe for their online access.
I had started a small fansite on which I was putting upcoming movie release dates as I found them (which was quite a challenge then). People started to e-mail asking me to update the section more and my girlfriend suggested I grow the site. I decided to register the domain name ComingSoon.net, as “Coming Soon” is mentioned at the end of many movie trailers and can be seen on movie posters. I updated the site all throughout my last semester at Texas A&M University with the latest news, release dates, trailers and more using dial-up (ah, the memories of waiting an hour for a small trailer to download!), and after my graduation, the site continued to grow.
With Sony closing in on production of the first Spider-Man movie and there not being many Spidey sites out there, I spun-off SpiderManHype.com as a place where fans could find all the latest updates in May of 1999. The two sites grew to the point that I had to tell the internet consulting firm I was working for that I would no longer be able to come in every day. That company ended up closing because of the “dot-com collapse” in 2000 and it was then that I decided to take on the sites full time.
With the Spider-Man movie approaching, we decided to turn SpiderManHype.com into SuperHeroHype.com at the end of 2001 so that we could cover all superhero movie and TV shows. A few years later I got connected with the CraveOnline team, which has done an amazing job of keeping the sites in business all these years. In February of 2007, we also thought horror fans were interested in more daily updates, so we spun-off ShockTillYouDrop.com with Ryan Turek at the helm.
I’m very proud of ComingSoon.net, SuperHeroHype.com and ShockTillYouDrop.com, and I want to thank everyone who has been involved with the sites over the years in making them a success. The writers, ad team, tech team, studio publicists, family members, and most of all you, the fans who have continued to visit us year after year.
The internet has evolved since we started, times have changed, the girlfriend who encouraged me to start the site has now been my wonderful wife for almost 10 years, but you know what, I still get excited when a new trailer is released and we get to see the first footage from a film we have sometimes talked about for years. The magic of movies lives on no matter what happens in the world, and we hope to be covering them for many years to come. That’s why we’re here.
Mirko Parlevliet
COO/Editor-in-Chief
