Beyonce Knowles successfully released her new album 'Surprise' online, without any prior announcement creating a huge marketing blitz for herself, but has she now established a new trend for people in the film industry?

Hollywood actors like Tom Cruise, Vin Diesel or Jennifer Lawrence command millions of online followers. They can individually reach out to a lot of people with whatever they have to offer or say. Could Beyonce's example encourage celebrities in the film industry to consider promoting personal projects, like indie movies that have been funded through their efforts?

We saw earlier in the year some very successful crowd-funding campaigns that could suggest that trend is already in motion, but we have yet to see the big names actively doing this with such a brilliant result. For now, the studios are taking care of the big movies, but could big movies in the future, be promoted by the actors on their own?

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Twitter is after all a good place to start when it comes to generating discussion. If something is new, has a significant message, it can travel very fast.

When it comes to distribution, we now have the technology to deliver movies to audiences worldwide through numerous websites. The concept of a digital album is quite like that of a film. It gets posted online, you can download it, and pay for it. All you need to do is to get people to be interested in it, and then to buy a copy.

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So with that said, Beyonce may have proven that stars can take control of the release, and build up the momentum. Everything else follows (although, for everything else, you still need an army of helpers!)