Netflix Big Mistakes: we stole a necklace off a Sunset Boulevard billboard
A real billboard, a CGI heist and a cast of thieves: how two FOOH films opened the Big Mistakes Instagram account and turned a date into a story, before the series hit Netflix's global Top 10.
The setup
On Tuesday 10 March 2026, a billboard went up on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles with no logo and no copy. Just a diamond necklace spelling 4.9.26, above a liquor store, with a Netflix logo in the corner. Nobody was told what the numbers meant.
The billboard was real, a classic out-of-home placement. What Netflix wanted from us was the part that happens after the photo: a reason for people to look twice, share it and argue about it. In a series about two siblings who are very bad at crime, the answer was obvious. Somebody had to steal the necklace.
Two films, one theft
We shot the billboard at night from the street, then built the heist in CGI on top of the real footage. Two angles, two posts.
Film one is the security camera. A fixed CCTV frame, timestamp at 1:42 AM, a figure climbing the structure and walking off with the necklace. It went up the same night the billboard did, as the first post of the Big Mistakes Instagram account.
Film two is the witness. A passenger films the billboard from a car, points, and the necklace is already being dragged off the edge of the board. Phone footage, real traffic, real neon, one thing that should not be moving.
A few choices that made it work:
- A real billboard first. The CGI only has to sell one thing, the necklace moving. Everything else in frame, the liquor store, the cars, the streetlights, is simply there.
- Two formats of evidence. A CCTV feed and a phone video are the two ways people actually see a crime online. Both are low-fi on purpose, so the grade hides the seams and the eye stays on the necklace.
- No logo in the films. The billboard already carries it. The films read as footage, not as an ad, which is what gets them shared.
- A cliffhanger, not a reveal. The films end with the necklace gone. The answer came from the cast.
The thieves
The next day, the culprits showed up. Dan Levy, Taylor Ortega, Laurie Metcalf, Abby Quinn, Boran Kuzum and Jack Innanen each posted a selfie wearing the stolen necklace. Then the necklace went back on the billboard, and 4.9.26 turned out to be the premiere date: 9 April.
The whole sequence, billboard, theft, culprits, return, ran on a single prop that never physically existed. That is the point of FOOH done with a real placement: the media buy gives you the credibility, the CGI gives you the story.
What it did for the account
The Big Mistakes Instagram account launched with our film as its first post. Since then it has grown to 35K followers, all organic, with no paid push behind it. For a show account that started from zero a month before release, that is the audience the trailer and the premiere then landed on.
The series
Big Mistakes is a crime comedy created by Dan Levy and Rachel Sennott, with Levy as showrunner. He plays Nicky, a pastor who moonlights as a jewel thief, and Taylor Ortega plays Morgan, his sister and partner in crime. The tagline on the poster says it all: partners in disorganized crime. Eight episodes, world premiere at the Paris Theater in New York on 6 April, on Netflix worldwide on 9 April 2026.
On release, the series entered Netflix’s global Top 10 for English-language TV at number 8 with 2.7 million views in its first four days, then climbed to number 3 in its second week with 4.4 million views, per What’s on Netflix. It holds an 80% score on Rotten Tomatoes. On 13 May 2026, Netflix renewed it for a second season, alongside a first-look deal with Dan Levy.
What we took from it
- Steal from your own billboard. If the media is already booked, the cheapest big idea is to do something to it that could not happen. One OOH placement became a week of content.
- Evidence beats polish. CCTV and phone footage travel further than a glossy render, because they look like something someone caught.
- Let the cast close the loop. The films raised a question. The people the audience already follows answered it. That is how a stunt becomes a story.
Launching a title with a date to protect? Tell us the screen and the date, and we will show you what could happen to it.