Kanye West releases 'Runaway' as the lead single from MBDTF

Why it matters

"Runaway" was released as a song and as a 35-minute short film on the same day, October 4, 2010. Kanye West directed the film. It premiered on MTV that evening as a 35-minute event called Runaway, structured around a phoenix (played by Selita Ebanks) who falls to Earth and tries to integrate into a Kanye-narrated alternate reality. The film features most of the songs from the in-progress My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The Runaway short film is one of the more genuinely ambitious commercial-rap visual projects of the early 2010s. The hour-of-prime-time-television treatment for a single from an upcoming album was a marketing move that nobody had really tried before at that scale. Kanye paid for most of the production himself. The film cost a reported $3 million. It is, as a piece of filmmaking, uneven and pretty in roughly equal measures. As a marketing event, it worked: it built the kind of cultural anticipation for MBDTF that the album, when it dropped seven weeks later, more than satisfied. You can watch the short film on YouTube. Watch it in the order it was meant to be watched. The Runaway sequence at the long-take dinner table is still affecting.