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According to new data from TikTok and theater trade group Cinema United fan-made TikToks can now do what big marketing campaigns couldn’t always achieve: keep a movie thriving after opening weekend.
At this year’s CinemaCon, the annual convention for movie theater owners, director Denis Villeneuve showed the first seven minutes of his third Dune film. He told the crowd he made his latest installment of the science fiction saga for the fans. And long before the December opening, fans have been posting their own reactions on TikTok.
“There’s this incredible chant in Dune 3 that’s in the trailer and what we’ve seen is it’s a soundbite that users on TikTok have embraced and made their own content with,” says Cameron Curtis, executive vice president of global digital marketing for Warner Bros.
He says TikTok is a tremendous platform for reaching new audiences.
“We often see that the creator content on [the] platform outperforms our traditional advertising content by 3-to-1. It’s become just critical to our strategy and everything that we do,” says Curtis.
He says Warner Bros. and other studios have been partnering with TikTok creators to market their films. According to TikTok executives, that’s for good reason. “We really saw that the buzz doesn’t stop with the opening weekend,” says Dennis Papirowski, TikTok’s global head of Entertainment and News.
He says every day, the platform’s users create 6.5 million posts related to content from new and classic films and TV shows. According to TikTok, half of their users say they discovered a new movie through the platform. And of those, more than a third looked up showtimes and purchased a movie ticket.
Dawn Yang, the company’s global head of entertainment partnerships and business development, says studios tend to do a lot of marketing for the first weekend a film opens.
“But on TikTok, it really takes off after the first weekend,” she says, “because people have seen the entire movie and they want to talk about it.”
TikTokers post enthusiastic movie reviews, they cosplay and reenact scenes, and some create new edits from the official trailers and footage. For instance, 24-year-old college student Josiah Pilet remixed Spider-Man clips set to music.
Fan edits would have been no-nos in the old Hollywood strategy of protecting intellectual property, says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for Comscore, which analyzes the box office.
“There was a time when studios did not want marketing messaging going out that wasn’t from them,” he says. Now, he says even negative responses to movies are welcome “as long as it’s not something horrible, that can boost the profile of a movie and excitement around it, because sometimes people want to see what the fuss is all about.”
Dergarabedian says studios are increasingly embracing and harnessing the power of short TikToks made by the key Gen Z audience.
“You have some movies that open huge, have a huge opening weekend, then drop by 70% or more in their second weekend,” he says. “But the way you keep people coming back is that you not only have a great movie, but the social media engagement continues, amplifies and creates that excitement and the FOMO factor among potential moviegoers.”
Take last year’s box office hit Sinners. Cinema United and TikTok’s report found that buzz about the film surged on the platform during its opening week — and ticket sales barely dipped the following week.
But social media platforms, including TikTok, have also sometimes caused minor headaches for theaters. Last year, fan-made posts chronicled the mayhem sparked by a line spoken by Jack Black’s character in The Minecraft Movie.
Audiences shouted “chicken jockey” along with him and tossed popcorn in theaters. The ruckus was so chaotic that one fan even carried a live chicken into the movie, as shown by one viral video.
At CinemaCon, Warner Bros. executives offered a good-natured apology to theater owners for the mess.
But it’s not just fans posting TikToks. As executive director of communications and content for B&B Theatres, Paul Farnsworth makes funny TikToks, starring himself and the staff — often in the lobby, playing around with the latest movies.
“It’s like a little wink-wink joke, nothing that you’re going to like, pay money to go see a stand-up comedian say,” he says. “But I think for us, it indicates to our guests a sensibility of like the playfulness of the movies, the magic of the experience, the shared communal thing that we’re all trying to achieve with them.”
Farnsworth says he asks the studios for guidance on the material — hoping his viral TikToks get people into movie theaters.
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