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Hollywood Recruits Fan Edits For Marketing Campaigns
Courtesy of Lionsgate on TikTok
Studios are turning to TikTok creators of “fan edits” — montages or memes that remix a movie or show’s plot or characters, often set to popular, incongruous music — to help reach younger audiences.
The Big Picture: Hollywood is eager to find the best way to reach Gen Z and Gen Alpha as premium movies and shows hit an existential crossroads — facing smaller audiences for fewer titles while the creator economy, video games, and now AI compete for attention. But studios are realizing that sometimes, the best way to go viral is to let the audience do it for you.
Behind The Videos: By embracing fan edits, studios are doing something they don’t like to do — giving up control.
Hulu, Paramount+, and Lionsgate are now weaving TikTok fan edits into their campaigns while reserving more polished marketing materials for platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
Lionsgate is particularly bullish — using them to promote new titles like The Long Walk and older ones like Divergent. It even leveraged fan edits as a launchpad to bring the Twilight series back to theaters.
The studio hired 26-year-old Felipe Mendez, formerly of UTA’s Next Gen team, to lead Lionsgate’s TikTok account. He recruited 15 editors of fan content to join his team.
Mendez believes the best fan edits are ones “so divorced” from what a movie or show is known for, like subbing in Flo Rida’s “Whistle” with Katniss’ bird call in The Hunger Games. The more tongue in cheek, the better.
The Final Cut: So, do fan edits actually work? Turns out, they rack up hundreds of millions of views — and even helped fuel Suits’ surprise climb to the top of the Nielsen charts during the pandemic. More recently, a video posted by creator Areq about the Creed series led to a 29% viewership spike on Amazon Prime.
In other words, audiences aren’t just watching the fan edits… they’re watching the content that inspired them.
Next Campaign: Prepare for a line to be drawn in the sand between everyday fan edits and those generated with AI — with the former being the only ones Hollywood is embracing… at least for now.
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Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited by Nick Comney. Polled and Copy-edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.