In a bid to drive engagement with younger audiences, Paramount chopped up its 2004 high school comedy Mean Girls into 23 segments and dropped the film on TikTok for free on Tuesday.
The move, believed to be the first time a major Hollywood studio has put an entire film on the social platform, was a promotional tactic to raise awareness among Gen Z and younger Millennial viewers ahead of the January 2024 theatrical release of a new iteration of the cult film.
Tuesday’s stunt honoured ‘Mean Girls Day’ on October 3, which as afficionados will attest is named after a scene where Lindsay Lohan’s lead character Cady tells high school heartthrob Aaron the date.
The original film was based on a screenplay by Tina Fey and Rosalind Wiseman, whose parental advice book ‘Queen Bees & Wannabes’ serve as the inspiration.
Mean Girls grossed an unadjusted $130m worldwide when it opened nearly 20 years ago and also starred Amanda Seyfried, Rachel McAdams, Fey, Amy Poehler, and Jonathan Bennett.
Fey later adapted the film into a Broadway play which launched in 2018. The musical adaptation of the stage show will open theatrically on January 12 after it was initially scheduled to debut on Paramount+, while the live show will debut in London at the Savoy Theatre next June to commemorate the original film’s 20th anniversary.
Amid a combustible strike climate that has seen writers and actors fight for months for a new formula for residuals in the streaming age, among other demands, Tuesday’s TikTok tactic came under early fire.
It Follows producer Rebecca Green, who was not involved in Mean Girls, posted on X (formerly known as Twitter): “As the WGA strike comes to a close, studios find another way not to pay us for our work (and if you think people won’t watch the film this way, you’re obvs not on TikTok)”.
Residual payments on social media remains a murky area, however Screen understands that talent from the 2004 comedy will be paid for Tuesday’s promotional event, although the exact formula remained unclear.
Screen was unable to reach Paramount at time of writing, although industry sources with knowledge of the stunt said the TikTok drop was a one-off, single-day occurrence, adding that the studio had no plans to explore a potential new distribution model.
By early evening on Tuesday the Mean Girls TikTok channel had attracted 111,400 followers and 1.7m likes.
The Part 1 opening scene had drawn 196,800 views and counting and other segments achieved numbers ranging from 18,000 to 173,000. A stand-alone 10-second clip in which Cady utters the famous line “It’s October 3rd” had attracted 8.7m views.
The TikTok channel linked viewers to a page where they could buy DVDs or digital downloads of the original film. Mean Girls is available on Paramount+ and is free on YouTube with ads.
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