03 Oct Paramount Knows Exactly What It’s Doing Putting ‘Mean Girls’ on TikTok in Full [IndieWire]
BY BRIAN WELK
October 3, 2023 | Paramount is really trying to make “Fetch” happen, this time with a younger generation.
On October 3, forever enshrined as “Mean Girls” Day in memory of the first time hottie Aaron Samuels asked Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) what day it was in the 2004 teen comedy, Paramount put the entirety of “Mean Girls” on TikTok, viewable for free in 23 chunks.
It’s the first time a movie, new or classic, has been released in full by a major movie studio on TikTok, though Peacock earlier this year released the full pilot episode of the Craig Robinson series “Killing It” as an appetizer to bring in audiences to the streaming show. Other distributors have experimented with such models on other platforms, like the Fortnite premiere of “Tenet” or when Oscilloscope posted a movie in 6-second segments on Vine.
Even though “Mean Girls” is already available to watch on Paramount+ or on YouTube for free with ads, the excitement of seeing it on TikTok was immediate. Paramount’s official TikTok feed for “Mean Girls” had just 700 followers at midnight when the movie was added to TikTok, and by press time on Tuesday, the channel had over 66,000 followers and one million likes (and counting). Individual segments of the movie had tens of thousands of views, while the “October 3” clip from the movie started circulating widely and has 5.3 million views. #MeanGirlsDay even became a top trending topic on X (formerly Twitter).