On Tuesday, October 3, production company Paramount Pictures pulled off a marketing coup on TikTok by publishing one of its 2004 hits on the platform free of charge: Mean Girls by Mark Waters. Users could watch one of the most iconic films in the career of 2000s icon Lindsay Lohan, free of charge. For the occasion, the film was cut into 23 short videos.
Why this film? Emblematic of online culture, Mean Girls is a reservoir of memes from which internet users like to draw to invoke the figure of the popular but insensitive and superficial person.
Why this day? Because one of the characters refers to this date in the feature film and it has evolved into "Mean Girls Day." Finally, the choice of format was inspired by the hundreds of accounts on the platform that illegally broadcast reports, series and even films – including Mean Girls. In August, NBC relied on the same strategy, previewing an episode of its comedy Killing It, as The Guardian reported.
This is because, on TikTok, users are crazy about these works, which, to comply with the platform's standards, are broken up into short videos. Excerpts from blockbusters, romantic comedies and TV shows can reach thousands of views. So much so, in fact, that it is not uncommon for them to appear on the application's home page (the "For You" feed). Some users even purposely leave the message "I'm commenting for the algorithm" under an excerpt, in the hope of being automatically offered the rest of the video. It is a practice described in the 2023 book Le Système TikTok by journalist Océane Herrero.
But this is nothing new: Back in the 2000s, with the spread of piracy, many internet users were already downloading films in chunks. Later, video-sharing sites such as YouTube also saw the emergence of unlicensed publications of fragmented films.
On TikTok, this content is increasingly numerous, bringing back into fashion movies that are sometimes several decades old, as Radio Canada points out, or giving new popularity to hits like Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" (1977). Series or films from the past such as Mean Girls, Legally Blonde (2001) and Malcolm in the Middle (2000-2006) are also popular. The presence of this copyright-protected content seems to be moderated with uneven zeal by the platform, which also raises questions as to the tolerance level of production companies regarding this practice.
One might suspect that rights holders are counting on the fact that these video snippets have the effect of a trailer or teaser, and encourage the less relentless internet users to view films in a more conventional, legal and, above all, more comfortable way. Their effectiveness remains to be seen, but they illustrate TikTok's growing influence on the way internet users consume audiovisual content.
In any case, Mean Girls has since disappeared from the official TikTok account @meangirls, which now boasts 154,000 subscriptions.
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.