After watching Saltburn, I ran to tell my friends about it. The response I was often met with was the phrase “it keeps coming up on my TikTok feed.”
As the film’s success became evident amidst social media buzz, I began to wonder exactly how much TikTok’s algorithm could decide the success of a film.
Despite an average opening in cinemas, streaming and social media can be attributed to the Saltburn craze, with the BBC reporting Saltburn-related TikToks racked up over four billion views by 2024.
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It used to be box office ticket sales or reviews from an exclusive cohort of critics that decided whether a movie was doing well.
The modern metric of a film’s success is the buzz created on social media; feature films can make it, or break it, at the mercy of a hashtag.
The question is whether filmmakers are keeping this in mind as they bring their films to life, and whether they should.
A prime example is M3GAN, a horror movie featuring a possessed doll that does a robotic, slightly provocative dance with a deadpan face.
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The marketing department at Universal saw the viral potential in this dance scene and encouraged its replication on TikTok.
Hashtags #M3GAN, #M3GANMovie and #M3GANDance generated 1.3 billion views on TikTok.
M3GAN is an example of how viral marketing can boost a movie’s box office potential – it profited almost US$170 million in the box office and blew out on projected opening weekend sales.
But for a film to really earn ‘street cred’, they need to earn a badge in the FilmTok community.
FilmTok and the Importance of Online Film Forums
‘FilmTok’ is the film community on TikTok where users can indulge in their love of film and watch edits focusing largely on aesthetics and romanticisation.
Here you’ll find the perfect symmetry and colour palettes of Wes Anderson, or brooding edits of Timothee Chalamet in the hazy summer back-drop of Call Me By Your Name.
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Cult film discourse branches off into various subcultures including African American cinema, Asian-American representation in Hollywood, and the LGBTQI+ sphere.
The emergence of these micro-communities is a reclamation response to the cookie-cutter representations made in the mainstream movie industry.
Discourse about race, gender and sexuality in film has flourished on TikTok, celebrating movies previously shunned due to ingrained bigotry in the industry.
Jennifer’s Body has become a cult classic thanks in part to the nostalgic fan worship of the film by the LGBTQI+ community.
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However, online film communities pre-date TikTok. Think of Reddit forums, Letterbox’d, or channels such as CinemaSins on YouTube.
Yet TikTok has surpassed all these platforms in terms of its scale and intense algorithmic mechanisms - but does this mean the film industry needs to bow to it?
There are those out there calling for the film industry to take this AI-powered algorithm potential to revolutionise how films are made.
Dawson Bley wrote in his thesis that movie studios could utilise TikTok to make shorter films and lean into the short-form format.
According to him, the movie industry is at risk of extinction if it doesn’t change the way it makes movies soon:
“Ignoring the needs of a target demographic as well as denying environmental opportunities and threats is a surefire way to lose momentum as a business and become irrelevant; therefore, the movie industry must seek an alternative option to maintain its once-indemand reputation”
Bley also suggests that alongside shorter films, releasing scenes periodically rather than all at once could create a marketing buzz similar to the episodic release of television.
But isn’t the traditional film format worth preserving? If movie studios abandon the full feature convention, are we doomed to scroll for hours to find an iconic cultural moment like the end of Casablanca?
Bley says TikTok friendly short films would unite online communities of movie fans - however, these communities already exist, and the existence of FilmTok is not to dilute a film down to a montage, but instead encourage movie lovers to watch these films in their entirety.
What we can take from Bley’s argument and the example of M3GAN is that filmmakers should be utilizing a free promotional tool to ensure their film’s box office success.
The chicken and the egg question is: are filmmakers making films with TikTok edits in mind? Saltburn had all the TikTok aesthetic potential, from edits of Euphoria star Jacob Elordi in linen shirts, to the nostalgic Y2K setting and colour palette.
Did Emerald Fennell think about the ways TikTok users would reproduce her film in TikTok edits or post their shocked reactions to its absurd scenes when she made it?
Even if she didn’t, we will have to see how many filmmakers from now on will be including brighter colour palettes, more symmetrical framing, tighter aspect ratios and TikTok friendly montages to secure the success of their movie.
