“I’m on Part 49,” said my flatmate. “Why would I flog through the whole film?”
Bite-sized clips of pirated films may be revolutionising how we watch films. Lasting anywhere between five seconds and ten minutes, the clips are being uploaded free to TikTok by ‘creators’ earning £0.02 – £0.03 per 1,000 views.
Such clips are thrown up randomly by the algorithm and cannot be searched for, since film titles are not mentioned. This is the only way the ‘creators’ can avoid the clips being taken down as pirated material. Take almost any popular film and you can watch it, though possibly not in the right order, broken into short fragments. It can be seen as a terrible way to watch a movie – every minute or so you have to scroll onto the next clip, characters may be cropped out of shot, and the clips are often speeded up or overlaid with dramatic music to make them more ‘grabby’.
So why are they so popular? Studies have shown that Gen Z’s average viewing span has fallen below eight seconds – reducing to 1.3 seconds for ads. TikTok thrives on this dwindling attention capacity, turning potentially ‘boring’ feature-length films into snappy pieces that can be binged without context.
Perhaps not surprisingly some of those that make the films are less than enthusiastic about the new trend: “Get over that sh*t. Let’s watch a movie that actually tells the story … that’s not all fast, cut, cut, cut” posted American actor Michael Rooker on X.
The industry’s relationship with TikTok clips is vexing. On the one hand, there’s the flagrant theft of copyright. On the other, there’s the fact that these short films can be powerful promotional tools, something that has led to a gamekeeper turned poacher situation.
Last year, Paramount sliced their 2004 teen comedy Mean Girls into 23 parts and uploaded them to TikTok in a bid to attract younger viewers. The “Part 1” opening scene drew 198,800 views, while a standalone clip in which Cady utters the famous line “It’s October 3rd” attracted 8.7m views. Paramount’s action has tacitly legitimised this style of short-form, chaotic consumption, signalling a dramatic shift in the industry’s stance, whereby film clips becoming ‘memes’ or ‘going viral’ can be a powerfully successful marketing ploy (think Saltburn). If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
What it means for our attention spans is anybody’s guess.
Photo by Adrian Swancar on Unsplash