I remember a time when watching a movie meant sitting in your car in front of a giant screen at the drive-in. You drove to the cinema, bought a ticket, grabbed some popcorn and gave a story two uninterrupted hours of your attention all while sitting in your car. Then television arrived and brought the movies into our living rooms. A little while later came streaming. And streaming was seen as the ultimate convenience because you could watch whatever you wanted whenever you wanted. But apparently… even that isn’t convenient enough anymore.
Today, entertainment is at our fingertips. All you have to do is open TikTok, Instagram or YouTube and within seconds a clip appears. An algorithm has already decided exactly which clip you’re going to see first. One clip becomes another, then another, and without you even realising it, you’ve spent forty minutes watching videos which were not on your to do list.
Some may deny it, but at some point we’ve all fallen into that trap. According to Variety, Disney has now entered into a content-sharing agreement with TikTok that will bring officially licensed short-form clips from Disney’s vast catalogue directly onto the platform. The partnership allows Disney to use TikTok as another stage for its films, television shows and franchises, embracing the very format that has completely reshaped modern media consumption.
The entertainment industry has spent years trying to convince audiences to come back. Now it’s becoming increasingly clear that Hollywood has realised it needs to meet audiences where they already are. Well….what better place than on our phones? I mean why wait to be comfortably seated when you can enjoy your clip, sitting, standing or eating for that matter. Think about it for a second. You scroll and a thirty-second Marvel scene appears on your feed or a funny moment from The Simpsons pops up while you’re waiting in line for coffee that catches your attention. Before you’ve even realised it, you’re already planning what you’ll watch later that evening. You automatically start thinking about how you going to fit it all into your day.
Short-form content has single-handedly become the world’s biggest movie trailer that simply goes on and on with no end in sight. What’s fascinating is that Disney isn’t abandoning long-form storytelling. Oh no, in fact it’s quite the opposite. You see what it’s doing is acknowledging that people’s viewing habits have changed. Whether we like it or not, attention has become one of the most valuable currencies in entertainment, which every studio is fighting for. We no longer discover movies only through television commercials or cinema trailers. We discover them while scrolling between cooking videos, football highlights and somebody’s pet golden retriever wearing sunglasses.
Welcome to the reality of modern entertainment. There’s also something strangely ironic about all of this. For years parents told their children to spend less time on TikTok and more time watching proper movies. Now one of the biggest movie studios on Earth has effectively said…
“Fine. We’ll come to TikTok instead.” I mean really, you have to laugh. Technology has always changed the way we tell stories. Radio gave way to television. Television adapted to streaming. Streaming is now adapting to short-form video.
The stories themselves haven’t changed but the journey to finding them definitely has. Whether this partnership becomes a game-changer remains to be seen. But one thing feels certain. The battle for our attention is no longer happening only in cinemas or on streaming platforms.
It’s happening one swipe at a time.
And if Disney is willing to follow us there, you can be absolutely certain the rest of Hollywood won’t be far behind.
