What if a movie trailer had filters and huge neon text, and was set to, say, a Dua Lipa song? What if it was made by a teenager in the Philippines, or Brazil, using pirated material? What if the plot of the film was entirely irrelevant?

If you’ve spent time on TikTok, odds are you’ve seen your fair share of fan edits — intricately crafted montages of film, TV or other clips that are set to popular music. Some are like highlight reels, others are like memes and still others are fantasy-based interpretations of popular media that stray far from the tone or text of the source material. Take #SydCarmy, a hashtag that offers hundreds of edits that project a romantic relationship between the two platonic main characters of “The Bear.”

These edits rack up millions of views, activating fan communities around titles from “The Summer I Turned Pretty” to “Barry Lyndon.” Briana McElroy, the head of worldwide digital marketing for Lionsgate Films, calls them “love letters from fans.” Put cynically, they’re also free advertising.

Hollywood studios like Hulu and Paramount+, noticing the immense viral impact of these TikTok videos, have started to adopt fan edits in official marketing campaigns. Lionsgate has gone all in on the format, posting edits every few days of new titles like “The Long Walk” and old ones like “Divergent.”

“Within our digital marketing team, we operate like fans,” McElroy says. “If we’re trying to have a conversation with fans online, we need to be able to speak their language.” Lionsgate works with “legacy agencies” to craft a more “polished” voice on Facebook and Instagram, McElroy says, while for TikTok it creates content that feels “native to the platform.”

Of course, any corporation attempting to engage in internet culture runs the risk of being the desperate “cool mom” who spoils the fun. So instead of trying to emulate viral fan editors, Lionsgate decided to hire them. Felipe Mendez, who manages the Lionsgate account, reached out to around 250 editors on TikTok and built a roster of about 15. “We’re going to the artists that fans are already obsessed with and saying: ‘We want you to create what you’re already doing; we just want to work together,’” says Mendez, who is 26.

Mendez, a member of UTA’s Next Gen team, has helped brands like Axe and PBS reach younger demographics. He says he pushes company leadership to lean into what they don’t understand about Gen Z. “To do well on TikTok, your videos have to be so divorced from what your brand is,” he says. In other words, the brand has to be OK making fun of itself. (A “Hunger Games” edit posted by Lionsgate pairs Katniss Everdeen’s bird call with Flo Rida’s unsubtle ode to oral sex, “Whistle.”)

Mendez says he realized the potential of fan edits a couple years ago, when “Suits” videos were garnering hundreds of millions of views on TikTok. He credits those clips with catapulting the 2010s legal drama to the most-streamed show of 2023 and spawning a spinoff.

While it’s difficult to measure the conversion rate of people who see a fan edit and then watch the movie or show it’s based on, Mendez says the proof is in the comments section. He points to a “Creed” edit by user Areq, which has amassed 195 million views and 19 million likes since July. A sampling of the 300,000 comments: “Guess I’m watching ‘Creed’ today”; “OK, I’ll watch ‘Creed 1,’ ‘2’ and ‘3’ today”; “Just let the editors make the trailers for the movies at this point.” The week Areq’s edit was posted, viewership of the 2015 boxing drama increased 29% on Amazon Prime, according to Luminate data.

Can fan edits drive engagement offline? For Lionsgate, the first major test is the upcoming rerelease of “Twilight,” itself prompted in part by the response to a fan edit campaign. The studio has posted nearly 40 edits since last summer and believes there is a whole community of TikTokers born after “Twilight” came out who will show up in theaters for the vampire romance.

In fact, McElroy says the marketing aim is much bigger than just one theatrical event. “When we started posting ‘Twilight’ content on TikTok, it wasn’t with the goal of driving revenue or bringing the film back to theaters,” she says. “Our goal was just to make sure we’re creating a community and sustaining it.”