Welcome to Future Social, where we talk about… High School Musical and my financial trauma? Those are unrelated… I’m pretty sure they’re unrelated…

Today’s issue is all about an awesome social media move from the Disney folks, along a personal confession & how I’m gonna publicly share an area of my life I’m terrible at. We’ll hit on:

—Jack Appleby

I find business finances wildlyyy triggering (thanks, family money trauma). Anddd now I have two creator businesses between Future Social and How To Hoop Forever, whichhh means taxes, payments, vendors, and a million excuses for me to freak out instead of taking care of business.

But a friend joined Relay, a small business banking platform. She pitched me their business & promised their system would keep my brain from scrambling—now I'm running two creator businesses on their platform!

The big differences for me:

Get this—I'm now running a professional basketball team's finances through Relay. Paying players, handling sponsor money, keeping everything clean. And it's actually kinda fun now that I can make sense of it all.

If you run a creator business and want your money to make more sense without becoming a finance person, give Relay a try.

Most movie distribution debates are all big screen vs. streaming, where we bemoan low box office numbers and wish people would get off their couches for the theaters. Meanwhile, Disney+ just dropped a full movie on their TikTok.

For the 20th anniversary of High School Musical, Disney+ posted the entire film as 52 sequential TikToks. Not highlights or a couple select social clips—we’re talking the entire film, from start to finish, published directly to the feed.

And all together? It hit 34.9 million TikTok views.

This wasn’t Disney giving away a movie—it’s a deliberate social strategy that cleverly repurposes existing “content” (in this case, an actual movie) in a way that drives virality, attention, and most importantly, real views on Disney+.

From a social perspective, the most important thing to understand: watching the full High School Musical on TikTok is a terrible viewing experience.

The movie is fragmented into short clips, linked together by a playlist, watched on someone’s iPhone with a broken screen, with big black bars on both sides. In absolutely no way is this presentation a strong way to watch the full movie… but it is a grrreat way to watch clips from an old favorite.

Each clip acts like a modern trailer. Not a two-minute teaser, but dozens of micro-reminders that say, “Hey, remember how much you loved this?” It’s just enough to trigger emotion without ever replacing the real thing.

Take a look at an individual clip here. See how the film footage is still horizontal with huge black bars on either side? That’s far from a “social best practice” for most social strategists. What’ll especially raise eyebrows: TikTok actually supports horizontal video, allowing phone holders to turn their screens.

Disney+ didn’t use that feature, though, nor did they try to force film footage to fit vertical video. They slapped black bars on both sides! And that’s actually the right call.

They optimized the movie for social by not optimizing the movie for social. And like we said earlier, it’s far from the ideal full movie viewing experience, encouraging views on the proper Disney+ platform.

The TikTok algorithm’s felt pretty trigger happy lately. If you watch one full Tok of anything, you’re gonna get a lot of related content in the For Your Page. So if you watch just one of these High School Musical TikToks? I’ll bet you’re gonna see many more of the 52 that Disney posted.

It’s just another thing that makes posting the ENTIRE movie so smart—because the algorithms are smart! If someone watches one of the clips, it knows they like High School Musical and offers more! And if they don’t? That scroller will still get the other D+ TikToks, because the platform recommends content on a content level, not just an account level.

Case in point: the campaign has 35 million views and counting, but only one video has more than 4 million views. That means every video’s performing well without outliers, generating a huge average view number.

We often think of social in a per post basis. For the most part, that’s good—our primary goal is for individual pieces of content to succeed in a way that drives interest or sales in our businesses.

But when you can combine strong social posts that can stand on their own with a larger stunt or package, that’s when you can generate not just virality, but long term success.

We all know any clip from any film has viral potential on TikTok, whether it’s coming from a rando or an official account. But because Disney+ posted the whole movie, it’s a 1+1=3 situation. Every clip supports every clip, and the entirety of it works as a PR move while remaining social-first.

Now I do get slightly hesitant to encourage the package thinking, even though I believe in it. Far too often, we see brand social media content pillars that aren’t really that compelling, and there’s also been a new wave of “social series” thinking (developing IP for social) that I think’s a bit overblown right now. So yes, I want you thinking in stunts and packages, but remember—nothing matters if the individual posts aren’t strong and stand alone.

The final lesson here is the simplest, and the one most brands struggle with.

Disney didn’t create anything new for this. 35 million views generated by what’s basically just resizing a movie and admin work to get it up.

Every movie and TV company should be considering this strategy. And even if you’re not a studio with a catalog of films, the same principle applies. Most brands are sitting on years of great material they’re afraid to resurface, like old commercials, evergreen guides, strong past campaigns, anything. I bet a bunch of that holds up.

Don’t be afraid to give away your best stuff on social. Scrollers will see it and come your way.