Influencers have become Hollywood's secret weapon and studios are spending big to keep them happy

• Influencers are getting paid tens (and sometimes hundreds) of thousands of dollars to generate content around new releases.
• Some have taken the opportunity to launch businesses and acting careers in earnest.
• Insider spoke to influencers and studio executives about the latest Hollywood trend.

Amanda Castrillo was driving with her husband through Los Angeles when she let out a scream so loud that he almost swerved off the road.

This wasn't a reaction to danger up ahead. Castrillo was buried in her phone, elated by some big news: She'd just scored an invite to the world premiere of "Spider-Man: No Way Home."

For months, Castrillo, 26, had worked on building up her TikTok account, posting fangirl missives and comedic bits about all things "Star Wars" and Marvel. She'd created the account in 2020 after being furloughed from her job in retail at the height of the pandemic.

And now here she was, getting invited to a red carpet for the first time.

More than a year later, she can still vividly recall the "No Way Home" premiere: the excitement of meeting other influencers in person, and, of course, of seeing all the stars of the hit Marvel movie in the flesh.

"It was a weird sense of impostor syndrome," Castrillo told Insider. "I thought, I'm actually breathing the same air that Zendaya is about to breathe!"

While she wasn't paid for attending, the opportunity to get close to the stars of her favorite films was a selling point in itself; the idea that Castrillo would get unique access to them to create content to help build her TikTok following was an added bonus.

"I didn't really know red carpets or events like that were even an option," Castrillo said.

Since then, she's been to dozens more.

Castrillo, who has over 300,000 followers on TikTok, is just one of many influencers who movie studios, networks, and streamers enlist to get the word out about new releases. While cultivating relationships with well-connected people in hopes of creating buzz for a product is nothing new, TikTok's explosive growth among Gen Z and millennials has made partnering with influencers a must-have for film studios looking to score opening weekend. And now influencers are using their newfound cachet with filmmakers to make it off the apps and onto the big screen.

These days, it's not enough to simply fly people with a lot of followers out to red carpets and hope they post about the film. Instead, studios are now dedicating members of their marketing teams to forging relationships with influencers and actually collaborating with them, paying them tens of thousands — and sometimes even hundreds of thousands —  of dollars to create content tailored to a specific project.

"The devotion to this part of marketing is probably the biggest change during the COVID era," says Marc Weinstock, the president of worldwide marketing and distribution at Paramount Pictures. "I think it was exacerbated by the fact that a lot of people were watching TikTok videos because they were stuck at home. So why wouldn't you have creators have fun with your campaign and get the word out that way?"

Castrillo says she can make anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000 in paid content deals with studios, depending on the type of content and the number of posts involved. While influencing is still a side hustle for her — she also works as a social media producer for the studio Awesomeness TV to pay the bills — many influencers have parlayed their proximity to Hollywood into full-time jobs, whether that's by regularly creating content, consulting for other influencers, or sometimes even becoming actors themselves.

'The more organic, the better'

After years of working on the marketing side at companies like Beats by Dr. Dre, DC Shoes, and K-Swiss, Gabriella Gomez, 32, saw an opportunity to strike out on her own with her influencer marketing company, Department of Influence. 

She now spends her days acting as a go-between for influencers and studios, helping the former find their voice and pitching the latter on how to market them.

"My first question when I sit down with an influencer is what do they want to do when they grow up — and that doesn't matter what their age is," Gomez tells Insider. "It's, 'What do you want to do with the platform you've built?' And it's different per person."

Once she gets a sense of an influencer's interests, she'll begin molding an idea with them that she can pitch to a studio.

"I'll have an idea for, say, the 'Barbie' movie. I'll pitch a couple ways how influencers can work into the release of the movie, and I take it to the studio," she explains. "I'll navigate and produce it all the way through."

Gomez's clients range from actor and entrepreneur Bella Thorne to The National Association of Theatre Owners, who leaned on her to hire influencers for its National Cinema Day campaign. In return, she takes a 10% cut of the overall budget plus a flat rate for her services.

Marketing teams at studios will also come up with ideas just for influencers.

For "Transformers: Rise of the Beasts," Paramount flew influencers to Singapore for the movie's world premiere.

Leading up to the release, they enlisted freestyle sensation Harry Mack to perform his talents alongside the cast.

In June, Paramount invited 450 influencers to a "Young Hollywood" screening of "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1" at its studio lot in Hollywood. The event featured Instagram and TikTok-friendly activations the influencers could use to create content, like a red carpet step-and-repeat and an area where they could take photos sitting on the motorcycle Tom Cruise rides in the movie. (Castrillo was on the invite list.)

"We know the kind of content they make, so we think about a movie that fits their voice," Weinstock says of how he chooses which influencers to work with. "We look to do it where the more organic, the better."

But what is the endgame for these influencers? Do they want to just live off the perks provided by studios?

Castrillo hopes the proximity to Hollywood she's gained as an influencer will help her forge a career in the industry she's currently covering as a fan.

"I've always loved entertaining people," she says. "I was a chorus kid, band, community theater. I would like to write and do TV."

'I thought you were going to be an influencer bullshitting around'

Andrew Bachelor, 35, better known on the internet as King Bach, has just landed in New Mexico, where he's being taken to the set of a Gerard Butler movie.

This isn't for some juicy content for his tens of millions of followers across his TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube; Bach is on-site because he has an actual role in the movie.

It wasn't always this way. Bachelor rose to internet fame during the Vine craze — he holds the Guinness World Record for the most Vine followers with over 16 million — and spent the ensuing years making six-figure deals with brands and studios. Over time, he realized paid content was great for a paycheck, but it didn't do much to raise his profile.

"I started to tone it down a lot just because the fans, they were realizing I was promoting these movies and I wasn't in them," Bachelor tells Insider.

When he was approached to do paid content in 2015 for the Zac Efron movie "We Are Your Friends," he says he declined until the producers agreed to put him in the film.

"They catered the script around me for a cameo, and it blossomed from there," Bachelor says. "Now what I'm doing is taking a role not as an influencer, but for real roles. You're hiring me as an actor."

Bachelor joins fellow influencers Addison Rae and Charli D'Amelio in making the jump from iPhone screens to the big screen. According to Bachelor, it was all part of his master plan.

After graduating from Florida State University, where he was a member of a comedy troupe, he began doing stand-up, hoping to follow in the footsteps of his heroes, Martin Lawrence and Jamie Foxx. Social media, he realized, was the new entryway into Hollywood.

Since "We Are Your Friends," he's appeared in comedies like "Meet the Blacks" and "When We First Met." He's currently on his own stand-up tour. But to date, the feather in his cap is appearing in the 2020 Gerard Butler movie "Greenland."

"I sat down with the director, Ric Roman Waugh, and we put together a character, not catered around King Bach, so I knew I had to shine out," says Bachelor, adding that he got the role thanks to his friendship with one of the movie's financiers. "It was a drama. I did the scene, and Ric pulled me aside and said, 'You're really good! I thought you were going to be an influencer bullshitting around.'"

After that, Waugh cast him in another movie, his 2021 release, "National Champions."

These days, Bachelor says if he ever attends a movie premiere, it's for fun, not for content. He recently jetted to Rome — on Universal's dime, though he says he wasn't required to post anything in return — to attend the world premiere of "Fast X," where he hung out with Ruby Rose and John Cena. He's also getting his production shingle, Purely Divine Studios, off the ground.

Though Bach has outgrown the influencer hustle, countless others are ready to take his place.

People like Straw Hat Goofy and Reece Feldman haven't just become regulars in movie promotion — the studios have also tapped them to host official red-carpet live streams and granted them face time with film stars for their accounts.

Going forward, Paramount's Weinstock believes the use of influencers to promote movies will only grow. 

"Marketing has evolved to where people don't want to be sold to, they want to discover," he says. "This allows for people to discover our marketing as opposed to it being poured down their throats."