The Brief

On a warm evening in early August, friends and family gathered in Juan Ramón González’s Pasadena backyard to eat homemade tacos and share stories about the kind-eyed 56-year-old who had lived in the neighborhood for three decades.

González, who entered the country in his 20s without authorization, had recently been reassessing his life in the United States. Amid challenges that once seemed unimaginable, he had been wondering whether he could — or should — stay here, or return to the homeland he hadn’t visited since the mid-1990s.

When he first told his wife, who has a U.S. green card, that he was thinking of “self-deporting” back to his home state of Michoacán in southwestern Mexico, she thought he was joking — and it wasn’t funny.

González had started considering leaving after the Trump administration began an aggressive campaign of harassment, detention and expulsion targeting undocumented immigrants. According to President Donald Trump, “People in our country illegally can self-deport the easy way, or they can get deported the hard way.”

The latter method sometimes involved the federal government shipping off immigrants to a maximum security prison in El Salvador or an alligator-surrounded, military-style prison camp in the Florida Everglades, or even cells built to hold presumed al-Qaida terrorists at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.

The Trump administration claims to have already deported 400,000 people as of September and says it is targeting the estimated 14 million remaining undocumented immigrants, almost a million of whom are believed to live in Los Angeles County, according to research from USC. Since ICE and Border Patrol cannot round up so many people, according to Amica Center for Immigrant Rights senior attorney Amelia Dagen, tactics involving high-profile cruelty aim to terrorize people like González into fleeing.

As the sun set over Pasadena that night, it illuminated the clouds shades of pink and orange against a deep purple sky. González looked up at the spectacular colors and told his loved ones how grateful he was to know them, how thankful he was that God had blessed him with “so many angels.”

González admires the sunset from his backyard on the evening before his departure.

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Alexis Hunley

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Capital & Main

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A land of opportunity

In the early 1990s, González was working in restaurants and hotels in Pátzcuaro, a town with red-tile roofs and colonial architecture on the edge of a high-altitude lake in Michoacán. He was earning enough to get by, but sometimes relied on tips to pay the bills. A relative encouraged him to seek out his destiny north of the border. After some convincing, González flew to Tijuana and then walked, he said, for three days to enter the United States.

Thanks to a family connection, work came fast. After a couple weeks in Pasadena, he was earning minimum wage, which was more than he ever had. By living on a tight budget in an apartment with some relatives, he discovered that he could send money to support his family south of the border.

Soon, he started working at a local Kentucky Fried Chicken and took a liking to the assistant manager. Three years later, they married and began raising two kids on a quiet Pasadena street. From his front porch, González became a friendly fixture of his neighborhood, greeting passing neighbors like Annabelle Freedman, who moved into the area in 2023. She later said that there was a warmth about González and his family that helped her to feel at home in Pasadena.

Weeks before his departure, González and his daughter look through family photos.

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Alexis Hunley

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Capital & Main

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For decades, González thrived there and rarely felt anxious about his legal status. The way he saw it, none of the presidents he had lived under in the U.S. — Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden — had caused him much trouble, and he never felt the need to regularize his immigration status, even after having a daughter who was a U.S. citizen. “For 30 years we had no problems. Life was good,” González told Capital & Main in a Spanish-language interview.

But when Trump returned to the White House early this year, “Everything changed.”

Heavily armed masked men began to grab day laborers in parking lots and throw them into unmarked vans. Border Patrol agents in riot gear deployed tear gas near residential neighborhoods, while others in plain clothes manhandled food vendors on the street.

“Watching everything on TV made me depressed,” he said. To him, it looked like kidnappings. “In all the time I’ve lived here, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Know your rights”

In January, while one of the most destructive wildfires in state history was reducing nearby homes to ash, González evacuated his family for a month. Their house was spared from the flames, but in the chaos, the restaurant where he was employed lost many of its customers and could no longer afford to keep him on. He began to look for new work, but amid Trump’s ongoing crackdown on immigrants, that job search slowed to a crawl because González was afraid to leave his neighborhood.

Freedman was handing out “Know Your Rights” stickers around Pasadena when she bumped into González. “If you know anyone who is undocumented,” she told him, “please share these.”

It wasn’t until the next time they bumped into each other that he told her about his immigration status. From then on, the two regularly met to discuss the challenges of undocumented life, which provided González with an outlet of sorts.

But that didn’t change his circumstances. Without an income for months, he was eating away at his savings, and his dread over immigration raids kept him up at night worrying that masked federal agents might storm into his home and grab him.

One night in May, Daisy — González’s 22-year-old American-born daughter — was getting ready for bed when she received a phone call from her father. He sounded faint, confused. Earlier that night, a stranger had found him on a sidewalk in Highland Park, fading in and out of lucidity, and called for help. González vaguely remembered something about being picked up by an ambulance. He had suffered a heart attack.

Ever since the Trump administration began large-scale raids at many of Los Angeles’ Home Depots, car washes and restaurants, González’s blood pressure had been spiking. The risk was real, he knew, since he had previously been through a heart attack several years earlier.

When Daisy arrived at the hospital, she saw wires connecting González to medical devices and crisscrossing his weakened, shirtless body.

If he were younger and healthier, González thought, he might not have let his circumstances get to him as much. There are millions of immigrants who, despite their fear, continue to work in industries that have long relied on, and sometimes exploited, undocumented labor, to get by and help their loved ones. There are community groups that have stepped up to protect vulnerable people from being victimized by federal agents from Los Angeles, New York City and Chicago to Portland, San Francisco, Boston and beyond.

Despite the widespread solidarity in his city, González, well into middle age, felt worn down. He started asking himself, “What am I doing here?”

If looking for work was difficult before, the heart attack made it nearly impossible. Stuck at home in bad health with constant anxiety, González came to a decision: He would “self-deport” and leave the community he’d been a part of for more than half his life.

The border

It’s one thing to decide to leave, it’s another to figure out how.

With the help of family and friends, González plotted his departure. He decided not to fly out of an American airport due to the risk of being detained by federal officials in the U.S. As for driving, it would take more than 30 hours from Los Angeles to Michoacán, and involve passing through some dangerous parts of Mexico. Instead, he decided to drive across the border into Tijuana and then catch a flight to Michoacán.

Daisy collected the documents her father might need, like his birth certificate and plane ticket, and Freedman helped start a GoFundMe campaign to supplement González’s depleted savings and offered to drive him across the border herself, with the help of her own dad.

It took weeks to finalize their plans.

It’s hard to know how many people have ended up in González’s position, according to Dagen, at the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights.

She used to reassure immigrants that their rights usually protected them from immediate detention and deportation, and that the government would for the most part follow the law. She says she can no longer make such promises.

“It is hard to tell people that they have constitutional and statutory rights and that it is very likely those rights will not actually be honored,” Dagen said.

The high-profile targeting of immigrants and the subversion of their rights has pushed many to flee the country, she said. The Department of Homeland Security claims, without providing evidence, that some 1.6 million people have fled the country.

While some, including González, have adopted the Trump administration’s preferred language of “self-deportation” to describe their departure under duress, Dagen notes that it does not define any sort of formal process; it is just people leaving without having any legal framework for returning to the United States.

In an ad released by DHS, Secretary Kristi Noem claims undocumented immigrants who choose to leave by their own accord “may have an opportunity to return and enjoy our freedom and live the American dream.”

But Dagen said such promises are being made in bad faith and used to convince people that this supposed “process” is their best chance to avoid violent arrests by federal agents.

González spent most of his last day at home with his family, savoring their last moments together and packing his things. When Freedman and her own father arrived to pick up González, his family was with him in the living room, weeping. González’s preschool-aged granddaughter had wrapped herself around his leg, begging him not to leave.

After the most difficult goodbyes of his life, he climbed into the Freedmans’ backseat, alongside Daisy and his daughter-in-law, and set off for the border.

Daisy clutched her father’s arm for much of the drive down to Tijuana. Even as they made their way toward Baja California, González remained terrified that immigration officials would somehow nab him before he left the country.

As mariachi music played through the car speakers, they reminisced warmly about González’s years in California, the only place Daisy has ever lived.

There had been times in the last three decades when González desperately wanted to make short-term visits to Mexico — his sister died of cancer near the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, his father passed away a few months later and less than a year after that, his mother followed. He had longed to return to see them in person or, at the very least, to attend their funerals. But he couldn’t be sure that if he crossed the border, he would be able to return.

As they approached the border in August, the atmosphere in the car grew silent. They saw a multicolored welcome sign approaching: “Tijuana México, aquí empieza la patria” — here begins the homeland. In the car, they were all in tears.

When they crossed, González could think of only one thing to say — something he’d waited to exclaim during his months hunkered down in his Pasadena home: “Fuck you, ICE.”

Homeland?

At Tijuana International Airport, González entered security, snaked his way around the belt stanchions and disappeared into his terminal. After a three-hour flight, he arrived in Michoacán, which was a very different place from the one he left in the mid-1990s. Some friends had moved away, others had died.

Today, González lives in the town of Pátzcuaro with an adult daughter from his first marriage whom he hadn’t seen in person in decades. Four of his seven surviving siblings — two brothers and two sisters — are helping him settle into a new life, sharing food with him when they can.

From there, he laments what he left behind in California.

“Half of my life stayed there,” González said during a recent follow-up phone interview from Pátzcuaro. “I cried when I said goodbye to my family, I cried when I arrived in Mexico, I cried the entire way here,” he said.

“When I think about it, I still cry sometimes."

When Daisy opens the front door of her Pasadena home, she still half-expects to see González welcoming her. Instead he is a 1,770-mile drive away, in a Mexican state that the Trump administration warns is too dangerous for Americans to travel to due to widespread violence from “terrorist groups, cartels, gangs and criminal organizations.”

To try to bridge the distance, Daisy and her father speak on the phone nearly every day. He tells her that it rains a lot in Michoacán, and that he misses her. They talk about the news from the U.S. — even though he doesn’t think he will ever be allowed to return.

He’s not sure if he’ll ever feel at home in Michoacán the way he did in Pasadena. He looks forward to a time when his California family might visit him. He hopes to find a new local restaurant job, even if it is certain to pay far less, so he can one day afford his own home in town.

But González no longer fears that masked men with the full support of the White House might abduct him. What keeps him up at night now is knowing that millions of other people are going through what he did in the U.S., attempting to live decent lives while the government treats them like violent criminals.

Copyright 2025 Capital & Main.

Orcas, the lovable black and white marine predators, have taken over 10,000 square feet of the Natural History Museum of L.A. County.

Orcas: Our Shared Future, which opened Sunday, includes floor to ceiling screens that play orcas swimming in the wild and a life-size replica of Ruffles.

He was one of the first orcas Alisa Schulman-Janiger, lead research biologist for the California Killer Whale Project, saw in the wild back in the 80s.

“It’s not him but it represents him. And I can actually go back in time and replay: I was standing here and my boyfriend who became my husband was standing next to me... seeing them under us foraging for fish,” she said.

Schulman-Janiger, who is also a research associate for the museum, said there was a sighting of these giants – the largest members of the dolphin family – in our local waters just this month.

“In the Channel Islands,” she said. “I just looked at some photos today sent to me by one of the naturalists... and she saw at least 16 different orcas.”

There are 140 original artifacts and specimens to see and experience at the immersive show, including sculptures and masks by Indigenous artists of the Pacific Northwest Coast.

Fred DeNisco, an orca expert from British Columbia who goes by ‘The Orca Man’ on social media, said he fell in love with orcas at the age of three, while watching 1993’s Free Willy in the back of a mini-van.

An original 'Free Willy' VHS clamshell on display at the Natural History Museum of LA County

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Robert Garrova / LAist

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He’s followed the exhibition all over the U.S. and Canada.

“It is just so unique in the breadth of topics that it covers, both in indigenous relationships with orcas, the research and more particularly our human relationship and the tumultuous relationship that has in media and captivity and even whale watching,” DeNisco told LAist.

And in case you’re wondering, the exhibition does include an original clamshell for a VHS copy of Free Willy, the film that inspired a generation of orca-lovers like DeNisco.

You can check out Orcas: Our Shared Future through April 25, 2027.

Ticket info is at the Natural History Museum website.

LAist is one of the Natural History Museum’s media partners for the exhibition, Orcas: Our Shared Future.

I’ve loved reading your reactions to the new LACMA David Geffen Galleries. Here are just a few of the many responses we received; most were positive, but there were some smart criticisms as well:

“The architecture by Peter Zumthor and the uniquely designed way of displaying the collection across time and place was brilliant! The joy is in finding the connections.” —Marlan

“Time and place braid together in a continuum unleashed from the strictly defined spaces typical of an encyclopedic museum. Truly radical in the best way possible.” —Bianca

“The art seemed to be presented in an almost random order, as if they took LACMA's collection like a deck of cards, shuffled them twice, and then just hung everything in the resulting order.” —Steve

Licorice Pizza has your music picks for the week, including post-hardcore band La Dispute at the Belasco, indie-folk star Cut Worms at Pacific Electric and rock en español sensation Julieta Venegas at the Grammy Museum — all on Tuesday. Wednesday, Charlie Puth is at the Forum, dream-pop trio Sunday (1994) is at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, singer-songwriter and breakout The Voice contestant Carol Ades plays the Troubadour and Latin rock band Zoé plays the first of two nights at the YouTube Theater. Thursday, Chet Faker plays the Novo, Maro is at the Fonda, King Tuff plays Sid The Cat Auditorium and a cappella legends Take 6 begin their four-night residency at the Blue Note.

Elsewhere on LAist, you can get a first look at the new Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, find out more about this King Taco’s historic designation, and grab your tickets for Wild Card with NPR’s Rachel Martin Live at the Crawford on May 2.

Events

Enormous Things

Tuesday and Wednesday, April 28 and 29
Elysian Theater
1944 Riverside Drive, Elysian Valley
COST: $25; MORE INFO

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Courtesy The Elysian

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A more up-my-alley musical has never before landed in my Instagram feed. Do you, like me, enjoy modern art and showtunes more than almost anything else? Enormous Things — a musical about Claes Oldenburg where Jeff Koons is the villain — might also be for you.

Just Sing 

Thursday, April 30, 7:30 p.m. 
Laemmle NoHo 7
5240 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood
COST: $14.50; MORE INFO

Fans of Pitch Perfect will want to check out this local real-life story. Just Sing follows the USC a cappella group SoCal VoCals as they make their way to the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella in New York City. Co-directors and cinematographers Angelique Molina and Abraham Troen will host a Q&A following the screening.

Japanese Heritage Night at Dodger Stadium

Monday, April 27, 7:10 p.m.
Dodger Stadium 
1000 Vin Scully Ave., Elysian Park 
COST: FROM $70; MORE INFO 

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Courtesy Los Angeles Dodgers

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Japanese superstar Yoshiki will perform at the Dodgers vs. Marlins game ahead of his headliner performance at Disney Hall in July, marking Japanese Heritage Night at the stadium. Get there early to hear the music, enjoy Japanese food specials and grab your special game jersey.

Old Woman Naked

Wednesday and Thursday, April 29 and 30, 7:30 p.m. 
The Broadwater Second Stage
6320 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood 
COST: $45; MORE INFO 

Acclaimed author Pamela Redmond is no stranger to using her own life for inspiration for her beloved fiction, like Younger (which later became the hit Freeform show) and Older. But baring all — emotionally and physically — onstage? That’s new territory for the 72-year-old. First performed in New York to a sold-out one-night-only crowd, Old Woman Naked digs into the truth about aging, sexuality, feminism, motherhood and coming into your own. An additional date of May 17 has just been added.

Comedy, at Night 

Tuesday, April 28, 8:30 p.m. 
UCB Franklin 
5919 Franklin Ave., Hollywood
COST: $20; MORE INFO 

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Courtesy UCB Comedy

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Bob Odenkirk, Sarah Silverman and many more bold-faced comedy names join this showcase at UCB Franklin, hosted by Nate Odenkirk and Ari Mostow.

Double Chin pop-up 

Monday, April 27, 9 a.m. until sold out 
Petitgrain Boulangerie 
1209 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica 
COST: VARIES; MORE INFO

Double chin? More like double yum. Get in line early for this pop-up at Petitgrain, featuring Leah Chin-Katz’s popular pastries and jams.

Glowworm Full Moon Night Hike 

Thursday, April 30, 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.  
Gabrielino Trail, Western Trailhead
915 Ventura Street, Altadena
COST: FREE; MORE INFO 

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Jason Journeyman

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Rattlesnakes sleep at night (right?), so head out for a late-night hike to see the rare California pink glowworms that come out this time of year in the Altadena foothills. Intrepid hiker Jason Wise (Journeyman) leads this nature-filled evening with L.A. Rises.

Screening: Dead City Punx 

Thursday, April 30, 7:30 p.m.
Brain Dead Studios
611 N. Fairfax Ave., Melrose 
COST: $18; MORE INFO 

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Courtesy Gold Atlas

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Dead City Punx exhibit 

Through Saturday, May 30
Beyond the Streets 
434 N. La Brea Ave., Mid-City
COST: FREE, MORE INFO 

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Punk in Los Angeles is far from dead. Dead City Punx, whose shows have shut down streets and seen fans start fires, are the focus of a new documentary and gallery show at Beyond the Streets. Dead City Punx (trailer here) tells the story of the band that built a following through “chaotic, illegal outdoor shows during the pandemic — complete with bonfires, fireworks, graffiti and clashes with law enforcement — ultimately sparking a movement that challenged what DIY and punk culture mean today.” Produced by Rage Against the Machine’s Zack de la Rocha, the film and gallery show are out now.

Los Angeles County is home to the largest homeless population in the U.S. — more than 72,000 people, according to official estimates.

In 2024, county voters approved Measure A, a half-percent sales tax increase aimed at raising $1 billion a year for homeless services and affordable housing.

Its backers promised voters more transparency, accountability and results.

As new revenue flows in, questions about how L.A. County spends homelessness dollars aren’t going away.

How Measure A came to be 

Homeless service providers and advocates wrote and campaigned for Measure A in 2024. Their goal was for it to replace a smaller, temporary county sales tax for homeless services known as Measure H, which was set to expire in 2027.

That quarter-percent sales tax, approved by voters in 2017, delivered about $500 million a year.

That new funding helped move more people into shelter beds, and the number of unhoused people in shelters in L.A. County increased from about 15,000 in 2017 to about 23,000 in 2024, according to official estimates.

But the county's overall unhoused population — which includes people staying in shelters as well as those living on the streets —- grew by 37%, from about 55,000 in 2017 to more than 75,000 in 2024.

Measure A’s solution was to double the special sales tax for homelessness, make it permanent and use the extra revenue to help build more affordable housing in addition to homeless services.

A majority of county voters agreed. The county enacted the “Affordable Housing, Homelessness Solutions, and Prevention Now Transactions and Use Tax Ordinance” — and then started collecting the Measure A tax in April 2025.

Elise Buik, President and CEO of United Way of Greater Los Angeles presents an award to Peter Laugharn, President and CEO of Conrad N. Hilton Foundation at the United Way "Annual HomeWalk To End Homelessness" in 2017. Both organizations were major backers of Measure A, along with the California Community Foundation and others.

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Greg Doherty

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Measure A’s promises

Voters approved Measure A amid increasing concerns about the regional agency long tasked with managing public homelessness dollars by the county and city of L.A.

A county audit in late 2024 found that the Los Angeles Regional Homelessness Authority, or LAHSA, had regularly paid service providers late and failed to properly monitor contracts. A separate court-ordered report found L.A. city officials had made it impossible to accurately track homelessness spending, largely by outsourcing to LAHSA.

Measure A proposed a new approach to the region’s homeless services system, which many have described as “dysfunctional.” Written into the ordinance were clearer systemwide goals, increased accountability over spending and consequences for programs that fail to perform.

Unlike Measure H, which focused on getting people off the street, Measure A was written to also focus on preventing people from falling into homelessness. It directs more than 35% of its roughly $1 billion in yearly revenue to a new county affordable housing agency. Supporters estimated it could produce 18,000 new affordable units in L.A. County over 10 years.

It directs 60% or revenues towards homeless services — and dedicates a portion of that funding to be split directly among L.A. County’s 88 cities.

Measure A delegated oversight responsibilities for the spending to the county Board of Supervisors and two governance bodies the board had established in 2023 to coordinate regional planning on homelessness.

The first is an advisory group called the Leadership Table for Regional Homelessness Alignment. It includes nonprofit service providers and experts who meet regularly and inform policy decisions.

That group advises a more powerful one called the Executive Committee for Regional Homelessness Alignment, which sets Measure A’s goals and makes plans and funding recommendations.

Its nine members include two county supervisors (currently Kathryn Barger and Lindsey Horvath), the L.A. mayor (currently Karen Bass), an L.A. City Council member (currently Nithya Raman), a representative from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration and four officials from cities across the county.

The committee’s recommendations go to the county Board of Supervisors, which has the final say.

Last March, the supervisors formally adopted five-year Measure A goals with 2030 deadlines. They include: reducing unsheltered homelessness in the county by 30%, moving twice as many people annually into permanent housing and boosting affordable housing production by about 50%.

Measure A’s effects

One of the early after effects of passing Measure A has been a reorganization of who controls the growing pot of county homelessness dollars.

In April 2025, the Board of Supervisors voted to divert more than $300 million from LAHSA and create a new county department, the Department of Homeless Services and Housing, to manage homelessness funding directly.

Supporters of the move said it was necessary because Measure A voters were demanding accountability that LAHSA wasn’t delivering. The new county department formally launched in January.

The full transition of LAHSA programs to the county is planned in July. The Board of Supervisors recently directed the new department to create strict oversight procedures for all homeless service contracts.

Last March, L.A. County approved its first annual budget that included projected allocations from Measure A, totaling about $1 billion. The county had twice as much funding at its disposal but still cut tens of millions of dollars in programs and services for unhoused people, citing a strategic shift.

Now, the county is finalizing the budget for the next fiscal year, which starts July 1. It again includes $1 billion for homeless services and affordable housing because of Measure A, but the homelessness spending plan includes nearly $200 million in program reductions.

County officials said those reductions were necessary to cover rising shelter costs and the loss of pandemic-era state and federal funding.

Measure A has allocated about $100 million annually, or roughly 9% of all Measure A revenues, directly to the 88 cities within L.A. County to address homelessness in what’s known as the Local Solutions Fund. The county publishes a regional plan showing how that money is used.

The funding is awarded based primarily on a city’s recent unhoused population numbers, using estimates from the official annual homeless count.

Some city leaders complain that their residents are paying way more into the Measure A tax than they are getting out of it.

Torrance mayor George Chen says his city will generate about $26 million annually for the county through the Measure A sales tax, and it will receive about $559,000 in local funding through the measure.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath supported the Measure A sales tax, and also championed the effort to break from LAHSA and form a new county homelessness department.

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Affordable housing focus 

The major structural difference between Measure A and its predecessor is that it earmarks roughly 36% of its proceeds — about $363 million a year — for affordable housing development. Those funds flow through a new independent regional agency called the Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency, or LACAHSA.

The agency’s mandate is to create new affordable homes, preserve lower-rent housing and prevent displacement. It is still in its early stages.

As of March, the agency had received $275 million from Measure A and distributed $25 million to recipients, according to its Measure A Funds Tracker. Most of what had been awarded was emergency rental assistance.

On April 15, the agency’s board conditionally approved its first major round of housing production funding, approximately $102 million for 10 projects that will add 566 units of affordable housing, according to a recent report.

Projects are required to break ground within one year of receiving awards. A second round of awards is scheduled for the board's May 13 meeting.

Demand for funding far outpaced what was available: LACAHSA received 242 applications for 127 projects totaling $1.56 billion and representing 11,484 units.

What’s next?

The goals Measure A set are ambitious, and the deadline is 2030. A county dashboard tracking progress shows the region gaining ground reducing unsheltered homelessness while falling behind on other targets.

The county hasn’t made any progress decreasing the number of people falling into homelessness or decreasing homelessness among people with mental health or substance use disorders. The dashboard does not yet include affordable housing production metrics.

The transition from the regional Homeless Services Authority to the new county Department of Homeless Services and Housing is still underway, with a full handoff of staff and programs targeted for July 2026.

LAHSA recently announced it will lay off 284 employees at the end of June.

Federal cuts and changes to funding from Medicaid and the U.S. Housing and Urban Development — flagged as “threats to recent progress” in the county's recent budget documents — loom over the entire system.

According to new data from TikTok and theater trade group Cinema United fan-made TikToks can now do what big marketing campaigns couldn't always achieve: keep a movie thriving after opening weekend.

At this year's CinemaCon, the annual convention for movie theater owners, director Denis Villeneuve showed the first seven minutes of his third Dune film. He told the crowd he made his latest installment of the science fiction saga for the fans. And long before the December opening, fans have been posting their own reactions on TikTok.

"There's this incredible chant in Dune 3 that's in the trailer and what we've seen is it's a soundbite that users on TikTok have embraced and made their own content with," says Cameron Curtis, executive vice president of global digital marketing for Warner Bros.

He says TikTok is a tremendous platform for reaching new audiences.

"We often see that the creator content on [the] platform outperforms our traditional advertising content by 3-to-1. It's become just critical to our strategy and everything that we do," says Curtis.

He says Warner Bros. and other studios have been partnering with TikTok creators to market their films. According to TikTok executives, that's for good reason. "We really saw that the buzz doesn't stop with the opening weekend," says Dennis Papirowski, TikTok's global head of Entertainment and News.

He says every day, the platform's users create 6.5 million posts related to content from new and classic films and TV shows. According to TikTok, half of their users say they discovered a new movie through the platform. And of those, more than a third looked up showtimes and purchased a movie ticket.

Dawn Yang, the company's global head of entertainment partnerships and business development, says studios tend to do a lot of marketing for the first weekend a film opens.

"But on TikTok, it really takes off after the first weekend," she says, "because people have seen the entire movie and they want to talk about it."

TikTokers post enthusiastic movie reviews, they cosplay and reenact scenes, and some create new edits from the official trailers and footage. For instance, 24-year-old college student Josiah Pilet remixed Spider-Man clips set to music.

Fan edits would have been no-nos in the old Hollywood strategy of protecting intellectual property, says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for Comscore, which analyzes the box office.

"There was a time when studios did not want marketing messaging going out that wasn't from them," he says. Now, he says even negative responses to movies are welcome "as long as it's not something horrible, that can boost the profile of a movie and excitement around it, because sometimes people want to see what the fuss is all about."

Dergarabedian says studios are increasingly embracing and harnessing the power of short TikToks made by the key Gen Z audience.

"You have some movies that open huge, have a huge opening weekend, then drop by 70% or more in their second weekend," he says. "But the way you keep people coming back is that you not only have a great movie, but the social media engagement continues, amplifies and creates that excitement and the FOMO factor among potential moviegoers."

Take last year's box office hit Sinners. Cinema United and TikTok's report found that buzz about the film surged on the platform during its opening week — and ticket sales barely dipped the following week.

But social media platforms, including TikTok, have also sometimes caused minor headaches for theaters. Last year, fan-made posts chronicled the mayhem sparked by a line spoken by Jack Black's character in The Minecraft Movie.

Audiences shouted "chicken jockey" along with him and tossed popcorn in theaters. The ruckus was so chaotic that one fan even carried a live chicken into the movie, as shown by one viral video.

At CinemaCon, Warner Bros. executives offered a good-natured apology to theater owners for the mess.

But it's not just fans posting TikToks. As executive director of communications and content for B&B Theatres, Paul Farnsworth makes funny TikToks, starring himself and the staff — often in the lobby, playing around with the latest movies.

"It's like a little wink-wink joke, nothing that you're going to like, pay money to go see a stand-up comedian say," he says. "But I think for us, it indicates to our guests a sensibility of like the playfulness of the movies, the magic of the experience, the shared communal thing that we're all trying to achieve with them."

Farnsworth says he asks the studios for guidance on the material — hoping his viral TikToks get people into movie theaters.