Do you remember the Adam Sandler film Click?
It's OK if you don't remember the plot or anything; the 2006 film is hardly considered a classic. But a Vancouver couple has turned its middle-of-the-road DVD cover into comedy gold online.
Click-Tok stars
Kevin and Alyssa Aussant started the project account five years ago; but they only became internet-famous last year when they started doing their photoshopped joke DVDs on TikTok.
With over 19.2 million likes and nearly 384,000 followers, their joke covers are an unusual star on the social media platform; instead of dances or skits, the videos are almost all jokes about movies or pop culture with altered movie covers providing the punch lines. The Mt. Pleasant couple rarely appear in anything they post on 365daysofClick.
Instead, they take popular movie covers and tell a joke. (One of Kevin's favourites is about A Quiet Place.)
"It's fun when you get an audience when you haven't for so long," he says.
Brands are a popular target; it helps that they're something everyone knows. Another favourite is films from the 2000s and 2010s.
"We like to focus on 2010 movies because everyone has parodied the '90s," says Kevin.
Click to start
Click was successful, and so lots of Click DVDs were made. Many ended up in second-hand stores, which is where Kevin and Alyssa saw them.
"Kevin and I love thrifting, and every time we went, we would find a copy of Click. They were everywhere, so we started jokingly buying them," Alyssa tells Vancouver Is Awesome.
Alyssa works in the film industry; in 2017, she was managing social media accounts for productions happening around Vancouver. When she quit the job, she knew it would be good to keep up her social media skills, and so looked for something she could do on her own to force her to stay active.
Inspired by Everything is Terrible, a social media empire that collected thousands of copies of Jerry Maguire, Alyssa decided it'd be funny to take copies of Click all over the place, and post one photo a day. It's a riff on clickbait, she notes.
Thus @365daysofclick was born; in five years it's gained 30,000 followers.
"Originally, the whole idea was to make fun of social media," Alyssa says, adding that by now they've taken a photo of the DVD with every notable Vancouver "thing."
"The Instagram [account] really started as a weird art project," she adds.
Click here for more
Their audience started small, with fewer than 700 people following; most were people the Aussants had connections to.
Every day, Alyssa would make sure a new photo was published. It was easy at first but when the pandemic arrived things started to get repetitive.
"It was getting boring and Kevin suggested turning it into a video," Alyssa says.
That's when TikTok entered the picture. They started off with skits based on trends on the video platform, which gave them a chance to be more creative. They also started altering the covers sometimes.
"We posted like every day for a year on TikTok," Kevin recalls. "It was really hard to do a different video each day. At first, it was trends, then what we wanted."
Those videos have now been seen millions of times.
Clicking with Photoshop
As things evolved Kevin became more involved with his Photoshop skills. It was a skill he developed after he got in a huge accident as a bike courier.
"Kevin would spend hours doing the Photoshop and then together we'd go out," Alyssa says.
Clicked off
They enjoy seeing the responses they get. Many are in on the joke, and play along with things, like agreeing that whoever is on the cover was in the film. On TikTok, the community is open to the goofy fun of it all.
"The Gen Z audience (on TikTok) is so open to the weirdness, but then when it hits Facebook, they think we're trying to trick people," Kevin explains.
The pair know when a video's taken off on Facebook just by looking at the comments.
"They just actively do not like what we're doing," says Alyssa. "They don't understand the joy of it."
Click now
Along with their huge following, the couple has popped up in a few other places. On the meme encyclopedia, KonwYourMeme, 365daysofClick is recognized as the pioneer in knock-off DVD covers.
They've also caused the Mandela Effect in some people. While Adam Sandler definitely starred in the film, people have commented that they remember Seth Rogen as the star.
Despite all this, the two haven't turned it into a business.
"It's not quite like other social media where they have a really good per-view return," says Alyssa. "We're doing it out of the love for the game."
They note that their videos don't really work for monetization, either.
"We just do this for fun. We grew up watching tons of content online," says Alyssa. "YouTube raised me. So we're playing off that in our own way."
@365daysofclick Nobody’s gonna know. Day 36 of #CLICKBAIT. #clicktok #adamsandler #sethrogen ♬ how would they know bad girls club - Chris Gleason
