Every year, I have the honor of running a panel at NALIP—the National Association for Latino Independent Producers—at their annual conference. In July of 2025, I interviewed Whalar co-founder Neil Waller, who shared his ambition to build MTV for the next generation. Earlier this year, he and his partner James Street took that idea into the world with the launch of Lyrical Lemonade TV. Neil thinks and builds at a macro level. Its fascinating and inspiring to see how he thinks.

But for the filmmakers trying to navigate the changing landscape, this year I wanted to bring the conversation closer to the work: How are producers and production companies bringing the traditional film business and the creator economy together? What does that look like in practice?

I started asking around about who was doing it. I was surprised and how few examples turned up. But eventually those conversations led me to Ben Stillman, co-founder of Further Adventures.

Ben is running the kind of experiment we keep coming back to at Open Gardens: taking the experience and capabilities of the traditional film business and building a company with creators, with their ambitions at the center.

Below is a brief overview of Further Adventures, followed by our conversation. I’ve edited the transcript for length and clarity, marked the cuts, and added my own commentary between exchanges.

The business in brief

Further Adventures is a content studio that sits between digital and traditional media. It soft launched in 2024 and is led by Stillman and Steve Beckman, a childhood friend of Stillman’s who spent about a decade at YouTube.

Stillman’s background is firmly legacy. He started at Cinetic selling international distribution rights, co-founded Black Bear Pictures with Teddy Schwarzman in 2011 and eventually ran its TV studio, then founded Birchall Entertainment in 2022. His credits include The Imitation Game, I Care A Lot, Gold and Ben Is Back.

Further Adventures does three things, and keeps a traditional slate alongside them:

• Invests in creator channels. Capital for channels with an audience that want to expand their output or their team.

• Develops original IP. Projects built with creators and storytellers, often starting from an existing audience or community.

• Helps creators go to Hollywood. Development, packaging and production support for creators who want to make features or series.

They have several projects in development across those buckets. One is Greener Grass Awaits, a feature based on a horror video game that found its audience on YouTube. A surreal horror story disguised as a late-night round of golf, the game built a cult following through gameplay videos that generated millions of views.

Further Adventures also maintains a traditional indie film slate, including Walter Thompson-Hernández’s If I Go Will They Miss Me (made on a microbudget—just crossed a million bucks in theater box), Ramzi Bashour’s Hot Water and Casey Modderno’s Here for the Weekend.

Two questions run through the conversation. What does a legacy company offer a creator who already has an audience? And what does it take in return?

The conversation

Ben Odell: Tell us your background and why you made this move.

Ben Stillman: I started in the traditional film business, working for a company called Cinetic in New York, which sells international rights, so I built an understanding of the business from more of an agent’s perspective. Then I went off to launch, in 2011, a company called Black Bear, which has grown in a lot of ways but at the time was really focused on production and film financing. We made movies like The Imitation Game and I Care A Lot. I really came to understand the business from not just a producer’s perspective but more of a studio perspective. Toward the end I was working in TV there, launching a TV studio, in an era when independent TV was still vibrant.

At some point I wanted to build my own thing. One of my childhood friends, Steve Beckman, was at YouTube for about a decade, and we’d always talked about ways we might work together. He was ready for a transition as well. There was a moment arriving of the convergence of what I have done for 15-plus years producing film and TV, and seeing some of the struggles of the marketplace, with the opportunities coming from what Steve’s expertise really was, which was the creator economy, digital storytelling and digital distribution. We decided to bring our expertise and relationships together to build a company that’s telling stories we’re proud of, supporting storytelling of all sorts with a bit more of a forward-thinking model.

What I like here is that Ben isn’t making some big declaration about creators being the future. He’s a producer with 15 years in the business who found the traditional marketplace too rigid and teamed up with someone who knew the digital side. That’s a different starting point from a legacy company adding a digital division. Both perspectives are there from the beginning. Of course, a lot depends on those two people and their judgment. I’m curious to see how they carry that into a bigger company.

Ben Odell: You could have kept making movies. Where did you see opportunity beyond that?

Ben Stillman: We’re intentionally diversified still. Two years into the company, we’ll do everything from investing in great channels, to creating original IP, to figuring out whether there are ways to expand on a creator’s audience and brand. For others, capital isn’t as much of a need. It’s really more, how can we bring our expertise, our relationships, our perspective to help them? If they have an interest in telling a story they’re going to bring to Hollywood, we can help navigate that, because so many people in this space have built their own businesses with just themselves or a couple of trusted partners. They’re not having to take on extra infrastructure, extra notes, extra perspectives, and that’s probably turned out really well for them.

A lot of our early conversations came down to: you have this audience, you’re a great storyteller, you can keep doing what you’re doing, but do you have aspirations to tell a 100-minute feature? […] There’s a before and after as far as how they’re thinking about it. Are they looking to do it in a roll-up-your-sleeves, bootstrap way, make the smallest version of it, versus partnering with A-list producers who come with all their talent relationships and the studio deal?

Creators have built businesses without a producer or studio weighing in on every decision. Why bring that in now? Ben seems to understand that he has to give them a good reason. And for a producer, it’s worth asking what the creator actually wants help with. Getting something made on a small budget and building it into a studio project are different jobs, with different deals.

Ben Odell: Take us through what investing in a channel looks like.

Ben Stillman: There are channels that have built up a meaningful audience and are now looking to raise another round to expand their output or bring in people. A lot of creators began as one person with a camera, and then they built a reliable audience that wants to see more of the story they’re telling, and that requires more time and support. Sometimes it’s hiring someone to oversee the brand deals and business relationships so they can focus on the creative, or someone who wants to have a writers’ room because they’ve been doing it for a number of years and now feel stretched too thin.

It’s not cookie-cutter. There are some that are almost a manufacturing problem, where they have more demand than they can support, so they need more capital for it. For others, it’s the trajectory of what they’re trying to do as storytellers, and the aspirations are changing. Within that we’re trying to figure out deals that make sense for both sides, because these are self-sustaining businesses, and if you’re taking on capital it has to make sense for them. For us, it’s the right balance of where we still have upside. We’re very focused on telling stories in the traditional space, but we want to support a digital channel too and find ways to bridge both, creatively but also from the business standpoint. That’s sometimes an interesting dance.

What interests me here is how practical the investment can be. A creator already has an audience but needs writers to make more shows or a business manager to keep up with the work. Further Adventures can put money toward that specific need or help organize their business better. Each creator needs something different, though, which means Ben and Steve have to spend time understanding the business before deciding if / where they can help.

Ben Odell: Do creators actually want what a traditional producer has to offer?

Ben Stillman: For sure. YouTube TV is so ubiquitous, and people are watching content on digital platforms so much that quality has to match that expectation for the audience. There is definitely a need to navigate the actual Hollywood system, with the gatekeeping, frankly, that people are not always used to. You need help to do something as simple as cast your project, and have those relationships. But there’s also an anxiety for a lot of people who are used to doing everything on their own terms to suddenly be on set with 50 to 150 people who are all trying to service their vision, and how to manage that. That’s not always an intuitive thing for someone who hasn’t done it before.

This is where an experienced producer can be really useful. Having a million followers doesn’t prepare you to run a 150-person set. A good producer knows how to do that. The trick is bringing that experience into the room without taking over or making the creator feel like they’ve lost control of their own project.

Ben Odell: What mindset shift does someone from legacy have to make to work with creators?

Ben Stillman: It’s been eye-opening and inspiring. I’ve been doing this for 15-plus years, and sometimes you get frustrated with how hard it is to make a movie that can be great. And then you approach something with the thought, oh, maybe we don’t need permission to do this. There are budgetary parameters, of course, but it’s really about leaning into that spirit.

On the business side, it’s interesting because traditional Hollywood is: you pay for it, you own it, right? That’s the way it works. Here are creators who have built their own audience, have their own IP that they’ve spent years developing in many cases, and that warrants a bit more collaboration. This shouldn’t be the thing where you’ve done a great job building something and now you have to hand the keys over. It should be a genuine partnership.

But what does a creator give up in exchange for that help? That’s where I think about the multi-channel networks, or MCNs, of the 2010s. Hollywood money came into YouTube, creators were called partners, and the companies often ended up owning the rights. Eventually, creators started asking what they were getting out of the arrangement.

I brought up Lyrical Lemonade TV because of how they structure that partnership. Music video director Cole Bennett curates the channel, bringing in creators to make shows for his audience. The partners fund the shows, but creators own a significant portion of their IP and shares in the ad sense, brand deals, etc. I wanted to hear how Ben thought about that trade and where he saw the business opportunity.

Ben Odell: If you’re sharing ownership with the creator, how does that change the business for you? Where do you see the opportunity beyond the film itself?

Ben Stillman: It speaks to the entrepreneurial approach that a lot of creators take. Think about traditional film: most movies, you’re lucky to be in net profits. If you’re investing, you’re getting 120 percent back, and that’s considered a win. But then it kind of ends there. So there may be more value to that individual film, but it’s not the most sustainable business. Creators have been more entrepreneurial: merch, brand deals, label concepts where they support other creators and build their own channels. For us it’s exciting to embrace shared ownership of the IP, which is okay. Maybe this film gets made and we’re not fully owning it as we might otherwise in a different system. But we’re also participating, helping support your larger business, which is really a mini corporation in terms of what they’re creating. That makes it a lot more exciting for what could actually make somebody.

I’ve always thought making a movie is a little like opening a restaurant, getting it packed, and then closing it two months later. If you’re lucky, you get to reopen a few years down the road with a sequel. We spend all that time and money finding an audience, then give them very little reason to stick around. Working with creators gives us a chance to rethink that. What else can we build together that keeps people coming back between films?

Ben Odell: Have you thought about movies as one piece of a bigger ecosystem around a community?

Ben Stillman: Definitely. We have one project we just shot in New York this past summer called Old Soul, with a creator [named Babish] whose YouTube channel is centered on cooking and recreating famous meals from movies. He always wanted to tell this specific story, and he has the good fortune of a very successful channel that kept him very busy. We met, we talked about this idea, and we said, let’s figure out how to make this actually happen. We made it this past summer, and I think it’s turning out great.

We’ll submit to the festivals. If it can be a Sundance or South by or Tribeca short, that’s still fun and meaningful. But we’ve also talked about whether there’s something else. His channel focuses on food. Is there a food-related concept and format that can accompany this short? Is this the type of thing we can take to 30 cities, doing a live show of what people know you for while also screening the film in a meaningful way? […] It’s not just making a movie and then putting it out there, hoping for the best, which frankly is a lot of what you do in traditional, right? It’s thinking about how you’re going to market something, how you’re going to build off it before it’s even a success, and how you get the audience to engage and invest as much as possible, so that they feel ownership of it, both for the success of the IP you’re building and for the other opportunities that come from it.

Babish’s audience comes for the food. The challenge is giving them a reason to follow him into a very different kind of storytelling.

Ben Odell: What do you look for in a creator who wants to move into a traditional format?

Ben Stillman: It’s a little bit subjective and intangible, but we’re always looking for a unique point of view. One of our original conversations, Steve and I, was that yes, it’s great to capture an audience on whatever digital channel, but not everyone’s going to film school anymore. Some people have been telling stories on TikTok or YouTube since they were eight years old and have honed those skills as storytellers. Being able to identify talent that has something to say and that wants to take the next step, whether it’s an extension of what they’ve already built or not, is what we look for.

I don’t think there’s one thing we’re looking for, but we’re looking for creators who aren’t following the trends, who aren’t following the algorithm. We’ll take projects with people who have only a couple thousand followers on YouTube because they seem like they have something to say and they’re putting stuff out consistently and it’s growing. It’s really the same thing we’re looking for on the traditional side, where you see a short and say, that’s someone I want to support the future of.

At Sundance, someone has already sorted through thousands of films before you sit down. YouTube doesn’t have that filter, and subscriber counts don’t tell you who can tell a story. Ben is bringing that same producer’s eye to YouTube, even to channels with a few thousand followers. That’s a bet on talent, and a harder one to sell to investors—which brings us to the next question.

Ben Odell: Do you have any rigorous way to value one creator’s community against another’s?

Ben Stillman: I would say it’s not. We maybe should be more rigorous with some of the process, but sometimes it’s gut. Depending on the creator, is this growing or not? If they’re selling merch, how does that merch sell? Have they done sub-channels from the main thing they’ve grown, and how are those numbers? There are many services we can pay for that give us very granular data, and that’s great. But it’s also just looking at it as all of us producers, but also consumers. You watch one thing and you’re like, I’m happy to watch this while I’m doing laundry and it entertains me, but I’m not going to pay 20 bucks and leave the house and spend two hours for my kids to go and see it, right? So what shows evidence-level commitment as an audience, that people who’ve been excited from the start will actually come along for?

There are also a lot of creators who’ve done incredible things and are starting to be on the downside of their influence, and are aware of it. Sometimes that’s an opportunity, because it’s how people creatively want to do something different. And there are other times where you look at it and people want valuations based on things that were happening three years ago and maybe not so much anymore.

Ben’s laundry test gets at a question I keep coming back to: will someone who watches a creator while folding clothes pay for a ticket and leave the house to see them? We’ve seen audiences make that leap with horror, but how much of that is about the creator, and how much is about the genre?

Ben Odell: Iron Lung, Obsession and Backrooms were three very different models. Do you expect this to translate beyond horror?

Ben Stillman: I agree they’re all distinct and worked in different ways. The timing of it, of course, yielded this mentality of the creator-to-traditional pipeline. When Steve was still on YouTube, we met with one of these filmmakers well before all this, when he was around 16. I think there are three very different scenarios, but there are things you can take from each.

It’s a great question. We thought a lot about this, because even before these three pictures there were a lot of horror shorts on YouTube that got the feature-film treatment, and some did well, some not. There’s an obvious intersection with a genre that people will still go to the theater enthusiastically to see, combined with an audience that was excited to support it because the creators made it. I do think it hasn’t been proven yet in other genres so much. But there’s a YouTube new wave, a lot of talented filmmakers who have taken the form of vlogging and done it with more narrative behind it, and it’s compelling. For us, a bet on talented filmmakers who happen to be putting stories on YouTube will yield an audience. And I want to celebrate the movies made for a few hundred thousand dollars, not only look for big box office records.

Horror makes this harder to read because it already brings an audience of its own. Comedy and drama will tell us more about how much of the draw is the creator—and whether the budgets make sense for the audience that follows.

Ben Odell: If I’m a producer with a couple of independent films and no capital, how do I make this shift?

Ben Stillman: It depends where you’re starting. If you’re looking to break into Hollywood and you’re trying to figure out whether to focus on finding that next great script or finding an interesting creator, I think there’s a lot of creators who don’t have great scripts who want to do a feature or a series. They have an audience and they’re doing one particular thing, but they don’t know how to transition. So if you have the scripts, and maybe the doors to getting a meaningful filmmaker or cast on board are closed or nearly closed, maybe there’s a creator interesting to you. You reach out, and you find a way to be the one proactively making that bridge. I think that’s something a lot of creators are looking for.

It depends on your own network. Traditionally, thinking about a project is the package: script, filmmaker, cast. Now it’s also, how do you have something that extends beyond that? Do you have a creator who’s involved? Someone in your life who has a clothing label or an interesting publication can amplify the potential audience of a project.

I think a lot of producers hear “creator economy” and feel like they have to start over. But finding a voice you believe in and bringing them the right material is work we already know how to do. We just have to get used to looking in different places.

Ben Odell: What excites you about the future of entertainment?

Ben Stillman: Beyond access to new voices and storytellers coming from digital spaces, the more people get inspired and excited about [Backrooms, Obsession, Iron Lung] and so on, the more that’s going to motivate people who maybe wouldn’t otherwise give it a try. I’m really excited that people are going to the theater again. This younger generation seems to really care about that. The economics of that are exciting, and it’s not as dire as it was a few years ago. […] Here’s an idea with a passionate audience online, and how do we tell that story so it will play in the theater, and people will show up because it’s a great movie, but also because they’re bringing to it this expectation, this understanding, this enthusiasm. That’s something I’m very optimistic about.

What I take from it

What interests me about Further Adventures is that Ben and Steve are building this while still making traditional indie films. That’s how I think this shift will happen for a lot of us. We bring what we know, find people who know what we don’t, and figure out where we can build a business together. Sometimes a creator needs money to hire writers. Sometimes they need someone who can cast and run a bigger production. And if we want to participate in the business they’ve spent years building, we have to be willing to share ownership of what we make together.

It’s still early. The company is two years old, we haven’t seen the deals, and Ben is candid about how much of choosing creators comes down to instinct. We also have more evidence that this works in horror than in other genres. I’m interested in seeing what these first projects teach them, especially where the audience follows and where it doesn’t. Those are lessons the rest of us could use.

Last week, a friend was speaking at SoCom, a new national event series about how people discover and buy products through social media. It brings together brands, creators, platforms, agencies and technology companies focused on creator-led sales and livestream shopping. My friend is a social media strategist and entrepreneur with an uncanny ability to see around corners. She knows I’m fascinated by what she does—and that I draw inspiration from it for my own businesses.

At lunch, we sat with two engineers who built a platform that scores creators’ value for brands, and a 22-year-old founder whose platform helps social media management companies analyze their creators and match them with brands. And then there was me, a legacy producer of television and film, trying to understand how all these worlds are colliding.

My friend said our lunch (perhaps a bit too generously) reminded her of the coffeehouses that helped launch the Enlightenment: people from different worlds exchanging ideas that would never emerge inside a single industry. She had explained, more clearly than I could, why I find it so valuable to get outside our core businesses and look around with curiosity.

On day one, I heard from SoCom organizer David Vanderveen; Vincent Launay of TikTok Shop; Leonard Armato of Management Plus Enterprises in conversation with John Kraski of Dhar Mann Studios; Jamie Gutfreund of Creator Vision; Deren Baker of Flywheel Ventures; K-beauty marketer Norman Chu with Rashmi Paul of SoCom News; and Will August of Outlandish. Their sessions covered celebrity brands, livestream commerce, creator measurement, affiliate sales and the increasingly blurry line between content and shopping.

Why does any of this matter to my business? Social commerce is rooted in storytelling and faces many of the same marketing problems as film and television. It offers a window into how people’s habits are changing and, for producers who know how to tell and market stories, a possible new source of revenue. That’s something we are pursuing at my company, candidly.

I could attend only the first day. Here are three things I learned.

Three things I learned about celebrity at SoCom…

As my brain tried to filter all this information, one theme emerged across a few different panels—the value of celebrity…

1. Brands are being told to stop chasing stars and start running a show. TikTok’s Vincent Launay told brands that success is no longer about one viral moment or one famous creator. It’s about “operational excellence.” One poignant example --- At K2O, the hydration brand Kylie Jenner founded, more than half the sales come out of a studio an operator built in his basement, where staff paid $50 an hour go live on TikTok. The celebrity’s name is on the brand, but the hosts are doing the selling.

Will August, whose agency runs TikTok Shop for brands, was blunter about trust. David Beckham, he said, “can’t convert because he doesn’t give social proof.” A famous face brings attention. The trust that closes a sale comes from the people showing the product and answering questions.

1. A famous face can’t fix a product that doesn’t deserve a second buy. David Vanderveen built the Excess energy drink, sold it to Amway in 2015, and later helped launch IM8, a supplement brand co-founded with David Beckham. IM8 reached about $200 million in revenue in roughly 18 months. Then he told a room full of founders not to copy it: “Be careful about celebrity brands. That’s coming from a very successful celebrity brand.”

Here is what Beckham actually did for IM8. He gave the brand “stratospheric awareness” and attracted major ambassadors and creators, but “it didn’t convert that many sales.” The celebrity is a megaphone, not an engine. It buys attention and recruits talent.

So why do so many celebrity brands fail quickly? Vanderveen’s answer was pretty blunt: the celebrity’s team isn’t involved day to day, and “the product doesn’t deserve a second buy.” Fame can win the first purchase. The second belongs to the product and the people running it.

1. Celebrity prices itself on attention, not on sales. Jamie Gutfreund made this point with a made-up example she borrowed from the founders of Trudy, a company that scores how much a creator is likely to sell for a brand. Marge makes one post and drives 100 sales. Lois makes many posts and drives the same 100 sales, but costs far more. A brand that counts only sales sees two equal results. Gutfreund called that “just dumb” but “preventable.”

The example is about creators, but it points to a bigger problem with celebrity. A famous person’s fee is set by an unscientific analysis of how many people know them—followers, box-office success and the like—not by how much they will sell. And brands often can’t check because they don’t track what each result cost them. Gutfreund said most companies don’t keep their own creator data. It sits in reports their agencies hand over.

So a big name gets paid like an engine when, as Vanderveen showed, it often works like a megaphone. Fame is worth paying for when you want attention or want to recruit other talent. It’s a poor bet when you’re buying sales. 3Pas is partnering with more and more creators, so this is now the first question I ask: what did each result cost? In plain terms, what did we pay, and what did we get?

The pattern: Fame buys attention. Everything after that is operations, product and measurement.

Where my head goes—The lesson on the commerce side feels fairly clear. As we’ve explored businesses with celebrities, I’ve watched some representatives become so focused on the percentage their famous client receives that they lose sight of what actually makes a company work: a product people want to buy again, strong distribution and disciplined operations. They overvalue the trust the celebrity has built with an audience and undervalue almost everything required to turn that trust into a durable business. The wreckage of celebrity brands is increasingly hard to ignore.

I’m less certain how neatly this maps onto entertainment. A star in a movie isn’t simply endorsing a product; the star is part of the product. But I do wonder whether legacy media companies make a similar mistake when they treat recognition as proof of demand. A famous name can attract attention, help secure financing and get a project through the door. None of that guarantees that people will watch—or tell someone else to watch. This story is as old as time—(Digger the latest example. Right star wrong movie, too expensive, etc)

However that question feels especially relevant as streamers struggle to market individual titles and make their spending produce durable value. Are companies paying stars for the audience they are assumed to bring without knowing whether that audience actually follows? Are they using casting to compensate for weaker development or marketing? And are they measuring the value of a star with the same vague proxies—familiarity, followers, past box office—that brands use when pricing celebrity endorsements? Maybe this is all pretty obvious. But I do think there is something new in this lesson around celebrity brands that we need to think about… I just don’t know what it is yet.

The quote that surprised me

“A lot of people talk about social commerce. We talk more about discovery commerce right now.”

That was Launay again. TikTok sees itself as erasing the old split between media that creates awareness and e-commerce sites that convert it. People arrive to be entertained, and the platform carries them “from awareness to conversion and even to advocating.” The scale behind it: more than 200 million active U.S. users averaging over 100 minutes a day, with time on the app up every year for five years. Those are TikTok’s own numbers.

What surprised me was the assumption underneath. Discovery commerce needs a viewer who is scrolling and open to being found. Lia Haberman, who tracks social media trends, wrote last November, “We’re in our slow social era.” People aren’t logging off, she said, but they are showing up more deliberately. Launay himself conceded that “intentional discovery,” where people search for products instead of stumbling on them, is “becoming even bigger.” If audiences become more deliberate, discovery by accident gets harder. And if brands get hooked on marketing to consumers online while consumers curb their social media habits, everyone has to pivot again.

Where my head goes—As consumer behavior keeps splintering, how do you chase the trends? They seem to be moving in different directions at once. Even within generational cohorts, the data is starting to contradict itself. It’s also an admission that, as a producer who lived by “if you build it, they will come,” paying attention to this data in a profound way is relatively new to me. I need to get smarter about it.

The moment I felt vindicated

As I’ve put more emphasis on creator businesses, I’ve found it hard to measure their value. How big is a creator’s community? What is a post worth? What is a channel worth to a brand? Every answer seems to come from a different tool measuring something different.

It turns out Jamie Gutfreund has been working on this exact problem, especially for brands. She put up a slide mapping the software companies brands use for creator marketing: audience intelligence, analytics, payments and more. One category has grown from about 15 companies to so many she’s “stopped counting.” There are enough tools to make your head spin like The Exorcist.

Then she said, “Who the hell knows what a view is anymore?”

If the person advising brands on this can say that out loud, I’m not behind. The industry is.

And where does my head go generally? We should all look for inspiration outside our own industries. MIPCOM and Sundance are necessary. But if those are the only rooms we enter, we’re just talking to ourselves. The muse needs many sources from which to draw…

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A year ago, as Paramount and Skydance prepared to merge, I wrote about the idea that studios need to also go deeper rather than just wider.

The opportunity—and increasingly, the necessity—is to build around specific communities and fandoms. Disney showed what that can look like with Marvel and Star Wars: flywheels spanning film, television, live experiences, merchandise, and community.

Paramount already had the raw material. Star Trek, Mission: Impossible, and Yellowstone aren’t simply titles in a library—they’re worlds with passionate audiences. What would it look like to build around those fandoms more intentionally, creating entire verticals rather than just commissioning the next sequel or spinoff?

Some facts have changed since then but the thesis still stands so re-releasing —

Whenever I see A24 on a show or a film, I pay attention. They’re the kids at the cool table — and the closest most of us get to sitting there is watching what they make.

But when I saw the trailer for The Smashing Machine, it felt like a rehash — The Wrestler, The Iron Claw — a movie from another time. For the first time, an A24 release felt like a product of scale, not spark.

On The Town last week, Matt Belloni and Lucas Shaw nailed the financial side: A24’s $300M raise at a $3.5B valuation means they now have to scale like a midsized studio — risking the dilution of the very brand that built that value. But they missed one question: do they go vertical or horizontal?

The question I’ve been asking about A24 since their raise—

Do they deepen the core — turning fans into community and community into business — or do they chase the studio model, scaling budgets, output, and reach?

Because that’s the fork every entertainment company is standing at whether they know it or not. I’ve been asking the same question about New Paramount…

A24 built a handmade brand in a mass-produced world. Paramount built the factory that defined mass production itself. But both are facing the same question on very different scales: where is the growth?

Why Vertical Matters Now

Thank God for Doug Shapiro.

As I was wrestling this week with how to frame this stack and whether I had the authority to write it (truly nobody asked me), he dropped one of his weekly doses of wisdom and just what I needed— Fan Surplus, HYBE, and the Science of Fandom with the perfect subhead: “Why the future of media is selling more to fewer.”

Here are the headlines:

• Attention is tapped out. You can’t grow on minutes watched anymore. We are all at media (over) saturation.

• Creation costs are collapsing. As GenAI floods the market, content becomes abundant and cheap. The profits move to complements — products and services that live around the content.

• The future is fan surplus. Superfans want to engage more deeply, more often, across more dimensions. The opportunity is to capture that energy — to sell meaning, not minutes.

Breadth has hit its limit; depth is unbounded. The companies that win will be the ones that monetize depth.

This is where my head keeps going…

A24’s Vertical Play: (And why this is about all of us)

A24 didn’t earn that valuation by chasing volume — it built a business out of taste.

For its fans, watching isn’t enough; you have to be tapped in. The studio leaned into that subculture, turning aesthetic integrity into belonging: high-concept merch,, and a logo that became shorthand for taste.

The challenge now is scale. The only sustainable path is vertical — deepening its core rather than widening its footprint. That means turning its aesthetic into a flywheel:

1. Lifestyle as Extension:
   Not just “movie merch,” but MoMA Design Store — high-margin, artful products that express the A24 worldview between releases. Fashion brands.

2. Live and Experiential:
   Film is the entry point, but gathering is the glue. Pop-ups, salons, screenings, curated events that reinforce identity and monetize belonging.

3. Creator and IP Incubation:
   Sign the filmmakers, writers, and weirdos who fit the brand. Build a feedback loop between art, commerce, and new IP.

4. Music as Emotional Core:
   Music has always been the pulse. A small label or curated live events could anchor the emotional side of the business and drive loyalty.

When these layers reinforce one another, A24 becomes more than a studio — it becomes a self-sustaining ecosystem. Loops, not launches.

Which leads me to Paramount…

Paramount x Oracle: Can You Build Vertically with a Tech Spine?

We all know this part.

In 2025, Skydance and Paramount closed their merger and began trading as Paramount, a Skydance Corporation. The company reorganized into Studios, Direct-to-Consumer, and TV Media, with a public mandate to modernize and deliver “real efficiencies.”

David Ellison has been clear from day one: this isn’t a content factory — it’s a media-and-technology enterprise. Backed by a reported $100 million-a-year deal with Oracle.

They’ve also hired Dane Glasgow, a veteran of Meta, Google, and eBay, as Chief Product Officer — working with Cindy Holland on DTC, ads, immersive, and AI. If you’re serious about product-led media, that’s the hire you make.

So the ingredients are there: Ellison brings the capital, Oracle the infrastructure, Glasgow the product muscle. That’s the promise.

The harder question is what they’ll actually do with it.

We keep hearing how they’re “bringing tech to the studio,” but none of the specifics. So I looked at what Oracle is already doing for Hollywood right now — thinking maybe I could find the clues there…

What Oracle Actually Brings

• Searchable libraries: AI turns buried footage into usable inventory — converting dead archives into living assets.

• Studio-in-the-Cloud: Production shifts off hardware into rented computing power that scales up or down with projects.

• Delivery and personalization: Oracle manages encoding, encrypting, and streaming. Paired with audience data, it can learn how people watch and feed that back into programming and marketing.

• Enterprise + consumer brain: Oracle’s old strength was the back office; now it connects to audience data. The idea is one system linking what a studio makes to how viewers engage. Whether that builds loyalty or just better recommendations depends on what Paramount does with it.

In short, Oracle can be the operating system for vertical media — but Paramount has to design the layer that turns data into belonging.

What’s missing are declared verticals — distinct audience ecosystems with their own P&Ls, memberships, and commerce layers. That’s the leap from modernized horizontal to true vertical.

What “Going Vertical” Looks Like

A vertical is an audience-centric ecosystem built on:

• A cultural spine: a world people already care about.

• Membership and identity: a branded layer of status and access.

• A product ladder: from free to premium, spanning digital and physical.

• Creator integration: fan and creator collaborations that seed new IP.

• Live anchors: recurring events that gather the community.

• Feedback loops: data flowing between content, product, and commerce so every touchpoint strengthens the next.

Oracle can power the data. Glasgow’s team can build the surface. But the soul of a vertical is community — rituals, participation, belonging.

Paramount as a Portfolio That Holds Verticals

Paramount could evolve into a horizontal company that holds a portfolio of verticals — distinct cultural worlds with their own creative, commercial, and community engines.

Each vertical has its own GM, its own P&L, and shared back-office support for identity, payments, data, and media ops. Content still funnels back to Paramount+, but fans come for the worlds they love — and stay because they feel part of them.

Just like the old cable bundle, subscribers get access to multiple verticals (and pay the premium for it) — but they’re really focused on the one that defines them.

Going vertical doesn’t mean leaving casual fans behind — it means formalizing the relationship with the ones who care most.

Casuals still drop in for Top Gun 3 or a UFC fight. But verticals organize everything else — film, TV, commerce, live events — around the audience that identifies with the brand. Casuals watch; core fans belong. The studio becomes a living ecosystem.

How to Build Them

I see it in three fronts:

1. Build from what’s already working. Start with the worlds that already have loyal audiences. Don’t just make more — design systems around them.

2. Buy the audience, not the asset. Acquire communities with existing trust and participation, then layer in content later.

3. Build from the culture out. Anchor around the identity or values that hold the audience together, even when the IP shifts.

Applying Theory: The Perfect Move

If Paramount wanted to prove what a vertical strategy looks like in practice, there’s a single, perfect test case sitting in plain sight: buy Teton Ridge.

A couple months back, I wrote an Open Gardens stack about Teton Ridge — a privately funded media, sports, and lifestyle company quietly doing exactly what I’m talking about: building a full-stack cultural vertical. It owns The American Rodeo, controls its broadcast rights, runs equestrian and ranching events, sells Western lifestyle products, and is developing creator-led content, movies and TV shows around the same world.

In short, they bought the Openverse of cowboy culture to take reigns on its community.

They didn’t start with a show — they started with a world. They built the infrastructure of belonging first: the fans, the athletes, the events, the merch, the myth. Content became one spoke in a much bigger wheel.

Now imagine tying that to Yellowstone and its orbit.

Paramount doesn’t own Taylor Sheridan, and it doesn’t own his audience — it rents them for as long as he keeps making the shows. That’s the horizontal trap.

But combine Sheridan’s storytelling universe with Teton Ridge’s cultural backbone — the rodeo, the brands, the live events, the creator layer — and you get a vertical. CBS and Paramount+ get the live sports, docs and scripted content. They monetize the live events, the experiential, the commerce. And the studio gets something far more valuable than another hit: ownership of the culture itself.

That’s what going vertical looks like in the real world — not more content, but deeper gravity.

After I wrote the Teton Ridge stack, CEO Deirdre Lester reached out on LinkedIn and told me it was:

“the closest anyone’s come to describing what we are doing.”

She’s an impressive exec — sharp, grounded, and completely fluent in this idea of building from community outward. We eventually connected on zoom, and it was clear this thinking isn’t strategy-deck talk for her; it’s instinct. So of course, I asked if they’d ever considered selling to someone like Paramount. Her answer was fascinating… and not something I would share.

But rodeo isn’t the only play. You could build a vertical around Mission: Impossible — not just movies, but the entire culture of spycraft: immersive training, escape-room events, creator collabs that turn stunts into participatory entertainment. Or build one around Transformers — a robotics vertical connecting fandom, maker culture and subscription businesses, live robotics shows… I’m oversampling but you get the idea.

Done right, these aren’t franchises; they’re ecosystems. Communities that gather there can be monetized a thousand ways — through live experiences, commerce, creators, education, and media — and they grow far beyond the lifespan of any single story.

Nobody Asked Me, But There—I Said It

I’ve had multiple conversations lately with bankers in the entertainment space asking where capital is actually seeking opportunity right now.

Are investors starting to build business plans around verticals like Teton Ridge — companies that own culture, not just content?

The answer I keep getting is: it’s hard to model.

You’re going to buy an anchor business like a rodeo to build community… but eventually sell that community cowboy boots?

That’s the part the spreadsheets can’t process.

Horizontal growth still fits neatly into a financial model — output, windows, international projections, the legacy math everyone knows. But how do you model belonging? How do you forecast connection?

I get it. It’s hard. But the behavior is already changing, and the industry can’t spreadsheet its way into the future. The companies that figure this out first — the ones willing to take big, uncomfortable swings — will define the next era.

A24 already is a vertical — a handmade brand that grew by going deep instead of wide. Its next move isn’t to act like a studio; it’s to strengthen the community it already owns — to scale intimacy, not output.

Paramount’s opportunity is different. It’s not a vertical — it’s a platform that could hold them.

Instead of behaving like one giant pipeline, it could evolve into a portfolio of verticals: spy culture, Western culture, robotics, music — each with its own community, commerce, and creative spine.

The cleanest way to frame it is this:

Use the library to seed worlds. Use the worlds to seed communities.
Use the communities to seed products, events, and stories that feel inevitable — because they were born inside the culture you’re stewarding.

AI is about to make more content trivial. The scarce thing will be meaning. Build for that.

And here’s where it comes full circle: what studio should buy A24? (Their valuation is probably too high now, but go with me — I’m just trying to bring some symmetry to the end of this stack!).

If I were Paramount, I’d do it — not to integrate it, but to grow it.

This isn’t Universal owning a prestige arm like Focus or Disney buying Miramax to check a box on taste.

It’s something different — a structural play, not a symbolic one.

Let A24 remain its own vertical — powered by Paramount’s tech and infrastructure, not absorbed by them.

Let it be the cultural lab, the taste engine, the handmade brand inside the machine.

Let it grow its community with depth — that’s how you get to its best EBITDA, not by chasing volume.

Because maybe the next great M&E avalanche won’t come from studios buying each other — but from studios assembling portfolios of verticals that each own a community.

Keep an eye on the mega-creators — Dhar Mann, Dude Perfect, MrBeast — the usual suspects. They’re already doing it.

As the legacy world and the creator world converge in the open garden, that just might be where the next empire will rise.

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As I was exploring microdramas for my own company, I tried to meet with every platform in town. That eventually led me to MicroCo—now aTwist.

They told me what they were looking for, and I pitched a few ideas that seemed to intrigue them. They also wanted to explore comedy, which almost no one in microdramas was doing at the time. So I suggested they meet with Jon Stern, an old friend and former producing partner of mine. Jon is a prolific writer-producer of low-budget comedy series including Wet Hot American Summer and Childrens’ Hospital, plus much more. He has exactly the right mix of curiosity and chutzpah. It turned out Susan Rovner (one of its founders) and Jon went way back.

They passed on my ideas, hired Jon, and I didn’t even get 10 percent. Karma points, maybe.

So I guilted him into writing about the experience. Then, just to torture him, I made him rewrite it three times.

Today, a seasoned (i.e., old) comedy writer-producer on what he learned making—wait for it—My Billionaire Kidney.

And yeah, it’s pretty damn funny. Watch it at aTwist. At least the first seven episodes that are free.

Ben Odell, Substack-in-Chief.

The Executive Rejected My Pitch—Then Asked for a Kidney

Does a vertical have to be a melodrama? What about a comedy? Combine comedy with short-form and ultra-low-budget and I’m right at home. Also, I’m unqualified for every genre except comedy (and even that is highly debatable).

After a decade producing low-budget indie films, I discovered the world of “web series” (that’s what we used to call YouTube videos when “streamer” was only a term used in pornography). I noticed that exponentially more people were viewing these shorts than any indie film I’d ever made.

So twenty years later, I’m still doing it. In the form of a vertical for a new American-based vertical company called aTwist, started by TV execs Susan Rovner, Jana Winograde and Lloyd Braun. They raised some real money to launch a platform and commission original series.

Susan asked me to make a comedy. I pitched her a handful of ideas from my drawer of aborted movie script concepts. She didn’t outright verbalize “meh,” but I got the message. Then she added, “Why don’t you just do a parody of a microdrama,” which was the right path.

But how do you parody something that – let’s be honest – so often feels like a parody already, even if unintentionally? I wasn’t sure I could crack it.

First step: ingest a bunch of existing microdramas, many of them from other countries. I jotted down bits as I watched. I needed a premise, no matter how thin, to build a structure around. How about kidney donations?

Nothing gets a laugh like someone needing an organ transplant.

My Billionaire Kidney.

I wrote a season outline and the first ten pages.

Susan convincingly acted as if she liked it. aTwist gave me a standard vertical series budget and instructions to make at least 35 episodes totaling 60 minutes.

I hired myself to be the writer, director and producer through my production company, Abominable Pictures. Doing all these jobs at once was necessary to make the most of our resources. (In other words, there wasn’t enough money to hire someone better.)

This had a remarkable parallel to my first endeavor with Susan. Eighteen years and three corporate owners ago, Susan was an exec at Warner Bros. Television. Rob Cordry, David Wain and I talked WBTV out of a little cash to make Childrens’ Hospital, a web series for a short-lived Warner Brothers digital platform. Its low-stakes under-the-radar-ness allowed us to drop our inner censor and just try something different. That led to a slate of low-budget parodies as well as other alt comedies.

Which brings us back to My Billionaire Kidney. As you’re no doubt aware, microdramas are required to end each episode with a cliffhanger…

And what I’m about to tell you will BLOW YOUR MIND!

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Four Unions, Four Days, and Very Few Shirts

My gameplan was to combine my specific mainstream producing M.O. with the scale of a vertical. Starting with the unions…

Since I’m DGA and WGA we had to go that way. It was an IATSE crew because I appreciate the benefits of working with these great people from so many other Abominable Pictures productions, large and small. Kidney was quantifiably more efficient, more collaborative, and more fun because of this team. Also, I believe everyone should get health insurance.

The other union was SAG-AFTRA. Shooting in Los Angeles comes with an enormous advantage: the best pool of comedic talent in the world lives here. If you want access to that pool, you need to be a SAG-AFTRA production. And if you want to be truly accessible to these actors, it’s vital to shoot locally.

All the unions have structures for low-budget new media that applied to Kidney. Some have too much paperwork, if you ask me, but it enabled me to work with a bunch of people I already know and love as well as some that I had always wanted to work with.

I figured a four-day shoot – 15 pages per day – would be the right speed to fit the budget and to make the commitment more doable for the actors.

To fit that schedule, I wrote to three locations (including my house and my son’s school, to save money), with each location playing for three or more sets. Day exteriors are the fastest to shoot and light. Day interiors are in second position. Night scenes were not even on the table.

I experimented with iPad teleprompters to help speed things up and take the memorization pressure off the actors. It turns out that verticals and teleprompters are as good together as Laverne & Shirley. Or if you’re under 50, I guess Rhett & Link.

Because these things are so cutty, an actor rarely had to deliver more than one or two lines in a row. Plus, given the vertical format, the prompters could be very close to the actors and still out of frame.

It wouldn’t matter how smoothly the production ran if the show wasn’t funny, though. There are a bunch of common microdrama tropes that made me laugh:

• Throwing a drink at someone

• Cutting to a fancy watch to illustrate how wealthy someone is (in Kidney, the more wealth, the more watches)

• Knocking something out of someone’s hand (do people ever do this in real life?)

• Having a man take his shirt off to impress a woman

• Proposing marriage fast and loose

• Introducing pretty much every character by starting at their shoes and tilting up (I guess you can tell a lot about someone by their shoes?)

• Cringey sex scenes

• Characters having only two modes of transportation: private jet or the back seat of a limo

• Characters introducing themselves by running through their bio as if they’re in a job interview in an elevator

• Every male romantic interest having a scary, dark side

• People dropping and shattering their drinks whenever something dramatic happens (I learned that characters breaking things on purpose is a satisfying way to wrap a show.)

There’s another common trope I played with. Prepare yourself. What I’m about to tell you… COULD CHANGE YOUR LIFE!

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I Heard His Inner Thoughts—and They Were All in Extreme Close-Up

A unique device in microdramas is hearing the inner thoughts of every character via voiceover.

A lot of narratives shortcuts happen there.

Kidney would need to do this too, but only for jokes. Before we started filming, I wasn’t sure if it would play better for the actor to look neutral while VOing or whether their expressions should reflect what they were thinking. I was planning to shoot it both ways. After the first scene, it became clear they should act out every thought.

Through trial and error, we picked up formal guidelines too. At lunch on the first day, our DP Frank Barrera and AD Julian Petrillo and I put our heads together. We all come from traditional TV (often working together), so these observations might seem obvious to an experienced vertical director (i.e. – not me):

• Master shots are almost always useless.

• Action works better moving from foreground to background and vice-versa, rather than left-to-right, since there is hardly any left or right in the frame to work with.

• Characters enter a scene, plant themselves in a group, and deliver their dialogue completely before moving. Basically, no walk-and-talks.

• Just shoot medium-wide shots and blow up to MS, CU or ECU in post. Once I started taking advantage of that in the edit, I recognized that traditional TV was missing out. Thanks to the visual language of the genre, there’s no limits on the exploitation of push-ins, snap-zooms, jump cuts, irises and stings.

• Even two-shots can be punched in to be two singles. But two-shots don’t work so well anyway, except as 50-50s.

• Camera moves can be difficult to watch on an iPhone screen. Fast camera moves even more so.

• One stop-and-go take with pickups became the default for each setup.

Tone. Every project has its own tone, no matter what genre. A movie or TV show will have table reads and rehearsals. Sometimes it takes a TV series an entire season to land on it. You need alt readings in the edit. We didn’t have time to do that on Kidney. If you ask me the biggest challenge, it was expediting the tone-journey.

Here comes the EXCITING CONCLUSIONS!

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The Blog Post Finale

Going into this, my “dramatic question” was: Can the short-form serialized format work creatively for comedy AND find an audience. Can the jokes work for an audience unfamiliar with microdramas as well as the microdramas faithful? Will people enjoy poking fun at the very format they also take seriously?

It’s too soon to tell about the audience.

If you ask me, however, I’m now convinced that this format is tailor-made for comedy. Episodes’ shortness aren’t dissimilar than the length of a standard TV scene, or a Funny or Die short, or a sketch comedy piece.

We all are already using our iPhones for quick hits while we’re waiting in line (or, in the case of my kids, riding in the car, eating dinner, or having any conversation with me). That seems to me to be the perfect viewer to enjoy quick, funny bits.

How to monetize is an open question. The microdramas model relies on serialization. Though Kidney pretends to have a driving narrative, it’s really just the pretense of one. I tried to pull the viewer along by regularly introducing new characters and different sets, but are people going to spend money to see what happens next? Maybe the comedy verticals will adapt to be more ad-driven or subscriber-based.

As for my creative experience, the limits were assets, as is so often the case. It forced me to focus on the jokes and the viewer experience. To be efficient with the words, images and editing. To try things I wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity for.

There always needs to be an under-the-radar way to experiment and develop ideas. If we do this enough, new voices and material are guaranteed to break out.

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This week, El Juicio, a show my company 3Pas Studios produced in Mexico, in Spanish, reached #4 in the world on Amazon. We were doing a little victory lap.

Then I attended an event full of some of the most powerful agents, managers and executives in Hollywood. They all seemed to know each other. I knew only a few of them.

I’ve spent much of my career making content for US Hispanic and Latin American audiences. My accomplishments tend to live outside their rubrics of measurement. The reaction was what it has so often been: indifference. At times, rudeness.

I introduced myself to one agent who asked about my credentials. After I answered, he nodded and literally walked away.

Going from celebrating a show reaching audiences around the world to a room where that work barely registered was familiar. It brought me back to one of our first meetings when Eugenio Derbez and I were launching 3Pas Studios.

Eugenio had just made Instructions Not Included, a $5.5 million movie that earned over $100 million at the worldwide box office. He had been a major star in Mexico and among US Latino audiences for years. But at 50, after 25 years of work, he had finally become an overnight success in the eyes of Hollywood.

We were looking for a first-look deal to pay our overhead and get us started. The president of one of the major studios greeted us at his door. As we sat down, he pointed to Eugenio and said, “You, I want to meet.” Then he looked at me and said, “You, I don’t give a shit about. Sit over there.” He pointed me to a chair off to one side and literally didn’t acknowledge me the rest of the meeting.

In his defense, not that I feel the need to defend him, I had spent ten years as a screenwriter in Colombia, another ten producing small films independently, mostly in Spanish, and five years running production for Lionsgate’s Latino label, Pantelion Films. My credentials meant nothing to someone producing billion-dollar franchises.

The caste system was clear. His rudeness was acceptable, even expected.

When I was in college, social life at this small liberal arts school was built entirely around the Greek system. I pledged a fraternity, the Animal House of its time. They were literally disbanded a few years after I graduated. Pledging was brutal and humiliating. The worst part was taking orders from the fraternity brothers you least respected. They were always the most abusive.

In those situations, I imagined a little man sitting on my shoulder who was actually the target of the abuse. Made it easier. And he never left my shoulder as I moved to Los Angeles. Arrogance and ego has been a baseline to our industry. It was an unspoken law that you watched the movie Swimming for Sharks to prepare for it.

Im not sure it ever really served our industry but it certainly doesn’t now.

When I get passionate about something, I tend to lose objectivity. I can only see the positives. My wife reminds me of this all the time. And I have to be cautious about my love affair with the creator economy because I’m definitely in the honeymoon phase.

But as I’ve become closer to its architects and creators themselves, one thing I’ve noticed among many of the most successful is humility.

Last year I went to a Press Publish event in New York City. I dreaded it. Here I am, the middle-aged legacy producer, walking into this world of creators and the infrastructure that supports them. My guard was up because I expected the very kind of caste system I had fought so hard to climb, but now starting as a newbie.

I had my creator businesses going and ideas about opportunities I wanted to pursue. But I didn’t have the experience or recognition in this world that would give me a leg up.

Instead, I found a world that was highly accessible. The speakers from one event would be sitting in the next. Everyone was open to chat. I quickly made inroads to financiers, managers and heads of platforms. Follow-up emails were answered. Meetings were set. Business came out of those encounters. If you brought value or ideas to the table, they were worth exploring.

There are enormous egos in the creator economy too. I’ve met a few. And I’m aware that being welcomed into a room can color your judgment of everyone in it. But I’ve been thinking about whether there’s a business reason for the openness. So much is being figured out that people seem more willing to hear what someone else is working on.

I’ve had to make that adjustment myself. I’ve spent decades learning how to develop, produce and sell stories. I know what that experience is worth. But a creator who already writes, shoots, edits, distributes and markets their work may have very little use for the thing I walked in expecting to offer.

Calling them “talent” barely describes what they do. They’ve built businesses and relationships with audiences that I need to understand before I can be useful. I might see a way to help shape a story or develop something longer. They might have an entirely different ambition.

That takes some getting used to when you’ve spent years being paid for your judgment. You’re accustomed to having an answer. I’m finding myself asking more questions.

The willingness to reconsider seems especially useful in a business where you can put something out, see what happens and build from there. A short can become a series. Something that doesn’t connect can remain a one-off. You haven’t necessarily spent years getting it approved before finding out whether anyone wants it.

But you still have to accept what you’re seeing. I know how easy it is to decide that the audience didn’t understand something. Sometimes that may even be true. Creative work requires conviction, and I wouldn’t want to make everything by polling the audience. I do think there’s a problem when your first instinct is always to explain why your judgment was right.

We also bring very specific ideas about quality from Hollywood. I’ve spent my career developing those judgments. They matter to me. But they don’t explain every kind of work that people care about, and they can make it easy to dismiss something before you’ve bothered to understand its appeal.

Eugenio’s audience existed long before Hollywood took an interest. He had spent years building that relationship. The box office finally made it legible to people who hadn’t been paying attention. Yet in those meetings, we were still somehow waiting for their approval.

I keep thinking about how much you can miss that way.

And now, as AI and technology transform everything again, I’m finding that people in legacy media and the creator economy are questioning the future in similar ways. That’s been the most interesting part of these conversations for me.

I came into the creator economy expecting to learn how this newer business worked. I’m doing that. But the people I’m learning from are also trying to figure out what happens to their own businesses next. Having built something successful on YouTube doesn’t mean you know what AI will do to it. Having produced successful films and television doesn’t answer that question either.

We’re coming at it with different experience, but we’re asking many of the same things. What will people want to watch? What will they pay for? How much of what we know how to do will still be valuable, and where do we need to start learning again?

I don’t think anyone has particularly satisfying answers yet. That gives us a reason to talk to each other. It also makes the insistence on establishing who matters more in the room seem like a strange use of everyone’s time.

I spend at least one day a week at the Lighthouse in Venice, surrounded by people in the creator economy. I want the energy, curiosity and openness I find there. I meet someone every week I end up exploring business opportunities with. And they’re curious about what we bring from legacy media too.

It’s hard to single out one conversation because it’s the repetition that has made an impression. I keep going back, and I keep finding people willing to spend time on an idea before they know whether anything will come of it. Some of those conversations turn into business. Others help me understand something I hadn’t understood before.

That’s what I mean by humility here. You can have built a substantial business and still be interested in how someone else does it. You can know your work has value without assuming that makes you the authority on theirs.

None of this is an abandonment of legacy. I’m still passionate about film and TV. I’m just less tolerant of the bullshit.

We had a good week with El Juicio. I want to keep making work like that, and I want to understand where else our experience could take us. Increasingly, that means spending time with people whose accomplishments I might not immediately recognize either.

I’d rather ask what they’re working on and stay for the answer.

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As a legacy producer of film and television, I sometimes find the constant drumbeat that content must become more interactive or participatory to reach younger audiences a little daunting.

We were trained to believe that if you created a water-cooler moment—if everyone showed up Monday morning to the office talking about your movie or show—you had achieved all the participation you needed.

But alas: evolve or die.

A few weeks ago, a colleague called to ask whether I would explore a new movie technology that is interactive in the most literal sense. A theatrical movie driven by audience voting. I was hesitant. He persisted.

“This one is different,” he told me. “The tech is amazing.”

Then he mentioned the proof: an animated movie in Japan that had broken box office records on a remarkably small number of screens.

When Hypnosis Mic: Division Rap Battle opened in Japan on February 21, 2025, audiences used their phones to vote on the winners of the film’s rap battles. Each vote changed the version playing for everyone in the theater. Kino Industries president Scott C. Silver told me the movie went on to earn nearly ¥3 billion ($19 million US) after opening on roughly eighty-five screens.

That got my attention. So I agreed to a demonstration.

Seeing CtrlMovie in action clarified what my colleague had been trying to tell me. Kino had not removed the filmmaker or handed the story over to the crowd. It had created a tightly controlled form of collective choice—one that could change the movie without stopping it.

“Interactive entertainment” is often presented as a broad demand from younger audiences, even though the term covers very different experiences. A fan decoding clues, a player building a Fortnite island and a theater voting on the next scene are all participating.

They do not have the same power over the work.

How We Got Here

I can see a few reasons why participating in entertainment has become so familiar.

Video games, obviously. There are plenty of arguments about when games and storytelling really came together, but Final Fantasy VII feels like a hinge point: PlayStation’s 3D graphics and the storage capacity of CDs made room for elaborate cinematic sequences and a world you could spend dozens of hours inside.

Then social media made commenting, voting and telling creators what to do next practically a full-time occupation.

And the tools for making things reached far more people: you could edit a video, remix a scene or build a world using the device already in your pocket. of this fed an appetite to get inside the entertainment we love—to influence it, play with it and make something of our own from it.

I’ve been creating things since I was a kid, starting with animated flip pages, then clunky video cameras in college, and eventually screenwriting and producing. But when I watch a movie, my instinct is still to surrender to it. I want someone else to take me somewhere. My habits were already pretty well formed by the time story-driven gaming and social media took hold. Younger audiences grew up with participation as part of the deal. Worth remembering before I mistake my preferences for what a moviegoing experience should be.

Five Forms of Participation

CtrlMovie sent me down a rabbit hole. We call almost anything “interactive” now. But what does that mean? I realized they kind of fell into five broad categories.

Clue Hunting: The audience searches for answers without changing the story itself.

After Gravity Falls ended, creator Alex Hirsch organized Cipher Hunt, an international trail of clues that led fans to a real-world statue of the show’s villain. Severance inspired a less formal version of the same behavior. Between episodes, viewers gathered on Reddit, TikTok and other platforms to compare evidence, test theories and argue over what it all meant. The story stayed fixed. The audience kept digging.

Fan Remixing: Fans take a story they love and turn it into something new.

During the 2020 lockdown, TikTok users began posting songs, choreography, costumes and designs for an imaginary Ratatouille musical. No one had assigned them roles or coordinated the production. They simply kept adding pieces until producers assembled their work into a streamed benefit performance. E. L. James followed a more individual path: Fifty Shades of Grey began as Twilight fan fiction before she changed the characters’ names and published it as an original novel. In both cases, the original story became raw material for another one.

Crowd Control: An audience acts together to influence what gets made or how it is shaped.

By now we all know this one but it’s the clearest example: Youtuber Markiplier treated his community less like customers than partners in the life of his self-financed horror film, Iron Lung. He bypassed the traditional studio system, built anticipation and participation in the building of the movie through his own channels and asked fans to contact theaters that had not booked the movie.

World Weaving: Players use a platform’s tools to build much of the entertainment themselves.

Roblox lets users create and distribute their own games. Fortnite Creative gives players the tools to design custom islands and experiences. Minecraft is a sandbox for constructing and sharing entire worlds. In each case, the company built the framework—the tools, rules and distribution system—while players fill it with things to do. The platform provided the loom. The audience weaves.

Plot Power: The audience gets a say in the story before the story is finished.

The scripted science-fiction series Artificial was produced on Twitch and went for four seasons. The show followed Sophie, an artificial intelligence learning how to become human. During live broadcasts, viewers answered polls, questioned characters and helped make decisions that the writers carried into later episodes. Their choices did not always alter the story on the spot. But they entered the writing process while the season was still taking shape.

For creators / filmmakers and execs / studios alike, some of these opportunities can be designed into a project. Others depend on audiences taking the initiative. You can plant clues, invite votes or provide tools to build with. But you can’t plan on fans turning your movie into a musical. The producers of the Ratatouille performance recognized something that was already happening and found a way to bring it together.

So it’s understandable why a movie that requires participation from its very inception would be appealing. Audience involvement becomes part of the creative premise, something filmmakers can write for and build around.

Kino’s CtrlMovie brings that into a single theatrical screening: the audience makes choices together, the majority wins and the movie changes in front of them. Participation has a defined place in the work from the beginning.

Why Earlier Interactive Movies Stalled

Kino isn’t the first company to hand the audience the controls. A couple of earlier attempts were ahead of their time, though for very different reasons.

At Expo 67 in Montreal, Kinoautomat let audiences vote with red and green buttons on how a hapless man should navigate an increasingly disastrous day—including whether to let a neighbor wearing only a towel into his apartment before his wife got home. The film’s star appeared live to referee the decisions. It was a hit, but required a specially equipped theater and a live performer. And whatever the audience chose, the building caught fire. You could vote your way into trouble, but not out of it.

Then came Mr. Payback in 1995. Forty-four North American theaters installed three-button controls so audiences could vote roughly every 90 seconds on how a cyborg should punish rude and selfish people. Bob Gale wrote and directed it. The audience’s job was essentially to decide how sadistic the cyborg should get. Who said fascism can’t make for great comedy?

It bombed. (but I kinda wanna see it.)

Technology was clearly a factor in both cases. But my hunch is that even if these experiences could have scaled, the demand wouldn’t have been there. It took the evolution of story-driven gaming and social media to get audiences used to having a hand in their entertainment.

The Birth of Kino

Tobias Weber trained at the London Film School and worked as a commercial director before developing CtrlMovie. The idea joined his filmmaking background with an early interest in Dungeons and Dragons and story-driven games such as Monkey Island.

Weber’s first proof of concept played on an iPad, later reached consoles and appeared at roughly 50 film festivals. Its defining idea was already in place: a timed decision could change the story without stopping playback. When Fox invited Weber to present the technology, a conversation about the studio’s Choose Your Own Adventure rights opened a route into Hollywood.

“I wanted to build a narrative that allows an audience to find their own point of view in a matter,” Weber told me.

Weber met producers Chady Eli Mattar and Scott C. Silver in Los Angeles in 2017. Mattar and Silver had attended the AFI Conservatory and founded Silvatar Media which was producing genre movies. They supplied the production, financing and studio relationships needed to turn Weber’s invention into a company.

Weber focused on the system and interactive story design, Silver on production and finance, and Mattar on studio and exhibitor partnerships. Together they formed Kino Industries around the Swiss CtrlMovie operation.

Building a System Theaters Could Use

The first full proving ground was Late Shift, an interactive heist thriller made for about $1.5 million with outside investors. It demonstrated that a feature could move through authored branches without visible pauses, won a BAFTA Cymru award and reached console, PC and mobile platforms. It also showed the limits of a successful demonstration. The technology still had to fit the equipment, schedules and economics of commercial theaters.

Kino continued developing the platform as it pursued studio and exhibition partners. The company raised additional funding shortly before the pandemic, then built a streaming version when theaters shut down as they continued to focus on the theatrical experience. As cinemas reopened, Kino returned its attention to fixed theatrical installations and now has multiple movies in the pipeline for release.

Silver described the practical case for leaving the equipment in place: “Look, the machine is not all that expensive to begin with, so install it, leave it.”

The engineering problem was the branch itself. Earlier systems often exposed a pause while an optical drive searched for a new segment or a stream buffered.

Weber’s patented approach separates the audio and video streams. At a decision point, the system can move to a different video segment while continuous sound masks the transition. If the vote fails, ties or attracts no response, a default path keeps the movie running.

The audience sees only a phone interface. The screen stays black during the film, then lights for four or five seconds when a choice appears. A server collects the votes and sends the winning path to the playback system. The theater does not pause, and people who choose not to vote can keep watching.

You can also see the filmmakers behind the technology in the tools they’ve built. There’s a screenwriting program—think Final Draft with alternate paths—that lets writers build choices into the script, and an editing system that lets editors work with those branches. They’ve thought about how you write and cut one of these movies, as well as how you play it. As a producer, that part matters to me.

Less Choice and Better Constraints

Kino stands by the philosophy MAYA – “most advanced yet acceptable.” Currently viewers get a fixed set of options and a short voting window.

The company also favors stories in which a collective decision already belongs to the premise. A rap battle or survival scenario gives a crowd a legible question with an immediate consequence. An open-ended moral decision inside a conventional drama is harder to resolve by majority vote without weakening the character or the story.

The consequences can also arrive much later. Demonstrating the software, Silver pointed to a choice involving a knife: “This knife could come back at the end of the movie two hours later, and since you made that choice, you don’t have your knife. Then you know you’re out of luck.”

The system also makes the room part of the experience. After a CtrlMovie screening, viewers can receive a record of their choices, including how often the rest of the audience agreed with them and how often they were overruled. Weber described the feeling of being outvoted: “Sometimes you’re sitting in an audience, and they’re going against you all the time, and you go like, ‘Who are you, people?’”

Weber argues that this does not require abandoning a filmmaker’s point of view. As he put it, “we tell one story, or we tell it in variations. But there is one story, there is definitely one theme, and there is one message.” The audience gains agency inside an authored structure rather than becoming responsible for inventing the structure itself.

Testing their Premise

This is where Hypnosis Mic comes in.

King Records, a Japanese music and entertainment company, had already begun developing an interactive film when it approached Kino. The film was based on Hypnosis Mic: Division Rap Battle, King Records’ multimedia franchise about six teams of voice-acted characters who face off in rap battles.

The project began with music in 2017 and developed an unusually direct relationship with fans, who had already helped determine the winners of earlier battles.

Silver said the production team had already mapped the film’s voting points, branching paths and possible endings, although the final animation was still being completed. Kino’s job was to turn that structure into something theaters could reliably run.

Kino integrated the film with its software and worked on the rollout with Toho, one of Japan’s largest film companies and the operator of the nationwide TOHO Cinemas chain. Toho served as both distributor and exhibitor, helping equip theaters across Japan. The release extended beyond its own circuit and eventually reached roughly 85 screens. Installation moved forward while King Records finished the animation, and the film opened on February 21, 2025.

Silver said a Toho executive had hoped the film might reach 500 million yen at the box office. By the time of the interview, it had earned nearly 3 billion yen. That result came from a relatively small theatrical footprint, although the film also had two significant advantages: an established fan base and a premise naturally built around choosing winners.

As reported by The Wrap, fifty-one percent of the “Hypnosis Mic” audience returned for repeat viewings, encouraged by an app that allowed fans to see if their favorite group was winning in screenings across all theaters showing the film.

And it’s still going. In a follow-up, Silver told me Hypnosis Mic was still getting one or two screenings a day in Japan. A recent week-long re-release packed theaters again, he says, while its Taiwan run was extended three times. King Records is also closing deals in Korea, the Middle East and Latin America. For a movie built around choosing what happens next, people apparently keep coming back to choose again.

The release also changed what Kino built around the film. Silver said the company had added “more collectibles, more achievements, a leaderboard system” to its app—rewards that extended participation beyond the vote itself.

Hypnosis Mic offers a specific lesson rather than a universal formula. CtrlMovie made the voting quick and unobtrusive, while the rap battles gave audiences a clear reason to vote.

The film remained authored, but each theater could produce a different shared version of it. Interactivity was not an interruption added to the movie. It was the event audiences had come to see.

Where it Goes from Here

The next test is already in post.

Silver says Kino has two films at that stage: Slay Day, a throwback slasher in which every main character can live or die, in any combination, and Control Your Fear, a working title for a ghost-hunting experience filmed at a location he describes as one of the most haunted in the US.

Deciding who survives a slasher seems like a pretty natural use of the format.

The announced slate also includes Alice Is Missing, based on the role-playing game, the stalker thriller Girl Crazy, and the haunted-house film Nightmare Manor. Horror is clearly getting the first crack at this. I’m curious about what else filmmakers might do with it.

Technology creates new ways to tell stories, but sometimes a storyteller has to push it along. Tobias wanted to tell stories in a way that required different tools.

My first instinct remains: filmmakers should tell the stories they want to tell. I like being in the hands of someone with a point of view. But why do I assume giving audiences choices means surrendering that point of view? The filmmaker still decides what we can choose, what we know when we choose it, and what happens next. That’s authorship, too. Gaming may have already settled this. I’m not a gamer.

Sure, this could become a roller coaster with the audience voting for the next drop. That could be fun.

But I’m more curious about sitting with strangers at a moral fork in the road and having to decide together. What happens when the room makes a choice we find appalling—and we have to sit through the consequences? The right filmmaker could reveal something about us that’s hard to get at any other way.

For creators whose work grows out of a relationship with their communities, participation could bring that relationship inside the movie. I’d be curious to see what Kinigra Deon or Alan Chikin Chow would do with it. Or filmmakers like Curry Barker and Kane Parsons, who came up making things for online audiences. What happens when those audiences get a say in the story?

And how might those choices change across cultures, genders, ages or political affiliations? Would the same moral dilemma send different rooms down entirely different paths?

Imagine a theatrical run generating three or four versions of a movie based on audience decisions. A distributor sells them all to Netflix. Would you want the version that reflects your instincts—or the one shaped by people who see the world differently?

Silly, perhaps. But fun to think about. For me, the exercise is to stay open. We don’t have to pursue every new way of telling a story. But this one might earn a place in theaters, bringing a different audience out for a different kind of night at the movies.

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Hollywood is in the middle of an overcorrection.

As the industry chases the creator economy—and wonders whether it has been doing everything wrong—a new generation of producers is arriving for whom the internet is neither a threat nor a strategy. It is simply another tool in the box.

Lucas Ford is one of them.

Yeah, he’s the guy who discovered The Backrooms and Kane Parsons. (For the feature, they dropped “The”—channeling Timberlake-cum-Sean Parker.)

In August, my friends at Lighthouse suggested we host a series of Open Gardens conversations about this great convergence, building on the success of the Horror Triumvirate.

We began with Akshay Mehta, head of Lighthouse Studios, and a fascinating discussion about his work with Lyrical Lemonade. Then we brought Open Gardens to Lighthouse for a conversation with Lucas.

I knew the headline version of his story. While working at 21 Laps, Lucas found Kane Parsons’s short, brought Kane and the project to his bosses, and helped set in motion the development deal that followed.

Leading up to the movies’ release, press and interviews referred to him only as “the assistant” who had found it—until Matt Belloni finally put his name to the story in Puck.

Before my pre-interview with Lucas, Belloni’s account was all I had read. It was gratifying to see Lucas receive credit, but I was more interested in what came next.

I had him pegged as a terminally online kid who had stumbled onto something huge—probably someone who preferred YouTube to movies and would eventually leave Hollywood to work with creators or start some new-media business.

In short order, our conversation made it obvious that I had him wrong.

Lucas is thoughtful, curious, ambitious, and deeply driven—although in that polite, low-key Canadian way that can make ambition easy to miss.

He grew up making things online and learned early to pay attention to an audience. The internet became a natural place to find emerging talent, ideas, and cultural currents. Then he worked at TIFF, encountered world-class filmmakers, and became a cinephile.

That is what makes Lucas interesting. He isn’t “the internet guy.” He is a producer looking everywhere—online, in cinemas, at festivals, and in conversations—for filmmakers and stories that move him.

He left 21 Laps before The Backrooms was made or his role in it was widely recognized, then began building projects of his own.

At 32, one of his first films as a producer, Portal to Hell, had just been released. He now has a dozen movies between development and post-production, six of them financed. There’s Adulting, about a recent grad student who falls in love with his mom’s friend; Henry’s Ebb, an emotionally grounded film with genre elements about a boy and his imaginary friend; a stop-motion movie made by two young artists in their Silver Lake home; and a prehistoric love story.

None of this happened because he was “the guy who found The Backrooms.” It happened because Lucas is not a fluke.

Sitting with him reminded me why producing can be so much fun.

His approach recalls producers like Christine Vachon and , but it is powered by a distinctly contemporary fluency: Lucas understands the convergence of filmmaking, online culture, and audience. He is humble, but seasoned producers should listen closely. There is much to learn from how he is evolving the role.

He will be a leading voice of this generation. You heard it here first.

Taste Before Metrics

The easiest lesson for Hollywood to take from The Backrooms story is that Lucas found a popular YouTube video before everyone else. But Lucas does not begin with popularity. He begins with his own response to the work.

The same principle has shaped every great producer since Irving Thalberg became the Boy Wonder at MGM in 1924. And that’s how Lucas looks at creators more broadly.

A large audience will get his attention. It will not make the decision for him.

Sometimes the work that excites him has almost no audience at all.

Lucas understands the signals coming from the internet, but he does not confuse those signals with taste. We all need to heed that warning.

Looking Everywhere

No one at 21 Laps formally appointed him the company’s internet scout. He simply went where no one was looking—and where he naturally explores anyway.

The habit was more important than any particular platform.

One project began with a piece of album artwork.

Elsewhere in the conversation, he talked about finding filmmakers through Instagram, Fantastic Fest, video-game cutscenes, and work coming out of New Zealand, Scotland, Serbia, and the UK.

We all know that a cinematic voice doesn’t need to come from Sundance. But it could. His internet fluency just means he casts a bigger net.

Community as Creative Intelligence

When Lucas stumbled onto The Backrooms, Kane Parsons’s video had around 50,000 views. Within a month, it had 11 million. Lucas noticed that growth, but he was equally interested in what the audience was saying.

The audience gave him another way to understand the work. It showed him which details people cared about, where their curiosity was leading them, and how deeply they wanted to participate in the world Kane had created.

Lucas is optimistic about younger audiences precisely because they are demanding.

Yeah, don’t we always do this? Question the younger audiences because we don’t understand them? They are all ADHD. Terminally online. Can’t watch a whole movie. The fear is generated from lack of proximity. Its not just reading data, its living in it. That’s why we need young producers making movies for their generations.

The participatory nature of an online community also creates a different kind of relationship with a story.

But Lucas stops short of letting audience data become a formula.

He understands an online community as a source of creative intelligence. It can tell him why people care. It cannot tell him what he should care about.

Trust your gut. In a world that demands curation, the producer-as-curator has never been more vital.

But it’s not new — Thalberg, David O. Selznick, Samuel Goldwyn, Val Lewton, Robert Evans, Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, Saul Zaentz, Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, Scott Rudin, Vachon, Hope, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, Jason Blum.

All curators of their generations.

Protecting the Strange Edges

I’ve written about the success of the Horror Triumvirate. How it was as inevitable as it was a fluke to timing.

I asked Lucas about it. Like me he expects Hollywood’s current enthusiasm for creator-driven movies to produce failures.

Wise words from a young producer. Finding a creator is only the beginning. The harder job is bringing that creator into a larger system without losing what made the work distinctive.

Lucas applies the same test when developing an online work into a feature.

He sees the internet as another place to find filmmakers, not as a shortcut around the work of producing them.

If you really break down the success of ‘Iron Lung,’ ‘Obsession’ and ‘Backrooms’ only the first was a pure creator-driven movie. The other two depended on the Hollywood system, ‘Backrooms’ more than the others. Developed, packaged, financed and distributed by the Hollywood machine.

It’s an AND conversation: the old way and the new way, working together.

Building Around the Artist

A creator who can make something remarkable alone may not be ready to direct a large crew, develop a screenplay, or explain an idea in a studio meeting. Lucas sees helping them cross that gap as part of producing.

The process cannot be identical for every filmmaker.

Lucas described an animation project he is producing with two filmmakers who were accustomed to animating everything themselves.

The goal is not to turn every creator into a conventional studio director.

This may be the clearest expression of what makes Lucas valuable as a producer. He can translate between a creator’s highly individual process and the larger machinery required to finance and make the work. He does not assume the creator must change first.

Designing More Than One Path

Lucas is still primarily producing movies. But he does not assume that a feature released through a traditional distributor is the only possible destination for a project.

We talked about the excitement of a storyteller using more than one medium—not simply a ninety-minute movie—to express themselves. What’s exciting is considering how that talent can live across so many different formats.

For Lucas, a feature can be one expression of a creator’s work rather than the final rung on a ladder.

That flexibility is built directly into his stop-motion animation project. The team is producing it as 45 two-minute episodes that can also be assembled into a feature.

He’s building in a hedge for himself, the filmmakers, and the financiers—not merely as a matter of pragmatism, but to create leverage and preserve the best path forward.

Yet his ultimate investment is in the filmmakers, not a distribution hack.

Reaching the Audience Is Part of Producing

Lucas does not draw a hard line between making a film and finding its audience.

That means considering how the film will live beyond its running time.

For his horror comedy Portal to Hell, filmmaker / DP Woody Bess spent a day taking the film’s eight-foot demon (played by creature actor Trevor Newlin) around Los Angeles. Lucas, Woody and the film’s star and fellow producer Trey Holland have been building a DIY theatrical release plan across North America inspired by Hundred of Beavers (2022 silent self released silent movie) and Iron Lung.

Yes but he wasn’t just extending the confines of the movie. As I’ve written: To sell a product, you can’t mention the product. Pulling the scary creature out of the movie and sticking him in mundane settings, breaking the fourth wall of the movie. Simple. Smart and the right mindset for a producer today.

Lucas sees this as another part of understanding the audience.

The question is how the movie’s DNA can carry across different surfaces, with each expression standing on its own. That isn’t merely marketing.

I’ve been making this point for a while. Producers need to think differently about what storytelling and marketing mean and how they’ve become intertwined and evolved.

For Lucas, it’s just a natural part of producing.

Technology Serves Instinct

Lucas approaches AI with the same lack of ceremony. It can help him pre-visualize a film, build production systems, extend a physical world, or complete mechanical work more efficiently.

On one project, Lucas used a combination of physical production and AI tools in a proof-of-concept test whether a story that might traditionally require a $150 million budget could be made for $10 million.

But he has no interest in outsourcing the fundamental decision of whether an idea deserves to exist.

Amen, Lucas. Amen.

Repetition

Hollywood is searching for a creator-economy formula. Lucas is building a body of work. The internet changes where he looks, what he notices, how he works with filmmakers, and how he reaches an audience. The producer’s job remains the same: recognize something special, protect it, and find a way to get it made.

It’s an evolution, not a revolution.

None of this works if Lucas’s discovery of The Backrooms is treated as a lightning strike. His approach depends on doing the same work repeatedly: searching, watching, meeting people, developing projects, and placing bets that may lead nowhere.

When he left 21 Laps to produce full time, he did not begin by trying to reproduce the scale of The Backrooms.

That may be the most traditional thing about him.

The reality is Lucas will be judged not on being the assistant who found Backrooms, but on the movies and other media projects he makes, and how they fare in the marketplace. Right now he is operating on promise and potential. Producers are judged on a body of work over time. But to meet him is to root for him.

In him and his peers is the future of cinema.

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Mitch wrote the first version of this piece more than a year ago. Somehow, it feels even more relevant now.

We’re being forced to reconsider what intellectual property is, where it begins, and who gets to own it. The next great franchise might emerge from a Reddit post, a meme, or an inside joke developed collectively by thousands of people—not from a studio development slate. Its value may belong less to a single creator or company than to the community that participates in its creation, transformation, and spread.

That’s because content is no longer something an audience simply receives. It is increasingly interactive: remixed, extended, performed, and turned into something new.

The audience is becoming part of the creative process, and the boundary between consuming culture and making it is disappearing fast.

The music industry—and DJ culture in particular—understood this shift long before the rest of media. In the piece below, our Resident Gardener Mitch Camarda explores what remix culture, live experience, and creative mastery can teach us about building IP in this new world order.

It’s worth revisiting. Happy Labor Day.

— Ben

I've lived through a media revolution before. But I didn't recognize it at first.

In 2010 at Pacha NYC, Dirty South and Axwell’s remix of 'Sweet Disposition' hit me so hard it rewired my brain. DJs, once background noise, now headline Madison Square Garden. That explosive shift taught me how quickly democratized creativity can reshape entire industries—exactly what's happening today with creators.

That late night experience led me to help build Vibe Magazine's dance music coverage and eventually book hundreds of shows as a programmer and talent buyer.

More importantly, it taught me to recognize the patterns of creative disruption before they become obvious to everyone else.

DJ culture offers us a unique lens for seeing around corners—showing us not what might happen, but what's already in motion.

Remix Culture Shows Where Creative Value Really Lives

What DJs did: DJs proved that the most valuable creativity often happens between existing works — not in isolation. Daft Punk didn’t kill disco; they revived it for a new generation. Avicii didn’t replace folk music; he blended it with EDM and reached audiences who’d never have found it otherwise.

Remix wasn’t reduction — it was multiplication.

How it transformed their business: This mindset cracked open new markets. One hit song didn’t mean one version: a popular track might inspire a dozen remixes, each drawing in different fan communities and extending the song’s shelf life. Labels that embraced this saw bigger back catalogs and longer revenue tails.

@zedsdeadTurn any grandma into a dubstep fan with this simple trick #dubstep #edm #brooklynmirage #nyc #franksinatra #zedsdead #deadbeats

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DJs didn’t just make new songs — they made old songs valuable again.

How we can use it now: The current tension between AI creators and legacy IP holders mirrors the sampling battles of the '90s and 2000s. Disney and Universal's recent lawsuit against Midjourney echoes the same anxieties that drove Grand Upright Music v. Warner Bros. and Campbell v. Acuff-Rose.

Companies want control; creators want freedom to transform. DJ culture shows the winning path isn’t to police remixing but to channel it.

Imagine if, instead of fighting AI reimaginings of The Godfather, studios licensed multiple reinterpretations — one retold in modern Lagos, one as a sci-fi epic, one from Diane Keaton’s POV. One of these could unlock new audiences and fresh revenue streams for decades.

The lesson: companies that build remix-friendly ecosystems will unlock compounding value. Epic Games nailed this with Fortnite — every user-generated map or skin feeds the core IP. Music labels who embraced multiple remixes per song saw more streams, not cannibalization.

What this means for legacy media: Don’t build walls around your best ideas — build infrastructure for others to play with them. The next growth engine isn’t just new originals; it’s letting your stories evolve through reinterpretation, collaboration, and cultural cross-pollination.

DJ culture proves this doesn’t dilute value — it multiplies it.

Live Experiences Create Unreproducible Value

What DJs did: DJs knew that recorded music alone wouldn’t build real loyalty — unforgettable live shows would. Eric Prydz’s HOLO shows aren’t just concerts; they are immersive light-and-sound worlds you can’t stream later. Spain’s Elrow parties transform venues into wild, themed playgrounds where strangers became a pop-up community for one night only.

How it transformed their business: This insight flipped the economics of dance music. The live circuit — festivals, residencies, and tours — became the true profit engine. DJs went from side acts to headliners commanding stadium money. Fans didn’t just remember songs — they told stories about nights that couldn’t be pirated.

How we can use it now: Today’s digital-first creators are catching on. Danny Gonzalez turns YouTube sketches into sold-out live comedy tours. Ludwig sells out venues worldwide after building fame on Twitch. Gaming expos have evolved from industry booths to fan-powered culture festivals.

As content gets cheaper and more abundant, experience becomes the premium layer: live, local, and impossible to duplicate.

The emerging model: ‘Experiential Content’

Imagine Robert Rodriguez announcing his next film won’t just hit theaters — it’s launching as a multi-city cultural tour, each location offering something impossible to replicate:

• Austin: The premiere happens at Creator Camp — fans watch, but also join live Q&As, shoot bonus scenes, and test Rodriguez’s own gear in pop-up filmmaking workshops.

• Brooklyn: A warehouse turns into the film’s set, built out in full detail. Before and after the screening, the audience explores the story’s world and sees new installations by local street artists inspired by the film’s themes.

• Nashville: Local musicians perform a live soundtrack during key scenes, blurring the line between movie and concert.

• Denver: An overnight outdoor screening where fans camp under the stars, then spend the next day in hands-on workshops learning Rodriguez’s DIY techniques — proving the film’s core idea that anyone can make something great.

Every city adds exclusive scenes, local merch, and a community moment that can’t be streamed the next day. Fans don’t just consume the film — they co-create the cultural footprint around it.

What this means for legacy media: When content is infinite, people pay for connection. DJ culture shows that experiences bind audiences tighter than passive consumption ever could. Creators and companies that build experiential layers will win deeper loyalty and new revenue.

In the next wave, the most valuable releases won’t just play in theaters — they’ll happen in the real world, and the story will keep growing after the credits roll.

Mastery Wins When Tools Are Ubiquitous

What DJs did: During the EDM boom, everyone got access to the same tools. Ableton, Logic, free sample packs, endless YouTube tutorials — the bedroom producer was born. But not everyone with a laptop became a global DJ.

The market got crowded fast. Loud drops and flashy effects became commodities overnight. The DJs who endured didn’t just push buttons — they evolved into complete musicians: Calvin Harris wrote pop hooks that worked on radio and the festival main stage. Avicii fused folk melodies with dance beats and told stories through sound that hit deeper than a simple club banger.

How it transformed their business: This skill leap let the best DJs break out of the dance niche and dominate pop culture. They scored top radio hits, lucrative residencies, brand deals — and their songs outlasted trend cycles that buried lesser imitators.

Being good at the tool was table stakes. Being great at the craft made careers.

What it means for creators and legacy media: Raw access to AI will keep raising the floor — but it won’t raise the ceiling. The creators who master character, narrative, and emotional resonance will stand out while the clones fade away.

And here’s the chance for legacy players to stop gatekeeping and start developing. Help emerging creators evolve from short clips to compelling series, from catchy edits to lasting IP. The best labels didn’t fear bedroom producers — they found the real talent and helped them grow beyond loops and drops.

The lesson: DJ culture proves it: democratized tools create a wave of output, but true mastery builds a lasting career. AI will flood the market with passable content. But craft, voice, and story are the new moat.

The future belongs to those who treat AI as an instrument — not the whole band.

Looking Around Corners

DJ culture gives us a cheat sheet for what comes next. The patterns are clear:

• Remix culture will thrive — but the real value will go to those who build ecosystems where reinterpretation expands the pie.

• Experiences will be the premium layer — moments no algorithm or AI can replicate.

• Democratized tools like AI will flood the market with content — but mastery and storytelling will separate timeless work from disposable trends.

The smartest creators already know this: they use new tools but don’t chase novelty for novelty’s sake.

They double down on craft — memorable characters, emotional arcs, worlds worth revisiting — because that’s what endures long after the remix goes viral and the hype fades.

For legacy media, the edge isn’t owning the newest tool. It’s owning the oldest truth: great storytelling always wins.

Partner with the next wave of creators, help them master narrative craft, and build experiences fans can’t just scroll past.

DJ culture didn’t replace musicianship — it reminded us that new tech changes how we make things, but craft decides what lasts.

Amid all the AI breakthroughs, viral stunts, and algorithm tweaks, keep your eye on the fundamentals. The next era won’t belong to whoever tries the most tools. It’ll belong to whoever tells the best story.

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Sometimes, the most inspiring things I hear come from private or casual conversations. They get stuck in my head in an obsessive loop as I work out their implications.

Here are three. Turns out they are all connected…

1. NO to AI… but be ready.

The first came from a VFX supervisor who spends his time inside the major shops—the vendors that handle the heavy lifting for studio tentpoles. He was relaying what those shops are hearing from their clients:

It is not a story about whether AI is good enough. It’s an order to stand by. This is all about errors-and-omissions insurance and chain of title.

E&O coverage is a condition of distribution at Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and Disney+. To write the policy, a carrier needs a chain-of-title review establishing that every element in the film was either created originally or properly licensed. A model trained on scraped material cannot produce that. So most 2026 E&O policies now carry explicit AI exclusions or require a representation that the production contains no AI-generated material that can’t be cleared. No E&O, no distribution. Full stop.

Technical problems resolve gradually and unevenly, which is what creates early-mover advantage. Legal problems just slow down what gets released in the world and where.

In some cases, the cost of readiness is being pushed down onto the vendors.

The VFX shops are being told to build, staff, and maintain a capability they cannot bill against a single shot, for an indefinite period, at their own expense.

That is a mandate they have to pay for themselves in a business on the point of extinction. Remember Rhythm & Hues? They won the visual effects Oscar for Life of Pi eleven days after filing for bankruptcy. That is the historical baseline for how much cushion this business carries.

At the same time, some—maybe all—of the studios are developing or buying their own tech. Netflix. Amazon. Is it a coincidence that they are both tech-first companies? Maybe not. They may well be trying to connect AI to their stock price.

Will the AI floodgates open all at once? I don’t think so. There will be fits and starts. Tech that seems bulletproof will turn into lawsuits. Other technology will quietly work its way into workflows without pomp or circumstance.

For filmmakers? Stay infinitely curious. Whether it becomes an advantage or mere survival, you have to keep up.

But who needs to wait?

There are podcasts made entirely with AI that are monetizing. Surely they don’t have clean copyrights. Ditto on social media platforms.

But here’s the example I’m most curious about—just one, but with much bigger implications. Friends of mine in an unnamed country in Latin America are using AI throughout their pipeline in ways that would not pass muster in the US. They finance independently, release their movies theatrically, and then sell them to the streamers. They have at least three movies on streamers now using AI in questionable ways.

But they are walking through the back door, through post-production delivery departments outside the US that don’t subject the content to the same scrutiny those platforms apply in other territories. I assume Europe is as strict as the US.

So while US filmmakers are learning the tools but can’t implement them, filmmakers in other parts of the world are doing reps and getting paid for it…

2. The Youtube Floodgates are Open but the Deluge has just Begun

The second came from a friend who, among other things, helps studios organize their content strategies. Over lunch, she casually offered:

I guess we all know this, right? Somehow it hit me harder in that moment.

YouTube took 13.8% of all US television watch time in May—the largest share of any single distributor, ahead of Netflix, and a record. YouTube is not the future of distribution. It’s the present tense of it. The libraries follow the audience. They always have.

So picture the supply side: every studio shelf of unmonetized titles, every production company back catalog, plus a generation of AI creators producing at a marginal cost approaching zero. Producers launching shows direct to YouTube… An enormous amount of content arriving on one surface in a short window.

Here’s what I can’t reconcile, and what makes this interesting rather than obvious.

At the exact moment supply is about to go vertical, the biggest creators on the platform are moving in the other direction. MrBeast announced a 2026 reset built around what he called “ultra grind mode,” saying plainly that recent videos were “not as good as I wanted.”

Not more videos. Better ones.

Colin and Samir have been tracking the broader return to vlogging—the most sophisticated operators in the business going back to the least sophisticated format available.

Are these two connected in some way?

When content becomes infinite, content stops being the asset.

A library is inventory, and inventory in an abundant market prices toward marginal cost—which AI is driving to zero. What cannot be flooded is a specific person being specifically themselves on a Tuesday. The vlog is the least scalable thing on the internet. That is precisely why it’s appreciating.

To me, the bigger implication is handmade content. This is why I would bet on assisted AI to bring prices down before I’d bet on AI Gen. I just wrote about this last week.

But the impact is broader still and we watched this movie before—in music.

Streaming made every recording ever made instantly available. Catalog value went down. The money moved to live performance and the direct artist-fan relationship. The recording became the marketing; the show became the business.

YouTube is running that play on film and television catalog right now. The library becomes the marketing. The open question is what the show is.

If studios start strategically putting their content online as the market floods with content from all sides, they aren’t looking only to monetize what they have. They have to build the next business from it.

Which, to me, all comes back to one simple thing: Does your content have—or can it build—a real community?

All of a sudden, the relevant question in this discussion—whether the content is AI-generated, comes from studio libraries, or is Bro-Hollywood, whatever it is—is whether it can become part of a bigger flywheel.

I don’t know if any of this is surprising. But I can’t stop thinking about it…

3. Could Fede Álvarez Still Break In Today?

The third came from a major producer and former studio executive. She was talking about how good the AI tools have become for building concept trailers, how fast you can now get a look and a tone in front of a buyer.

But we both pondered their value in the marketplace.

She talked about the olden days—20 years ago?—when certain directors used rip-o-matics to sell their movies. This was once a moat. They weren’t easy to make. You had to pull scenes and clips from other movies and string them together into a coherent trailer. That, plus a script, sold a movie. But you needed amazing talent behind the scenes to make them compelling.

She worked for one such director, who was hired to make the biggest commercials in the world. He had editors in-house. They used rip-o-matics for the commercial world. He would put them to work on his movie concepts and in their moment, they stood out because they were so hard to pull off well…

Then there was the Short as Calling Card phase. The best reference: In 2009, Álvarez made a four-and-a-half-minute short called Ataque de Pánico!—giant robots destroying Montevideo—for a reported $300 and put it on YouTube.

Within days, he had a widely reported $30 million deal with Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures. He went on to direct Evil Dead, Don’t Breathe, and Alien: Romulus.

The thing that made that short was the to make something like that.

In 2009, a filmmaker in Uruguay producing a VFX driven short taking place in a part of the world where we couldn’t imagine it ever happening for $300 was attention grabbing.

The goal wasn’t just showing you an idea. It was proving a capability. The demo was the credential.

Here’s a piece of the puzzle that calls back to the point I was making about filmmakers in Latin America working with AI tools now: VFX shops in Latin America could prosper only if they bought some or all of their VFX tools on the black market. The licenses were just too expensive. This is kind of a version of the innovator’s dilemma… Those who play by the rules lose? But I digress…

As far as trailers go, anyone can generate a competent concept trailer this afternoon. It is no longer evidence of anything. When the cost of the demo goes to zero, the demo stops functioning as proof.

So the barrier relocated. The question is where.

Not entirely to craft—the machines are absorbing some of that. The bar gets much higher, for sure. A great concept trailer today needs more and more human intervention. The pure Gen AI stuff feels like pure Gen AI. It’s about specificity. It’s about pushing the tools to make something that feels unique—in every frame.

Most importantly, it needs a POV. It needs a real director making real, specific decisions, not leaving those decisions to chance.

In fact, most concept trailers look like trailers from the early aughts. But the best trailers today don’t even try to tell the story.

So part of the puzzle is more human intervention. Where a rip-o-matic was literally melding 30 different directors’ content into a single story that a totally different director would one day make, a concept trailer needs the most originality and precision possible to have a chance.

But that’s just the first piece.

Because mostly, the barrier has moved to validation.

A concept trailer with forty million views and a real argument in the comments is still proof—not proof that you can execute, but proof that somebody cares. The audience becomes the credential.

That’s not really new. First, Fede Álvarez created an amazing short. Then it went viral. Then Sam Raimi “discovered” him.

The old barrier was capability, and capability can be beaten by one talented person working alone. The new barrier is attention, and attention can be beaten only by an audience built over years. The tools that were supposed to democratize the entry point may have quietly raised it.

Where the Three Meet

We’re all talking about the same thing every day, and we don’t even know it. It’s about value. It’s about scarcity. How do we create value in a world of infinite content?

The first story says that technical capability is no longer the only thing determining what gets made. Legal permission and institutional readiness matter. While the studios wait, filmmakers outside the system are doing reps, learning the tools, and getting paid for it.

The second says that when every library, producer, and AI creator pours content onto the same platform, content itself stops being scarce. The value moves somewhere else—to the person, the relationship, the community around the work.

And the third says the same thing at the level of the individual filmmaker. When anyone can make a competent concept trailer, the trailer is no longer the credential. The proof moves from the image to the audience. Can you make people care?

AI doesn’t eliminate scarcity. It relocates it.

For a long time, the ability to create polished images was scarce. Soon it won’t be. But taste is still scarce. Specificity is scarce. A point of view is scarce. An audience that trusts you is scarce. So is a production pipeline that can actually be insured, distributed, and monetized.

That creates a strange split. Production is becoming more democratic at the same time that breaking in may be getting harder. More people can make something. Far fewer can make something that can be cleared, discovered, remembered, and turned into a lasting relationship with an audience.

The cost of creation is falling. The cost of significance may be rising.

Which means “be ready” has to mean more than learning the tools. It means being ready legally, creatively, commercially, and—maybe most importantly—with a community already forming around the work.

The tools were supposed to remove the barrier. Maybe they removed one barrier and revealed the next:

Can you make it?

Can you clear it?

Can anyone find it?

Will anyone care?

And will they come back?

That’s where the three meet.

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A week ago Saturday, an invite-only group of executives, lawyers, agents, producers and technologists gathered at AFI in Los Angeles to discuss the state of AI. The conversation was held under the Chatham House Rule. No cell phones. Ben Affleck was the star attraction.

I wasn’t invited, and neither were you.

That has become a familiar story. Producers and filmmakers are constantly told that AI will disrupt every part of production, but almost nobody can explain what that means in practice.

During Netflix’s second-quarter earnings call, Ted Sarandos said the company had used generative-AI workflows on roughly 300 titles, primarily in postproduction. Doing what? Removing wires? Building crowds? Altering performances? Replacing locations? Netflix offered a few examples, but most of the work remains a black box. My guess is that a lot of it is still dubbing and subtitling.

Placing the bet

There are evangelists who believe generative AI will eventually absorb the entire production process. Then there are filmmakers betting on assisted AI: keeping actors, directors and conventional photography at the center while using the technology to extend, alter or finish what they capture.

Both paths will succeed and fail in interesting and unpredictable ways. But storytellers planning for the next few years cannot wait for the argument to resolve itself. We have to decide where to put our time, money and attention.

I have become increasingly interested in assisted-AI storytelling.

Neither path is harmless to the people who make movies. Fully generated work can replace jobs outright. Assisted AI can shrink crews, eliminate shooting days and move work away from departments that have supported generations of craftspeople. Those are not abstract efficiencies. They are jobs, health insurance and careers.

I don’t have a satisfying answer to that.

But the other side of the equation is real too: if we cannot find efficiencies and keep the business healthy, there will be fewer movies—and fewer jobs—to protect. The survival of the business is part of the labor question.

I also recognize my bias. My business depends on stars, and I believe audiences will continue to care about human presence and human creativity. I have yet to see much exceptional work emerge from generative AI. The results remain rare and usually come with caveats.

The true believers will push back. If the work is good, audiences will care less and less how it was made. Today’s generative-AI content is the worst we will ever see. The tools will make possible things we cannot yet imagine.

All of that may be true. I still believe human creativity is the decisive ingredient—and assisted AI depends on far more of it.

Who is building assisted-AI tools? What can they actually do? And what can the rest of us learn from outside the room?

Affleck vs. Kavanaugh

That is the question I was chasing when I began looking at Ben Affleck’s InterPositive and Ryan Kavanaugh’s Acme AI & FX.

What I admire is that both of them made large, visible bets on AI-assisted filmmaking before the direction of the market was clear. They won’t be the last. But neither has shown us much about how his system actually works.

I wasn’t looking to dismiss either company. I wanted to understand what problem each was trying to solve—and how hard it would be to get there without access to what it had built.

So I reconstructed both systems, or at least as much of them as I could, from the outside. I gathered interviews, presentations and production claims. I read InterPositive’s patents and compared both companies’ descriptions with existing tools for inpainting, relighting, virtual production, markerless capture, previs, digital environments and footage-conditioned generation.

The question was not whether every component was new. It was how the pieces connected, what information moved between them and whether the resulting system could make hundreds of production decisions repeatable.

The investigation produced some answers, although for the sake of brevity I have not gone as deep here as I would have liked. In broad strokes, InterPositive’s patents reveal its training structure, internal models and the costs it was designed to reduce. Acme’s materials describe a recognizable pipeline that can be compared with tools already on the market.

Neither system has been independently tested. InterPositive has never been publicly demonstrated. Acme has not yet proved that a system built for one unusually ambitious movie—seen only through a short, private work-in-progress presentation—can transfer economically to the next.

Affleck and Kavanaugh were never building rival versions of the same system. They started with different ideas about what should remain fixed, where a director needs freedom and when the machine should enter the process.

Affleck: Build the Model Around the Movie

None of the individual things Affleck says InterPositive can do is entirely new. Visual-effects artists already remove wires, reframe shots, alter lighting, enhance backgrounds and create coverage that was never photographed.

If InterPositive were simply a conversational interface placed over familiar tools, it might be useful. But it would not explain why Netflix paid approximately $587 million for a company with fewer than twenty employees.

So what makes it interesting?

A Film School for the Machine

InterPositive’s most valuable asset may be a library of training footage designed to teach a machine how cinematography works.

Affleck’s team built that library on a soundstage using professional cameras, lenses and LiDAR, which uses lasers to measure the position and distance of objects. They photographed the same scenes repeatedly, changing one variable at a time: the lens, aperture, shutter, sensor, focus or color temperature.

Think of it as a film school for the machine.

Keep the actor, lighting and camera position exactly the same but change the lens, and the machine can begin to understand what that lens does to the image. Change only the aperture, and it can learn how depth of field works.

Footage scraped from the internet cannot teach this nearly as cleanly. An 85mm lens often appears in a portrait, while a wide lens often appears in a landscape or action scene. A model trained on random footage may associate the lens with the subject without understanding how the lens itself changes the picture.

InterPositive isolated the variables so the machine could learn cause and effect.

Training Smart, Not Broad

The footage from a single movie could never contain enough information to teach a model everything it needs to know. It may show one actor in one room under one set of conditions, but not that room from every angle or what would happen if the camera, lens and lighting changed.

Large general-purpose models solve that problem by training on enormous quantities of material. That gives them breadth, but it also creates many of the copyright, consent and chain-of-title problems surrounding AI.

InterPositive appears to take a different approach: train smart rather than broad. Its controlled dataset teaches the general rules of lenses, light, cameras and physical space. The dailies then teach the system the specific world of one movie—its actors, sets and visual language.

One dataset teaches the grammar of filmmaking; the other teaches the vocabulary of this particular film.

The patents leave room for InterPositive to use larger models made by other companies. But if its controlled dataset works as intended, the system may rely less on broadly scraped material because it has been taught the information it actually needs.

Jack of All Trades, Master of… Many?

The patents identify two internal models. The first is called SamildAnach, an old name associated with the Irish god Lugh that roughly means skilled in many arts.

SamildAnach looks at ordinary footage and describes how it was photographed. It tries to identify the lens, camera position, depth, distance and composition. Instead of simply labeling an image “a woman in a room,” it describes how the filmmaker created the shot.

A second model, called Filmmaker, uses those descriptions to modify or generate images while following the visual rules learned from the soundstage footage.

InterPositive is not asking a filmmaker to type “give me a car chase in Tokyo” and accept whatever appears. It begins with a movie’s own footage, learns that production’s performers, sets and visual language, and creates new material within those boundaries.

If it produces an insert or camera angle that was never photographed, it is still generating an image. It is simply generating from the movie rather than from a blank prompt.

How a Production Might Use It

The likely workflow is that a production shoots normally and supplies its dailies. InterPositive analyzes that footage and adapts a larger model to the performers, sets, lighting and visual language of that particular movie.

A filmmaker could then reshape material after the shoot—fixing mistakes, testing new creative choices or making changes that once required a reshoot or a much larger visual-effects effort.

The results would still need review, compositing, color and approval. Nothing I found suggests that filmmakers or visual-effects artists disappear. The tool expands what they can change and when they can change it.

InterPositive therefore appears to be more than a wrapper around existing software, but less than an entirely new form of generative AI. Its value lies in teaching existing technology to understand filmmaking and making it usable inside a professional production.

Why Netflix Dropped Big Bills on This

Netflix may have wanted a system built specifically for filmmakers, trained on material with a clean chain of title and capable of fitting into its existing production infrastructure. A general-purpose model might be more powerful. A model that understands how filmmakers work—and whose training material Netflix can account for—may be more useful.

Not to be cynical, but Netflix is a technology company, and technology companies now appear contractually obligated to mention AI in every earnings presentation. After a quarter that failed to excite investors despite strong earnings, InterPositive gave Netflix something new to talk about.

But $587 million is an expensive way to zhuzh up an earnings call.

Kavanaugh: Build the Movie Before You Shoot It

Kavanaugh begins with the same problem as Affleck—movies cost too much and could benefit from new tools—but his solution is almost the reverse. Acme tries to design the movie so completely in advance that the physical shoot becomes the shortest part of the process.

Its test case is Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi, directed by Doug Liman and starring Casey Affleck and Gal Gadot.

Acme says a conventional version would have required seventy-two shooting days across 213 locations in eighteen countries. Instead, the actors were photographed over approximately twenty days on a gray stage in West London, and the locations were built around them later.

Do the Work Before the Actors Arrive

Kavanaugh says he spent approximately $15 million, seven to eight months and the labor of a fifty-person creative team developing the system and planning the movie.

Every shot, camera position and environment was mapped before production began. The company says its software can read a screenplay and help generate storyboards, blocking plans and three-dimensional previews. Another part of the system determines which props must be physically present because the actors need to touch them. A central planning tool connects the shots with cast schedules, crew requirements and production logistics.

The simple version is that Acme turns the screenplay into a detailed set of instructions before anyone starts shooting. It does not eliminate production decisions. It forces filmmakers to make them earlier.

Why a Gray Stage?

Acme shot the actors in a gray room rather than against a traditional green screen.

Green screens make it easier to separate an actor from the background, but they also cast green light onto skin, hair and clothing. Visual-effects artists then have to remove that color, sometimes frame by frame. A gray stage creates less color contamination and provides cleaner footage for relighting and compositing.

The actors still wear real costumes and handle real props. Multiple cameras record their faces and bodies without motion-capture suits or tracking dots. The director and cinematographer can view versions of the digital environments through augmented-reality equipment, while projected marks on the floor show the actors where walls, furniture and other objects will eventually appear.

Acme is not generating the actors. It is capturing their performances and separating those performances from the worlds around them.

Build the World Afterward

Once the actors are photographed, the production moves into what Acme calls its “VFX Soup.” Production designers, cinematographers, costume designers and visual-effects artists continue building the movie together.

The production designer creates the environments. The cinematographer helps match the light on the actors to the light in those environments. Costumes remain physical but must be adjusted to reflect the colors and light of places that never surrounded them on set.

The advantage is that a director can change those places after the actors have gone home. Liman reportedly turned an ordinary restaurant scene into an elaborate venue with circus performers. A phone call originally set at a desk in Antigua moved to an Antarctic snowstorm with wolves in the background.

The company screened a polished ten-minute compilation shortly after the shoot ended. That does not mean the film was finished in two weeks. It means enough work had been completed during preparation for selected scenes to move through postproduction quickly.

What Does It Save?

Acme reports a total budget of approximately $70 million and a below-the-line cost of $40 million, compared with an earlier physical-production estimate of $120 million to $130 million.

I would want to see the comparison budget. No experienced producer would literally travel to 213 locations. They would be combined, substituted or rewritten. The fair comparison is between Acme’s method and the practical version a conventional line producer would actually budget. Maybe a better comparison is what they get for $25 million (which I believe was the BTL minus the 15 million in product development).

Even with that caveat, shooting for twenty-one days in one building obviously saves money on travel, construction, location fees, company moves and physical-production time. That is Kavanaugh’s point as he sells the system.

So What Is Proprietary?

Acme claims a large patent portfolio—more than sixty patents, compared with Affleck’s four—but I could not verify it. The applications may not yet be public because publication can take eighteen months. That does not mean the patents do not exist.

Most of the individual tools Acme describes already exist. Filmmakers can license software for storyboarding, virtual environments, camera tracking, digital relighting and markerless performance capture. Gray stages and augmented-reality previews are not new inventions on their own.

What Acme may own is the system that connects them.

Think of it as an assembly line. Acme may not have invented every machine on the factory floor—although perhaps it did invent some—but it may have developed a better way to move a movie from script to planning, from planning to the gray stage, and from the gray stage into post without losing information along the way.

What Does a Director Give Up?

The price of Acme’s postproduction flexibility is that more decisions must be made before the shoot.

Actors sitting in a planned wide shot can still improvise dialogue. The problem comes when someone unexpectedly runs across the room and the director whips the camera around to follow. The digital environment on that side of the room may not exist because nobody planned to photograph it.

The system can accommodate changes, but rebuilding the environment, tracking and lighting costs money. At some point, preserving unlimited spontaneity begins to consume the savings the system was designed to create.

That makes the method better suited to some genres than others. A controlled drama or international thriller may benefit enormously. A comedy built around physical improvisation may find it harder to use.

And the biggest question: does it use LLMs? Its hard to tell. But that might complicate chain of title. Apparently some of the cost of producing this movie were the lawyers they needed to avoid that very issue. Who knows…

The Cannes Reaction

What buyers actually saw at Cannes remains fuzzy. Reports describe only “first footage,” elsewhere characterized as a ten-minute preview, shown behind closed doors while the film was still deep in postproduction.

Doug Liman called the response “strong,” and trade coverage noted a “steady stream of curious buyers.” Word on the street was reportedly more mixed, with some attendees said to be underwhelmed.

Because no buyers spoke on the record, it is difficult to know what they saw or how representative those reactions were.

The footage apparently generated some territorial sales. Warner Bros.’ Clockwork reportedly entered exclusive talks for North America, although no completed deal was publicly confirmed.

Can Acme Repeat It?

Kavanaugh’s answer is his slate.

Acme says it has more than fifteen film and television projects in development or production, plus advertising work. None of this has been corroborated beyond Kavanaugh’s claims.

He says the buzz, set visits and conversations around Hollywood have brought producers to Acme with movies they cannot fit into budgets that will get greenlit. The pipeline will now include both Acme’s own projects and production services for others.

It is easy to be cynical about a business whose information comes primarily from its founder. But Kavanaugh took the first steps. He developed a script, got it funded and used that money to build a pipeline that could—or ostensibly does—bring costs down.

He is one giant step ahead of most of us.

Two Different Places for Creative Freedom

InterPositive treats the photographed image—and everything within it—as the source of truth, using AI to alter or extend what was shot. Acme treats the performance as the source of truth, building the surrounding world afterward. One targets reshoots, visual effects and finishing; the other targets locations, travel, construction and shooting days.

The eventual answer probably will not be one system or the other. A filmmaker might shoot 40 percent of a movie through Acme’s process, photograph the rest conventionally and run everything through InterPositive.

That is how movies have always been built: combine tools, move money around and preserve what matters creatively. The technology will change. The job remains deciding where the savings are worth the trade.

The Other End of the Market

Let’s be honest.

Most of us do not operate in Affleck’s or Kavanaugh’s orbit. Wherever the money came from, Kavanaugh put together a $70 million film about a man trying to save Bitcoin. A-list talent or not, he can access capital in a way most filmmakers cannot. And even if you make content for Netflix, who knows when—or whether—you will get access to Affleck’s tools.

Hernany Perla offers a view from the other end of the market. He is an old friend. We met when he was an executive at Lionsgate and the company I worked for had a deal there. After leaving the studio, he became expert at something few people know how to do anymore: take a movie from idea to delivery for a few hundred thousand dollars.

Hart’s company recently brought Perla in to help with microdramas but quickly realized his real skill was stretching one dollar into ten, whatever the format. So it asked him to help supervise Exotic Foods, a show being made for Hart’s LOL platform.

The Work Moves

Exotic Foods was the first project Perla observed that ran entirely through a hybrid pipeline: one location standing in for many, with real actors and props inside a world built around them digitally. Its budget was a small fraction of what full live action would have cost. It was a true indie assisted-AI show.

What he learned was that the savings were not where people assumed. They were not in post. They were in prep, paid for with a level of discipline low-budget filmmaking has spent decades learning to live without.

Perla still thinks physically. A table, cart or doorway gives an actor something real to move around. Hair, makeup and costume provide details the eye trusts. The background may be virtual, but the image still needs weight, texture and overlap.

The specific tools matter less than the system around them.

Unreal Engine, already common in production, can build the digital environments. Platforms such as Voia and Beeble help place photographed actors inside those environments by separating, tracking and relighting the live-action footage. Together, they offer pieces of a virtual-production pipeline that once required far more specialized infrastructure.

In the indie world, the producer does not need to own every tool. The job is understanding how they fit together—and where they are likely to fail (and will they work for your budget).

Ambition Leaks Out a Shot at a Time

A low-budget project rarely loses its ambition through one enormous compromise. It happens through dozens of small ones.

For now, that may be where these tools matter most: not replacing the shoot, but intervening in small, controlled ways and solving problems that would otherwise remain in the movie.

Those interventions will grow as the technology improves. Filmmakers will also get better at recognizing where the tools can help. The real skill may not be generating entire worlds. It may be spotting the handful of places where a modest intervention preserves something the budget was about to take away.

Eventually the only restraint will be the filmmaker’s imagination, not the budget.

We are not there yet. But we can start learning where the tools bend, where they break and which compromises they might allow us to stop making.

Who Owns the System?

Perla reached many of the same conclusions as Kavanaugh, only from the other end of the budget scale.

The difference is ownership.

Affleck built an asset Netflix could own. Kavanaugh built a system Acme hopes to repeat. Perla assembles what a particular production needs, then takes it apart when the movie is finished.

Those are different economic models, but they are also different answers to a larger question: How much of filmmaking should become permanent infrastructure?

Maybe the advantage will belong to the companies that own the technology. Maybe it will belong to producers who know how to combine tools without owning them. Or maybe filmmakers will eventually need some version of both—access to the open market and enough proprietary knowledge to avoid becoming customers in someone else’s system.

Still Digging

I do not have a clean answer yet. I am just digging in.

But here is a story to leave you with.

We were finishing a movie when an AI company approached us. We were missing a few inserts, and several sequences could have used shots we did not have. We reviewed them together, and the company was confident it could help. It promised 4K delivery and indemnification against legal claims, cited deals underway with studios, and pointed to other filmmakers already using its tools.

I was skeptical, but curious.

So I negotiated a very affordable deal. I told our post supervisor and my producing partner that we were paying to learn—but that we should keep pursuing the conventional solution, just in case.

Good thing we did.

The latest update is that we cannot color-correct the company’s outputs. If we want an insert of an actor’s hand holding a phone, we first have to color correct and output the footage in 4k, train the system and then generate the insert. The color has to be baked in before the new shot exists. Several other things we needed—including crowd work—turned out to be beyond what the tools could deliver.

This is a well-known company working in assisted AI. Its limitations do not prove that the technology is useless. They reveal the distance between an impressive capability and something that can survive a real postproduction pipeline.

So how far along are we, really?

Affleck has built technology almost nobody outside a small circle has seen. Kavanaugh has a movie in post that buyers encountered only through a closed, work-in-progress presentation.

Exotic Foods, the show Perla supervised, will soon go directly to consumers. It does not have to survive the same scrutiny as a studio feature projected on a forty-foot screen. Most people will watch it on a phone. It can still generate CPMs, attract brand deals and find an audience. Will those viewers care how the backgrounds were created?

These projects are different and deserve different scrutiny. That may be the point. “Ready” is not a single threshold. A tool can be ready for one format, budget and screen while remaining unusable for another.

Adoption will not happen evenly either. Different countries, platforms and production cultures will balance labor, regulation, cost and quality in different ways. Some may move faster precisely because they are willing to tolerate results that Hollywood cannot—or will not—accept.

The messier tools may reach audiences before the precise ones do.

I am talking to artists and technical experts. I am weighing whether my company should build something of its own—not because I know what it should be, but because ownership may be the price of a seat at the table.

Tomorrow, the tools will change again.

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A year ago a wrote a piece for us called “Quantum Comedy And The End Of The Single Format.” The proof point he opened with was Shane Gillis self-financing Tires out of his own YouTube channel and selling it to Netflix. A year later, that example has only gotten stronger — Tires just dropped a season 3, and Netflix locked Gillis into a new overall deal off the strength of it.

But the win isn’t really about Gillis. It’s what Mitch was using him to point at: comedy IP no longer moves in a straight line from pitch to pilot to premiere. It exists in multiple platform-states at once — tested cheap in public, on TikTok or YouTube, before anyone commits real money to it, then expressed differently depending on where it lands next.

That idea has only become more true over the last twelve months, and it’s foundational to how we think about convergence here — content, community, and commerce aren’t sequential steps anymore, they’re happening in parallel, on the audience’s terms, before a studio ever sees the pitch deck. IP finds its way across different surfaces, adapting to those surfaces. If the comedian IS the IP he will exist differently on each surface.

Caleb Hearon, who is on my radar for a legacy project, is a perfect example. He built a following on twitter with little sketches, he did something entirely different on YouTube with his show So True, and captures his stand up and talk show appearances on an insta channel called Caleb Says Things. And he is appearing in movies like Devil Wears Prada 2 or Trash Mountain premiering at TIFF soon. Stand up is a piece of the puzzle but it’s arguably not even the center of his universe. He is a comedian born into this era and fluent in its intricacies.

There are more like him emerging every day.

Not everything in the piece held up. Mitch’s big closing bet, that a major studio comedy department would shut down outright by 2026, didn’t happen although those departments are in many cases razor thin. What happened instead was restructuring — layoffs, contraction, quiet attrition — which is arguably the less dramatic but more accurate version of the same instinct.

This piece got so much attention from readers, from agents, from managers, it just felt like a year later it was worth revisiting.

Original piece below, unedited, exactly as it ran in August 2025.

— Ben Odell, Substacker-in-Chief

I grew up in the era of legacy comedy dominance.

Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, Zoolander, Meet The Parents, Wedding Crashers and The 40 Year Old Virgin were favorites of my adolescence. Let’s not forget The Fox comedy lineup of The Simpsons, That 70’s Show, Family Guy and King of the Hill. There were also plenty of others like The League, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, VEEP and Arrested Development.

These were pieces of comedy that formed my very specific palate. That and the likes of Ralphie May, Bernie Mac, Ron White, Norm Macdonald, George Carlin and Greg Giraldo. They helped forge a die hard comedy fan that in recent years has found that this genre of content is rarely found in the places I used to find it.

My dream as an aspiring writer was to one day work in a comedy writer's room and concoct jokes all day on the lot at some studio in Hollywood.

Those days are long gone. That type of work environment is hard to find, especially for an up and coming writer.

So where do I get my fix?

Not in the theatre, but online. It's not Thursday night on a major network, it's a weekly drop on Instagram or YouTube.

And I'm not alone. The entire comedy ecosystem has migrated while the studios were still scheduling pilot season.

The industry claims comedy in theaters is back, or at least 'Friendship' and 'The Naked Gun' are making a strong case for that argument. Netflix's 'Happy Gilmore 2' just crushed it with 41 million views in week one.

But here's what nobody's talking about: Brooklyn Coffee Shop pulled 8 million views with their first episode.

Major streaming comedies burn $2-5 million per episode for half that audience.

The game has already changed. While we're debating whether digital counts as 'real' comedy, creators are building empires from their bedrooms.

Web-to-TV That Actually Works

Forget everything you think you know about "maintaining authenticity." The real secret is platform fluidity and letting content exist in different states simultaneously.

Take Tires on Netflix.

Shane Gillis self-financed the first season from 'Gilly & Keeves’ then sold it to Netflix for a speculated $5 million. Now it exists as three different experiences:

• For podcast fans: Gillis's comedy universe

• For Netflix browsers: workplace comedy

• For comedy purists: proof transgressive humor still has mainstream appeal

Gillis didn't port his show to Netflix. He let it live multiple lives at once.

Dreaming Whilst Black went from 500K YouTube views to 2.3 million on BBC Three. How? They added workplace storylines for broad appeal while keeping cultural specificity intact.

How To With John Wilson transformed 50-100K Vimeo views into 800K-1M HBO viewers. The secret? Filming 200+ hours per episode. Maintaining obsessive documentary style within TV constraints.

Want to know what doesn't work?

Comedy Central's 'High School USA!' died after one season despite 15 million web subscribers. They stretched 11-minute episodes to 22 minutes. Destroyed the pacing. Dead on arrival.

The lesson is mathematical: successful transition requires understanding how platforms metabolize content differently.

Content That Multiplies Itself

Your primary series is just the foundation. The real money lives in the shadow economy of complementary content.

Shanked gets this.

The cast members are comedians and creators in their own right. By leveraging their existing communities and sharing BTS moments from Shanked across their own channels, they create an ecosystem that can generate more total engagement than the episodes themselves.

Smosh turned this into science. One shooting day becomes:

• Main sketch (3-5M views)

• Try Not to Laugh (8-10M)

• Behind-the-scenes (1-2M)

• Podcast (500K downloads)

• Livestreams (2-3M)

• TikTok clips (10-15M)

Annual revenue: $15-20M versus $3-4M if they only produced main content.

That's a 5x multiplier.

Good Mythical Morning built a $30M annual business where the main show is the smallest revenue generator. 10 billion total views. Only 40% from main episodes.

Reaction videos alone generate tons of additional annual views.

They let the shadow economy thrive because it's worth more than the primary economy.

Sketches as Live Ammunition

Forget focus groups. The new model uses sketches as market testing in real-time.

Traditional pilot: $2-5M for one concept. Digital testing: $10-50K for 50-100 concepts.

Brian Jordan Alvarez proved it. Three years testing characters on TikTok. $15,000 total spend. His character videos pulled 200M+ views, creating massive data sets on what worked.

Result? 'English Teacher' premiered to 2.3M viewers. FX's strongest comedy launch in five years.

The network saved millions while getting pre-validated content.

Caleb Hearon turned Twitter into a development lab:

• 500+ comedic bits over two years

• Bits exceeding 100K views became sketches

• Sketches topping 1M views became series concepts

Traditional development could cost $500K in market research. Hearon did it for free while building an audience.

Superwog discovered through YouTube data:

• Family sketches outperformed friend sketches by 300%

• Ethnic humor traveled globally, Australian-specific didn't

• Sub-3-minute sketches had 80% completion versus 45% for longer content

When ABC Australia commissioned their series, it came pre-optimized based on 100M+ views of data.

Meanwhile, Quibi burned $1.75 billion on content nobody validated.

Your development budget should be 90% testing, 10% production. Not the reverse.

Fan Economies You Don't Own

Stop trying to control your fan base. Cultivate it instead.

KallMeKris seeds 3-4 "duet-able" moments per video. Each original spawns 100-200 fan remixes. That's 10-20M additional impressions per video.

Her 50M followers are an unpaid marketing department generating $2-3M in equivalent advertising value monthly.

RDCWorld1 built Dream Con from online sketches. The convention generated $3M in ticket sales. But the real value? 50M+ impressions of user-generated content.

Fans pay to create marketing for them.

Gus Johnson tracks which moments get remixed most. Creates similar content. When he releases a 2M-view sketch, fan content generates another 5-8M views.

Want to know how to kill this golden goose?

Fine Brothers tried to trademark "React" videos. Lost 675,000 subscribers in one week.

You don't own your fan economy. You cultivate it.

Worlds That Generate Revenue

This isn't merchandising. It's fictional worlds becoming real economies.

Viva La Dirt League raised $3.2M crowdfunding. Backers didn't just donate – they bought into a universe:

• Become NPCs in their world

• Have items named after them

• Join exclusive game servers

Their Baelin's Route film generated $500K direct sales plus $2M in channel growth.

JK! Studios' Freelancers secured $300K fan investment with equity participation. ROI for early investors: 250% over two years.

Aunty Donna built a multi-tentacle business:

• YouTube: 100M+ views

• Netflix: $1M+ deal

• Live tours: $2M annually

• Podcast: $500K annually

• Merchandise: $300K annually

The math is beautiful: Podcast listeners are 3x more likely to buy tickets. Netflix viewers are 5x more likely to buy merchandise.

Alan's Universe partnered with HYBE to create real pop groups from fictional characters. The fictional band's Instagram has 5M followers before releasing any music.

FAST Channels: The Gold Mine Nobody's Talking About

Everyone's obsessed with TikTok. Meanwhile, FAST channels are quietly printing money.

Samsung licenses Dhar Mann's content. His videos hit 73% completion rates versus 45% for traditional reruns. Samsung doesn't need exclusive content. They need content that holds attention through ad breaks.

Tubi licenses Kinigra Deon's content for 90% less than traditional shows. Still generates comparable ad revenue. Her series reaches 5-8M monthly viewers who would never search YouTube.

Context creates value.

Roku packages creator sketches into 'comedy hours.' Watch time increased 400%. 'Best of TikTok Comedy' hours pull higher ratings than cable shows at 10% acquisition cost.

The Veterans Are Building Something New

Paul Scheer and Rob Huebel launched 'Dark Web' after decades in traditional TV. They're exploring internet mysteries and strange online corners.

Not a hobby. A strategy.

Ken Marino and David Wain created Middle Aged Dad Jam Band. It's a cover band that tours, but here's the twist: they bring in comedians from their network to create digital videos. Millions of views. Live shows fuel viral content. Viral content sells tickets.

Each feeds the other.

These aren't pandemic pivots. They're strategic moves by creators who understand that owning your audience matters more than network deals.

They could get meetings anywhere. They're choosing to build from scratch online.

That tells you everything.

The Shadow Economy Nobody Measures

Beyond traditional metrics lies a parallel economy most producers never see.

Official YouTube AdSense might generate $100K monthly. But:

• Reaction videos to that content: $150K for other creators

• Fan merchandise on unofficial platforms: $200K

• Discord communities charging $5-15 monthly: 10,000 members

• Fan fiction and art: unmeasurable traffic back to original

Every dollar generated in the shadow economy drives $2-3 back to the primary economy through expanded reach.

When someone makes $10K reacting to your content, they're creating a commercial that reaches audiences you'd never find.

People Just Do Nothing learned this the hard way. First instinct: control all derivatives through copyright enforcement.

Result: 60% viewership drop in six months.

When they reversed course and embraced the shadow economy, audience grew 300% the following year.

The IP's value isn't in what you control. It's in what you inspire others to create.

The New Comedy Development Model

Here's how it actually works now:

A single IP exists simultaneously as:

• Instagram sketches (testing)

• YouTube series (primary content)

• TikTok clips (marketing)

• Discord community (fan development)

• Merchandise (revenue)

• FAST programming (passive monetization)

• Streaming series (victory lap)

Each state feeds the others.

Traditional pilot: $2-5M for one concept. New model: $50K testing 50 concepts.

Shane Gillis proved it. Self-finance on shoestring. Sell for $5M. Renewed before premiere.

What's Actually Coming

Beyond Platforms: Content existing in experiences that aren't platforms. Live interactive experiences. Real-time character conversations. Comedy transcending boundaries entirely.

Beyond Engagement: Audiences co-creating canon. Drawfee's 'Drawtectives' thrives because fans submit designs, vote on stories, voice characters.

Beyond Multiplication: Modular content audiences reconfigure. Characters for any scenario. Jokes for multiple contexts. Storylines viewers remix.

Beyond Testing: Anticipatory comedy identifies humor gaps before audiences know they exist. Create what's absent, not what works.

Beyond Economics: Revenue ecosystems. Value through community, cultural impact, lifetime relationships beyond transactions.

Your Move

Design for Flexibility: Create comedy DNA that expresses differently per environment.

Build Communities: Thousand engaged fans beat million passive viewers.

Create Expandable Universes: Design for multiple expressions – live events, interactive experiences, formats not yet imagined.

Orchestrate Collaboration: Writers' rooms include audiences. Comedy becomes structured improvisation with participation.

The Clock Is Already Running

By 2026, the first major studio comedy department will shut down. Not restructure. Not pivot. Close.

They'll blame market conditions, streaming economics, changing tastes. But here's what actually happened: their development executives kept greenlighting $5M pilots while creators were validating concepts for $5K. Their comedy teams kept chasing Emmy voters while audiences were choosing TikTok clips.

The studios that survive won't be the ones with the biggest budgets or the most IP.

They'll be the ones who understood that comedy development isn't about controlling the pipeline anymore. It's about becoming the platform where comedy happens – whether that's a 30-second TikTok or a 30-minute series.

The rest? They'll become case studies in business schools.

The barrier to entry has never been lower. You can validate your concept for less than your last catering budget. The future of comedy isn't being written in writers' rooms.

It's being written by whoever moves first.

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(You can still read it for free.)

If you didn’t notice, we recently—and without much fanfare—put up a paywall on Open Gardens.

Here’s what you should know:

Our weekly articles are still free. You can also read the previous three months of the archive for free.

Paid subscribers will get the complete archive and additional premium material as we start creating more. I’ve begun recording interviews on Riverside, and we’ll be publishing highlight clips on social. The interviews are the basis of many of my long-form articles, but the conversations themselves are often pretty interesting. Those go behind the paywall.

A paid subscription costs $8 a month or $80 a year.

I didn’t launch Open Gardens as a revenue stream. But doing this well costs money.

We want to record more interviews, produce more video, cover more events across the country—and eventually around the world—and continue expanding the group of people contributing to the publication.

Right now, I run Open Gardens at a deficit because this is, in the parlance of our time, top of funnel. The payoff is what I learn and what I can share with others and the community we are building.

Any money from subscriptions will go directly back into doing more of the work.

Because of where we’ve placed the paywall, Open Gardens is still essentially free. But if you get a lot out of the publication and can afford to support it, please become a paid subscriber.

And if you can’t afford it but want access to the archive and other paid material, just DM us. We’ll give you a subscription for free.

Really. Hit us up.

I launched Open Gardens a year and a half ago for three reasons.

First, I saw the convergence of the creator economy and legacy media coming, and I wanted to hold myself accountable for understanding it—for my own benefit and for the benefit of my company, 3Pas Studios.

Second, I wasn’t seeing enough reporting on these changes from the perspective of the people actually doing the work. Journalists provide enormous value, and I read just about everyone covering this space. But a peer-to-peer conversation is different.

Third, I realized that if I wanted to understand the creator economy, I needed to become a creator. Open Gardens became my induction into that world. Since we’ve launched multiple creator businesses with more on the way.

All three of those things paid off.

Here’s what I didn’t see coming.

I didn’t expect Open Gardens to become widely read by people across both legacy media and the creator economy.

I didn’t expect the convergence to happen so quickly—or for it to become one of the most talked-about subjects across both industries.

And I didn’t expect the publication to connect me with such an enormous network of smart, curious people on every side of this conversation.

I also didn’t fully appreciate that publishing a deep-dive article every week—while managing a team of three other writers and running a very active film and television company—would be a lotta work.

Duh.

Every week, as I face another deadline, I question whether I can keep doing this.

And every week I pull my shit together and get it done, usually while my family gets the brunt of my polishing an article over the weekend. , ,and face similar struggles with time.

And yet…

And yet it’s so worth it.

Open Gardens has become so integral to the evolution of my company that I can’t afford not to continue.

It has been the single best way for me to understand what is changing, where the opportunities are, and what all of this means for people who make a living creating content.

And, from what many readers tell me, it has become similarly useful to them.

Which brings us back to the paywall.

Truthfully, we turned on paid subscriptions because Ted Hope suggested it. Ted is—and has always been—the Patron Saint of Indie Filmmakers and a mentor to an army of people in this industry. When Ted offers advice, it’s generally wise to listen. He was the first to pay for a subscription (thanks Ted).

It also turns out that Substack was built to make money, and it favors Substackers willing to do the same.

The Venerated Algorithm giveth, and the Venerated Algorithm taketh away.

But the real reason to subscribe is simpler.

If Open Gardens helps you understand where this business is going, and you can afford to support the work, please subscribe.

Your subscription won’t determine whether somebody else gets to read Open Gardens.

It will help determine how much more of this work we can do.

Thanks to all who have supported our stack,

Substacker-in-Chief,

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An Open Gardens reader recently asked me the question I hear everywhere in legacy media: producers have spent their careers getting paid to make things — fees up front, backend if you’re lucky. The creator economy asks the opposite of you: fund it yourself, build it in public, and wait years for real revenue. How does a career producer survive that transition?

This week, I’m writing about Adam Neuhaus, a high-level nonfiction producer and former executive who isn’t just asking that question. He’s actively building a playbook to answer it.

Adam started in the William Morris mailroom in New York, then moved through Original Media and RadicalMedia, working on shows including Dual Survival, Swamp People, and BBQ Pitmasters. He later spent more than seven years at ESPN Films and 30 for 30, where he helped launch the 30 for 30 podcast series and worked on films including Be Water, The American Gladiators Documentary, and Dream On. A premium executive making premium content during peak TV.

He’s also an Open Gardens reader, which is how we connected. After I wrote about Teton Ridge and what I call OpenVerses—loose affiliations of people around a shared interest that can be corralled into vertical businesses—he reached out on LinkedIn: Hey, I’m actually building what you call an OpenVerse. Would love to chat.

So we did. Then we talked some more. The more we talked, the clearer it became that what Adam was building spoke directly to that reader’s question—and to how I’m thinking about my own company and the bridge between legacy media and creators.

I love this guy: how he thinks, how proactive and strategic he is, and what a mensch he is. That menschy-ness may be part of why he succeeds.

If you want inspiration, take a big hit of Adam Neuhaus. He’ll get you buzzed with excitement about the future of media.

First, Don’t Quit Your Day Job (Seriously — It’s the Strategy)

Before I get into the very distinct creator-legacy convergence businesses Adam is building — and I want to discuss each in detail — I want to lay out one of the foundational principles for producers leaning into the creator economy.

The thing you are great at, the way Adam is great at producing nonfiction series and films, you don’t stop doing it. First of all, you need the revenue coming in. And yes, it’s not what it was during the streaming wars, but if you’re good at what you do, you can still make money. And that’s going to keep the lights on while you build the next business.

Adam still develops and pitches the traditional way, because that’s who he is. But listen to how deliberately he manages it:

Because buyers are buying less, that precision is vital: it opens up time to build other things. The commissions that once sustained a whole class of producers have thinned dramatically—the festival acquisition market has cratered (Sundance 2023 famously produced zero U.S. Documentary Competition sales), Participant shut its doors after twenty years, and the streamers have pulled way back on third-party buying. Adam saw it in real time:

At 3Pas, we’re trying a version of the same thing: using the traditional business we know to fund a digital division that acts as the company’s spine, then making sure each legacy project is wired into communities. (I keep promising to write more about it, and I will. It’s a work in progress, and I’m waiting for the right moment.) When I described the approach to Adam, he jumped in:

I appreciated that honesty. Neither of us has fully cracked it. That’s kind of the point — this is a piece about building in public, and building in public means you gotta show the scaffolding…

Hello OpenVerse, Hello Puzzlers

OpenVerses are what connected Adam and me. When he read my pieces, he recognized that I had put a name to something he was already seeing—and beginning to build. His recognition helped propel him in a new direction. Puzzles were his OpenVerse, and the vertical he and his partners are building is called Hello, Puzzlers.

When Adam left ESPN, most of his slate was exactly what you’d expect from a premium non-fiction guy — series, docs, big IP. But one project put him immediately into creator-led territory. He partnered with author A.J. Jacobs, whose book The Puzzler he loved, and quickly sold a puzzle podcast to iHeart. And then came the realization:

Puzzles are precisely the kind of category that legacy content models struggle to serve. They’re too niche for a studio or streamer to build a business around—which is what makes them a ripe OpenVerse. The New York Times owns puzzle games as products, but nobody owns puzzle culture. From day one, Adam and his partners treated that opportunity as a company, not a show:

They also had to do it the way every creator does—through what serial creator-entrepreneur and creator manager Zack Honarvar calls “bootstrap VC”, i.e., funding your own seed round. “Building a brand without any money, if you talk to any creator, it is a challenging situation,” Adam told me. The iHeart deal covered a couple of full seasons, and the journey since has been a crash course in creator economics. They launched as a daily show:

After two years they decided to take the show independent — and credit to iHeart, who “very graciously gave us back our feed.” Then came the platform build-out, right as the industry decided every podcast needed to be a video podcast:

Three years in, here’s where the flywheel stands:

More than 670 episodes of podcasting at the time of this interview, a Patreon, a YouTube channel with nearly 100 episodes, a TikTok channel, live events — and their first physical card game arriving in September.

Full disclosure: as I’m an idiot and not a real journalist, I hadn’t watched or listened to the podcast before I spoke to Adam. But I did watch a few episodes on YouTube afterward. First I’ll say A.J. Jacobs is a perfect host — fun, authentic, smart, family friendly, and he knows he’s not curing cancer with his content, which is exactly the right tone for a platform that wants puzzlers. I watched Michael Ian Black, a heady comedian who clearly loves this stuff because he nailed so many of the questions. Fun to watch, except that it made me feel intellectually inferior to everyone on the show. While the podcast is doing respectable numbers, the YouTube channel is still in its early phase. But the content is great, and focused clearly on the niche.

Amongst their portfolio for the vertical, they tested live. “We saw live puzzling as a very interesting two-word phrase that we didn’t see a lot in the marketplace,” Adam said. “We filled rooms and we learned a lot along the way. I wouldn’t say it jumped up, but we saw that it traveled.” That word — traveled — is clutch to building any niche. In my own exploration of how to value communities, I wrote an article called the Six Dimensions Test about the six ways to analyze a community’s worth, and live events is one of them. So I love that Adam and his partners were kicking the tires early, testing the community’s portability and seeing IRL who these people actually are.

And then there’s booking talent for the show, which tells you everything about how niches work:

Passionate groups of people self-activate inside a niche world they love. The celebrities have fun, they come back, and the flywheel gets a push.

Commerce as a Community Test

One obvious measure of a community’s commercial potential is whether people will buy a product. In September, Adam and his team will test that with their first physical one: Earbus, a card game featuring 900 audio rebuses.

Earbus is a portmanteau of “ear” and “rebus.” An audio rebus is a word or phrase spoken in a particular way that forms a clue—“trouble, trouble,” for example, becomes “double trouble.” The idea grew directly out of a problem they had to solve for the podcast: How do you make a visual puzzle work in a medium where nobody can see it?

“I’ll say a word in a particular way and it will be a full phrase… [like Trouble-trouble]… We have 900 of those cards and clues. And we created a kind of Cards Against Humanity type thing. We partnered with an independent game studio who we’re splitting the revenue of the game with—not the IP.”

The podcast’s audio format forced them to think about puzzling in an audio format. Now they’re turning that format into a physical card game. They’ll split the revenue with the game studio that is helping bring it to market, but Adam and his partners will retain ownership of the IP—a distinction someone with twenty years of rights negotiations knows matters.

Then Adam said something that captures the whole mindset of using content to build a top-of-funnel while staying loose about where it might lead:

Yep, that’s the top-of-funnel mentality that all of us legacy knuckleheads need to get straight. Content creates the community, but the business is probably downstream—and you never know what it’ll be.

Maybe the Hello Puzzlers buy up an escape room company. Or make puzzle games for phones. Or maybe it’s a subscription business where you get a different physical game each month. Who knows? No one, actually—which is why you have to bootstrap these businesses long enough to prove the model. Then you can bring in financing if you need to.

Regardless of whether this particular niche ever gets the traction they hope for, he’s getting his 10,000 hours in audience-building. “It gave me the most cred,” he told me, “because I was able to say, I’m building this audience. And it is hard to build an audience… I have more respect for people who really gather people and build it and then monetize it.” That skill set compounds. It travels to the next niche, and the one after that, whether or not puzzles becomes the big one.

The Next M&A Gold Rush Is Community

Why does any of this matter beyond the joy of making things? Because of where Adam is convinced the market is going:

He’s so right. This is going to be the next frontier of M&A. It’s been happening quietly for a while, but community is becoming one of the strongest moats for building media companies that sell at a multiple. It lines up exactly with what Chris Erwin of RockWater told me when I wrote about how creator businesses actually get valued: the conversation has shifted from growth at all costs to durable businesses — profitability, IP ownership, revenue diversification, defensible moats.

In Chris’s framing, media is no longer the end product; it’s the acquisition channel, and community sits at the center. A company like Hello Puzzlers, with owned IP, diversified revenue, and a real community around it, is being built to be exactly what those buyers will be shopping for.

The Hot List — the Genius of the System

Now for the second business, which started with failure. After leaving ESPN, Adam worked in a first-look deal with a bigger producer who wanted sports expertise, and built a slate he believed in completely. And then:

So he took the idea to his LinkedIn community, writing that he had taken out 15 projects he believed in and sold none of them—and that other producers must be sitting on similarly strong unsold slates. He proposed using the Black List as a model for nonfiction.

He wasn’t announcing a company. He was airing his own slate’s failure in public and asking whether anyone else wanted to do something about it. The post went “mini viral” on LinkedIn.

People kept asking, “Are you gonna do it? Are you gonna be the one to put this together?” Because his own projects were having a hard time selling, he said yes and “immediately gathered a group of 20 volunteers on a Zoom call”:

He expected early-career filmmakers. “Instead, we got everybody. Emmy winners, Oscar winners, and in 30 days we had gotten 640 submissions.” They ran a film-festival-style review process, selected 23 projects, and published a public deck — with the contact information of every filmmaker, plus all their sizzle reels and pitch decks in one place. “In my twenty-plus years in the industry, I’ve never seen this type of resource out there,” Adam said. Filmmakers could be contacted directly. No toll booth. No gatekeeping.

And the spotlight worked. “We had films premiere at Telluride, premiere at South by, premiere at Sheffield. The one podcast we selected won a Peabody Award.” Some of those projects were already on their way — Adam is quick to say The Hot List was sometimes just another voice on the bandwagon — but the momentum was real, and so was the ethos behind it: don’t ghost anybody, get back to people, be easy to reach.

Which brings me to the thing I find most important about how Adam thinks. He wasn’t building a business. He was building a community, and the business emerged from it. Hello, Puzzlers is a B to C community. Hot list is a B to B community. The smartest move in my opinion is what he did with the 600-plus projects that didn’t make the list:

They called it the Fresh Eyes Initiative, and let’s be clear about the value here — these filmmakers were getting an hour with someone as smart and experienced as Adam Neuhaus, for free, at exactly the moment they’d normally be getting a form rejection. And all those conversations put his team in the middle of every trend line moving through the nonfiction space.

The goodwill turned into a business almost by accident — though of course serendipity and relationships are so often how brand deals actually happen. A former ESPN colleague, Ryan Spoon, is at Yahoo. During a catch-up call, Adam mentioned what he was seeing, including that documentary shorts felt like a wildly undervalued category. Yahoo hadn’t been doing much original content, and had no internal infrastructure to run an open call. So Ryan proposed one: Hot List runs the submissions and the curation, Yahoo licenses and distributes 20 shorts.

The films roll out at the end of August on Yahoo’s YouTube across sports, business, arts, and science and nature — plus a live activation at the American Dream Mall in New Jersey.

And notice what happened structurally: a brand-new distributor entered the documentary space because someone built the connective tissue that let them. Adam has been telling the documentary world that the Hot List’s goal isn’t just more money into the space, but new pathways — new partners, new distributors, new people who haven’t been doing this.

And once again, they turned rejection into community. Filmmakers whose shorts weren’t selected received a redirection email with six free webinars, created with organizations that support filmmakers—Seed&Spark, Kinema, Show&Tell, and Picture Motion:

So smart.

This is how you build a lasting community: give people something without expecting anything in return. What comes back is loyalty and a desire to strengthen the Hot List and who knows what down the line... And, for most people—especially those working in a cutthroat business—it simply feels good to help.

Submissions for the 2026 Hot List — works in progress — are open now. They’re anticipating several thousand submissions this time.

From here the business is branching in ways that all flow from the same funnel.

They’re going to brands in categories where submissions run deep, offering to curate slates of finished, independently made shorts — “we can bring you 10, 20, 30 amazing documentary shorts… in your topic, in your theme… You can roll these out in 30 days. And by the way, we’ll charge you a lot less.”

The brand knows exactly what it’s buying before it writes the check, which solves branded content’s oldest problem. And they’re raising a small fund to make bets on documentaries whose subjects could become real communities — funnels to flywheels — with shared resources on marketing and community building.

As Adam put it, the goal is to help “filmmakers build community before their projects are done,” because most “don’t start marketing until their film is done, which is the most expensive marketing dollars you could spend.”

Build your own email list early, and “you could bring those lists with you the rest of your career.” Filmmaker sustainability, built the creator way.

The Tarzan Effect

Take a step back and the two businesses share a similar diagnosis. Adam has a name for the disease they’re both treating:

Every legacy producer has swung on those vines. What Adam realized is that with one-off projects, you work incredibly hard—and then it all abruptly ends. Why can’t all that effort sustain an ongoing business? It takes the same amount of work to get started.

For me the wake up call was Acapulco on Apple and De Viaje con los Derbez on Amazon— two shows I produced, both extremely well supported by their platforms, no complaints there, but missing the connective tissue between seasons to keep the superfans engaged. And on both there were superfans who were begging for more content and continuity. That really started to bother me and was part of what pushed me to think about community building not just content creation.

Legacy just isn’t built for that idea.

Meanwhile, I was watching creators work in almost the opposite way: they started with the community and used content as one of many ways to keep it active. Legacy content could build communities too—we just weren’t always aware of what we had created, much less organized to sustain it. That gap really started to bother me and pushed me to think about community building, not just content creation.

Adam saw the same thing through the lens of nonfiction: vine to vine, project to project, instead of building around one community and letting its value compound over time. Building that community is much harder at the start, but far more valuable in the long run.

And the Hot List shows what’s on the other side of the swing — “now I sit at the top of a funnel of hopefully several thousand ideas,” projects that can be looked at not just as documentaries but as worlds, businesses, creator-led scenarios.

How Adam’s Legacy Brain Prepares for a Creator-Convergence Future

One of the things I love about Adam is how strategic he is. He’s thinking about the Puzzlers business as a 15-year business. Sure, it might end up being an exit in three or five years — but the founder mindset of building for the long term keeps you focused on value rather than quick exits, which, if you’re lucky, is exactly how you end up exiting well, quickly or otherwise.

He’s organized his whole working life around four categories, chosen so that expertise and interest compound instead of evaporating between projects:

He’s also hunting for worlds the way he used to hunt for reality-show access, but with a different endgame — “worlds that are maybe passed by, where we can build different pieces of businesses that make sense for that business.” A gardening documentary that leads to a seed business or a shovels business, like Epic Gardening. “There are lots of those,” he says, “not even in the creator economy yet — of experts.”

Niches Don’t Necessarily Need to Be Undiscovered

A word about the wine lane.

Adam talks a lot about finding underexploited niches. Wine is not one of them. It’s a packed category, with experts and creators everywhere. And yet his wife, Isabel Neuhaus, shows why that doesn’t necessarily matter.

Isabel writes a Substack called Wine Ideas, which includes essays and videos. I read a few posts and watched a few of the videos. I can’t claim any deep knowledge of wine, but she clearly knows her stuff—and, just as importantly, she has a specific voice. She’s charismatic. And as much as she knows, she doesn’t sound like a know-it-all.

That’s how even crowded niches work. Wine drinkers aren’t looking for the one person who owns wine. They’re looking for someone they trust, whose voice and sensibility resonate with them and whose expertise is expressed in a way they understand.

A niche can be owned by many people. You don’t need to own wine; you need to build a meaningful community within it. From there, you can expand into live events, curated trips, subscriptions, or a wine club—and monetize the hell out of it. Isabel doesn’t need 20 million followers. A couple hundred thousand engaged ones could create a great business. It will be interesting to see how she and Adam lean into it.

The Future of Storytelling: Stop Treating the Feature as the Finish Line

Toward the end of our conversation, we got into the part of this transition that filmmakers resist most: the idea that the film is no longer the whole product. The stats have been telling us this for a while—Gen Z discovers 60 percent of the TV and film it watches through social media, and that share keeps climbing. Which means you can’t think only about the movie anymore. There are all these surfaces where people consume, and the idea you’re making has to live across them—one of those surfaces happens to be a feature film. Adam has taken heat for saying this out loud:

Here’s what I’d add, as someone who has made a lot of independent films: the greatest frustration was always the helplessness after the film was done — a distributor cutting the content, pushing it out however they wanted, a publicist, and that was the extent of your control. If you look at the marketing as a creative extension of the work, it lets you create more and gives you far more control over how your thing enters the world. People who didn’t grow up in the pre-social system don’t understand how many problems came with it.

Adam also punctures the prestige illusion in a way I loved:

Against that, here’s where he sees the real energy:

And then the line that could be the thesis of this whole piece:

I asked him to check my bias on one more thing — my belief that in a world flooding with AI-generated content, real stories about real people become more valuable, not less. His answer is a model for how to hold that position without sounding like a Luddite:

There’s no fear in that comment. The people who win aren’t afraid of the future—or at least they don’t let fear drive their decisions.

And the contraction that started this whole story? He sees the opening inside it:

Karmic Kickbacks

One last thing, to bring this full circle. Adam first reached out to me with no agenda. We had a conversation. Then more conversations. Along the way, a very high-level documentary producer he knew was working on an intereating piece of IP that happened to be right in my lane—and he sent them my way. We decided to collaborate. We’re moving along—early days—but I love the idea, and I love that it was simply a product of this connection. No deal memo, no agenda, no ask.

Adam thinks about this stuff deliberately: “I think a lot about how do we create circular economies… where we’re passing stuff among people.”

It sounds hokey, but it isn’t. The goodwill you put out into this ecosystem comes back, in weird ways, on its own schedule.

It built Hello Puzzlers’ guest list. It built the Hot List. It turned a rejection email into the best one anyone ever got. And it’s the answer, or at least the beginning of one, to the reader question that opened this piece: the model that bridges the gap is the one Adam is building in public — keep the craft, keep the revenue, pick your categories, own a piece of what you make, and treat the community as a partner. The community provides.

Adam is the first to say he hasn’t figured it out. But he has the thing that makes me believe he will: the right mindset. That’s why I write about people like him—and why the rest of us can learn from what he’s building.

I did.

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“In five years I want Romantical to be an emotion and an adjective. I want you walking down the street, looking at a couple sharing a martini in a window at a restaurant, and thinking to yourself—damn, that’s romantical. That’s all I care about.”

That’s Jonah Feingold describing the company he is building. Not a slate. Not a production shingle. A word he wants people to use when they see something that makes them believe in romance again.

It sounds soft until you look at the business underneath it. Romantical is designed to make films, short-form digital series, brand partnerships and live events, all built around one genre identity and one audience. The movies are an output. They’re not the whole business.

Nora Ephron created in two sandboxes—first books like Heartburn, then movies. When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail. Her characters were smart but accessible, funny but grounded, romantic without being overly sentimental. Her name guaranteed a feeling.

Today a wri…

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TV is shrinking, and everyone in it is choosing one of three responses.

Some people are leaving outright — taking the marketing job, the vertical-video job, anything that isn’t scripted. Some are staying and squeezing what’s left out of a shrinking pie, chasing the same 22-episode dream that mostly doesn’t exist anymore. And a smaller group is doing something more interesting: taking the actual craft — not the credential, the craft — and finding out it’s worth something in a field that has never had it before.

Andrew Karlsruher is that third group. He spent fifteen years in network television — CSI: Cyber, five seasons on MacGyver, a season on Bull — before the development treadmill ran out from under him.

Somewhere in the last year, he noticed something: the humanoid and quadruped robots showing up in our homes, our sidewalks, our hospitals are, whether their makers admit it or not, ch…

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Having just moved back to LA after a year and a half of working from the coffee region of Colombia, I’m taking this week and next week off from the usual Open Gardens deep dives to settle in and catch up on everything happening in the great convergence.

But I am publishing something anyway.

This is less an article than a set of notes and reflections from Kara Swisher’s interview with Peter Chernin on On with Kara Swisher a few weeks back. I finally had time to listen to it.

I’ve spent all of one hour in a room with Chernin, back when we were considering selling our company, but he was in kicking-the-tires mode, not sharing-wisdom mode.

When you can get him to go deep on where he thinks media is going, you take notes. He has kept his pulse on this business better than almost anyone. His company’s bet on Backrooms proves it yet again.

The whole interview is worth listening to. There are a lot of gems, including his caution against the current overcorrection that every creator is now going to…

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I can’t tell you how many agents, managers, execs, and producers have called me in the last few months asking some version of the same question:

Who should I sign?

Who wants to make a movie?

Who has a real audience?

Not surprising.

The horror-youtube triumvirate (you know who) all landed in roughly the same six-month window, and suddenly the whole industry had a collective epiphany about creators, community, and the power of launching content when people already care.

On one hand, that epiphany was overdue. The signals have been there for years. Creators have been building real communities, moving audiences, selling products, filling venues, launching formats, and proving over and over again that follower count is not the same thing as fandom.

The industry just wasn’t paying attention.

On the other hand, the six-month cluster was a fluke. Three creator-led breakouts arriving that close together makes it feel like there are hundreds more sitting out there, fully formed, waiting to be unleashed.

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Everyone is talking about a recent run of creator-made horror movies that just crushed at the box office. Naturally, every person with a Substack or Beehiiv is now beating the subject to death with such abandon that we might call it, rather than blogging, a flogging.

But there’s one angle worth exploring still — these three creators were not trained through the legacy system. None of them went to film school. And that tells you a lot about what’s happening now. Because film schools and their relevance are a perfect metaphor for the larger conversation: legacy and creator systems colliding, converging, changing each other, becoming inseparable. It’s what makes it interesting to anyone paying attention — whether you’re rooted in the old system or building the new one.

Last August as I was looking at the implications of all this and couldn’t ignore the questions about the relevance of film school. I teach a class at Columbia University and also studied there and love and cherish it. And I’…

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When the acceptance to Press Publish LA came through I booked my flights right away.

Ben raved about the NY version enough that I wasn’t about to skip LA. The conference was on the Fox Studios lot, same soundstage where The Public Enemy shot in 1937 and where It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia just wrapped its final season.

Nearly 700 creators, operators, and industry folks showed up, some flown in from Amsterdam, Switzerland, Hong Kong. Tim Katz from YouTube, Markiplier, Tom Segura, Billy Parks who runs Fox Creator Studios, Johnny Harris fresh off an Emmy win, Michelle Khare, and the operators behind MrBeast, Mark Rober’s Crunch Labs, and Smosh. The room represented $1.3 billion in combined subscribers across 17 countries.

You could feel it the moment you walked on the lot. This is where Hollywood had built its walled garden for ninety years. Now it’s where creators come to talk about owning their own work. As Ben likes to say: ‘the walls have been breached’.

Nobody on the panels was …

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The 30-second spot and the trailer are dying, and not just because attention spans got shorter. They feel corporate.

Even for a middle-aged dude like myself, I’ve developed a strange aversion to trailers. They talk at you, not with you. They often feel… slow. (Yikes!). That’s the gap between what corporate does and what a creator connection does — and the implications run deeper than marketing.

I’m a producer. I still love making movies. But every producer I know has another part of their brain that’s always running — the part that’s thinking about how to get someone to actually watch the thing. And that part of my brain is what I’ve been trying to update to the new operating system…

I used to think about it like this: you make the movie, you cut a trailer, the trailer pulls people to the movie. Linear. The movie is the destination. Everything points back at it.

Now I think about it the other way around. You find the core DNA of the thing you’re making, and that DNA travels out across dif…

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