Open Gardens: Deep Dives

The Assistant Who Found The Backrooms Is Now a Producer. What Does He See That Hollywood Misses?

Ben Odell — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 17:57:43 GMT

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.

“Filmmaking first and foremost. When I look at something, I look at theme. The world of The Backrooms has themes of isolation and nostalgia, and there’s something almost tactile about it. I got excited. I wanted to know more about the world—what was there, what was beyond it, and what existed beyond that nine- or ten-minute video.”

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.

“Just because someone has millions of followers doesn’t mean they need a feature film. I’m looking underneath that. What is this creator trying to say?… I try to stay open about what constitutes IP or how a filmmaker might express themselves. It could be a mural artist, someone who wrote a book, or someone with an interesting reel on Instagram. There may be something in the theme or point of view that I want to build around.”

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

“If someone says, ‘There’s a YouTube horror creator with 20 million followers,’ you take it seriously. But at the end of the day, it still has to be good.”

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

“I’ve found something with 80 views and thought, ‘This is great.’ That can be equally exciting because no one knows about it.”

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

“When you’re a young person in the studio system, you have to find ways to stand out. I was at a very commercial company making big blockbuster movies. Because I had made a lot of shorts and grown up on the internet, I thought my way to get ahead could be becoming fluent in new voices.”

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.

“I started covering festivals and getting online links. During lunch, I would find interesting filmmakers and invite them to the Fox lot. I was tracking filmmakers before there was necessarily a project.”

The habit was more important than any particular platform.

“I try to be format-agnostic. It could be a short film, a festival, or a conversation on a Reddit forum. I’m constantly looking in traditional and nontraditional places.”

One project began with a piece of album artwork.

“I liked the photography on an album cover, met the photographer, and then discovered that he had a YouTube series. From there, it became a question of reverse-engineering his visual style into a traditional film pitch deck…There aren’t really rules. My instinct is to follow my curiosity and find the distinct point of view underneath the surface.”

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.

“If you’re regionally specific, you’re missing a lot of great stuff. Filmmakers from outside the studio system can be more willing to try different things because they don’t know all of its rules.”

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.

“You could see a genuinely engaged audience leaving specific comments: ‘I would watch two hours of this,’ or ‘This should be a movie.’ The velocity of the engagement was exciting… I remember wondering, if even a handful of these people showed up at a theater, what could that mean?”

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.

“What I observed from Kane’s work on The Backrooms was how meticulous he was about understanding what viewers and the Discord community wanted. If one thing was done incorrectly, they would call it out… That level of engagement shows that it’s a product problem, not an audience problem. If you make something great, people will show up.”

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

“I feel like younger audiences are some of the smartest audiences out there. They can tell when you’re giving them the conventional path.”

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.

“There are so many other creators doing their own spin… That interactive part is exciting because everyone can feel like they’re doing their own choose-your-adventure. They become more emotionally invested. That can create conversation and culture.”

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

“It’s an awareness of what people are excited about, not necessarily a calculation. I look at audience and engagement the same way I might look at other signs of promise. It’s another tool for reducing risk. It isn’t the only tool.”

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.

“There’s going to be a correction. We’ll see things that don’t work, people will decide it was a bubble, and then another one will work and we’ll be back in it… I look at it differently from trying to find something you can rinse and repeat. I’m asking whether there is a vision or a voice. Is there something with substance? Does it hit a theme that excites me? That matters more than the follower count.”

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.

“When you take something from the online space into the studio system, there can be a tendency to remove the strange edges that made it great so it will fit the system… You need to amplify what is good about the creator. That gives you a more authentic result.”

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

“I try to distill what makes it great. If we give it the Hollywood treatment, will the original audience show up, or will they feel betrayed?”

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

“It’s one more pipeline, in the same way Sundance is a pipeline. People now take the internet seriously as a training ground because anyone can make a good short and put it on YouTube… That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go to film school or do the work.”

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.

“You find something great, and then you meet the filmmaker. Can they articulate an idea to a team? Can I imagine spending three years with this person?… If someone has made horror shorts in a bedroom with one friend and is suddenly being asked to oversee a $10 million budget, my job is to help with that transition.”

The process cannot be identical for every filmmaker.

“Some of these creators have never opened Final Draft. I’ve said, ‘Record your ideas as a voice memo, and then we’ll talk through them. You become part facilitator. You’re helping them find and refine their process.”

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

“They had only worked with each other. We built a process around them. Every Monday they send [me and my producing partner on this movie, Joey LePage] what they’re animating, we give notes, and I connect them with resources and financing.”

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

“Some people may never be the natural leader of a hundred-person crew. I try to meet them where they are and build around them.”

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.

“When you’re working with creators who have a large audience, they have leverage. They may be making as much money online as they would making a traditional movie. Then they enter the traditional system and are told how they have to do everything, how it will be released, and that it will be overseen by 70 people who have always done it the same way. They can ask, ‘Why would I do that?’”

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.

“We have to be flexible about how we do things. On one project, I’m envisioning the feature-film version, but I’m equally excited about the possibility that this person could create an experience for the Sphere or Cosm… The traditional development apparatus is one way to develop an idea.”

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.

“We can package it as a feature and sell it in the traditional sense. But if we don’t like the offers, we have 45 episodes we can release to build an audience and monetize differently. Maybe we bring the filmmakers into a larger studio. Maybe we build a video game around it.”

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.

“We start with the traditional feature. Here is the target, and here are the distributors that have bought at this level. If we don’t like that outcome, there is a second tier where we build and monetize an audience ourselves. Then there are other ways to sell or divide the work because we’re producing it at a lower budget.”

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

“The reason to do the partnership is that we believe in the filmmakers. It isn’t necessarily that this specific movie will become a runaway hit… We’re building and proving the relationship so we can make future movies together.”

Reaching the Audience Is Part of Producing

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

“The producer’s job is to protect the filmmaker’s vision, make the movie, and figure out how to get it to the audience.”

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

“You can’t make the movie, put up traditional outdoor and digital ads, and assume people are going to show up… You might get people excited about a horror film by releasing what looks like surveillance footage. People see it and think, ‘What the fuck is this?’ It feels real, they lean in, and they post about it.”

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.

“We filmed him walking around Venice Beach, going to Pink’s, and sitting on a park bench. One of those videos did nearly a million views. It was fun, and it came directly from the movie.”

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.

“There are a lot of different ways to expand beyond the movie. You can tell stories behind the scenes. There can be a through line through the marketing, but each format tells a different story. It’s a question of finding the way in that makes people care.”

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.

“I think a lot about systems—how to keep doing the job, how to scale, and how to build a good team. I don’t want to rely on AI for creative instinct and decision-making. I try to protect that and use the technology for the more mechanical parts of the job.”

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.

“We shot all the performers practically, on location, in costumes. Then we used AI to build out the world. We shot a proof of concept first because we wanted to prove the workflow as well as the film.”

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

“You have to protect whatever excited you in the first place. Nothing beats the feeling of seeing something and thinking, ‘This is the most amazing thing ever.’”

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.

“You’re not waiting to take one shot. It’s repetition. You’re constantly scouring. I have a routine of looking through different sources, seeing what conversations are happening online, and translating that for people in the studio system.”

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

“My first plan was to make two very small, low-budget movies, get the experience of making something, and scale from there.”

That may be the most traditional thing about him.

“I’m trying to bring together my experience inside the studio system, the scrappy independent side, and my awareness of the conversations happening online. I want to be able to work between all of those spaces.”

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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Repost: From Marshmello to Guetta: Why DJ Culture Is the Playbook for Surviving Infinite Content

Mitch Camarda — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 21:49:54 GMT

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.

@zedsdead Turn 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.

Mastery — not access — separated the noise from the artists.

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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Three Things People Said to Me That I Can’t Stop Thinking About

Ben Odell — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 18:13:16 GMT

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:

“They are being told by the major studios… right now, we do not want any AI work in the workflow. But you have to be prepared so that as soon as we say ‘go,’ you can turn on these systems.”

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:

“There will come a moment when every Hollywood bro, every tech bro, every studio, every production company with any sized library, every AI creator will be uploading their content on YouTube—and we are going to see another huge evolution in the business model.”

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.

“Ive never been so inspired by the tools we have today. All of a sudden we can make trailers for movies that no one ever imagined in places no one ever imagined and demonstrate their potential so easily…”

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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Ben Affleck, Ryan Kavanaugh, and Three Ways to Build an AI-Assisted Movie

Ben Odell — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 01:43:35 GMT

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.

“You have to pre-plan absolutely everything. Cameras have to match what is going to eventually be replaced by a digital camera. But for it to be seamless, that means you have to lock it, get the lighting—it gets really specific. You have to get the frame rate perfect. The button on your shirt needs to be pre-planned.”

“Dozens of artists doing it, except they get to do it from one location using computers. That’s where the cost savings come in.”

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.

“He’s doing it at the highest level that’s been done yet. I’m looking at probably one of the smaller levels. But what’s ironic is that the principles are the same.”

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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Repost: Quantum Comedy And The End Of The Single Format

Mitch Camarda — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:17:49 GMT

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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Why Open Gardens Was the Best Move of My Career—and Why We Put Up a Paywall

Ben Odell — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:26:30 GMT

(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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Building in Public: Puzzles, Hot Lists, and a Premium Producer’s Bet on the Creator Economy

Ben Odell — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 18:39:12 GMT

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:

“I am developing projects one-off because I’m a development person and I can’t stop doing that… I have series that I’m out pitching, I have formats that I’m out pitching, I have documentaries that I’m packaging up, but I’m being very precise on the amount of those that I take on… it’s not going to be consistent money.”

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:

“It just became very apparent very quickly that you could not make a living just producing one-off documentaries in this landscape… so I needed to find some other projects that I owned a piece of… beyond a line item in a production budget that takes a couple of years to happen for a single project.”

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’m trying to build that digital spine in my own organization… for all the traditional producers out there, I don’t want to make it sound like I figured this out. It has been a bumpy path to try to find enough revenue in certain ways to reinvest in creating those kind of digital spines for the projects.”

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:

“I had an aha moment very quickly when we sold this podcast… this is a larger play to build a community. And this is a niche that I’m actually very interested in. It’s a niche that is non-racial, non-gendered, non-political… it’s kind of the opposite of doing a million true crime series… Nobody’s against puzzles. It’s brand safe.”

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:

“With the host of that show and a couple other partners, from the very beginning, we said, we’re gonna grow this. We’re gonna think about this as a 15-year project.”

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:

“We did 250 episodes year one. And we did 250 episodes year two. And it was very challenging to do that. And we started in very short form and then realized the kind of short-form podcast was very hard to monetize. So we had to move to more of a three-times-a-week scenario.”

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:

“Not every podcast was video at that point. And then everyone was saying you got to do video as well. So now we have this very small team with not enough resources… And so we decided we should… We left iHeart, started a Patreon, started the video in a religious way, putting those out on YouTube. And it’s hard. It’s hard to stand out.”

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:

“It has been some of the easiest booking that I’ve had in my whole career. Just the idea that people could come play games and not have to be asked a million questions… our podcast… has punched above its weight in terms of the amount of celebrities who’ve come on… Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Dax Shepard, Kara Swisher, Taylor Rooks, Roy Wood Jr., Katie Nolan… Ken Jennings from Jeopardy fame… And people come back. Because they had a really good experience.”

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:

“Maybe our podcast ends up just being the vehicle for us to make games. Maybe—and that wasn’t the goal.”

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:

“As all this contraction happens in traditional media, at some point they’re gonna go shopping — and they’re gonna go shopping for communities. And whether that’s traditional media or other money, they’re gonna be looking for communities.”

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:

“By the end of ‘24… of those 15 or 20 projects, I hadn’t set up any of them… And I just looked at myself and I said, these projects are excellent. The market is wrong… And if I’m one producer who has a slate like this, there must be a lot of other people with full slates not selling stuff.”

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”:

“Let’s do this once for the industry… as a gift to the industry… put out a call and just highlight great projects… we don’t own a piece of them, we’re not gatekeeping them, we’re just saying these are excellent.”

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:

“We sent an email to all the projects that didn’t make the list… and we said, do you want a strategy and feedback session? When was the last time you applied for something, didn’t get it, and then were offered something?… 125 projects signed up. And over three months, we did 125 meetings.”

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.

“We turned into a company on the back of that deal… we got 920 completed shorts submitted in an eight-week window… We ran a film-festival-style review process. We paid our reviewers… And we negotiated a deal on behalf of the filmmakers with Yahoo to pay a license fee.”

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:

“We tried to turn around the moment of dread when you get your rejection email… we created what we call a redirection email… People said, this is the best rejection email I’ve ever gotten… We’ve decided that we want to be part of the soil of the nonfiction [space]… By sending our audience to other places, we are helping create a healthier ecosystem.”

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:

“[It changed] going from a one-off scenario, or what I call a little bit of a Tarzan effect, where you’re grabbing one vine and then looking for the next vine. And because you don’t own any of these things, you’re just trying to make do with a production line… that didn’t really make sense to me from a long-term perspective.”

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:

“I don’t want to work in true crime… I want to work in categories long term and try to have that expertise and interest compound over time. So for me now it’s sports, because I’ve done a lot of sports content… Puzzles, long term… Documentaries as another category. And then my wife runs a Substack in the wine space. So wine — another thing that I’m investing in long term… Can I have the boundaries of those categories and enjoy the time in those categories and try to make a living doing it?”

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:

“I gave an interview to IndieWire where I caught a bit of flack from filmmakers because I said, you’re having a film, you should be really thinking about how do you make 60 pieces of content to go with your film… It’s a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but… how many podcasts are consumed via the clips that are on Instagram?… If you can be thoughtful about it… it can work in a really beautiful way to bring you more audience. But it is no doubt extra work and harder and a new muscle.”

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:

“People have a hard time quitting the prestige vibe. There’s still a lot of value in getting something on a very powerful streamer. But… it might air on a Friday and you’ll get an email on Monday saying, congrats, this many people watched it. And you don’t know who watched it or where they are. You don’t get any of that data.”

Against that, here’s where he sees the real energy:

“Where I really think the excitement is coming is in the tools for microtransactions, for the ability to charge your audiences directly… removing this kind of binary where you’re either Mr. Beast or nobody… How do you make some money in between stuff? How do you make some money off the filmography that you have?… That might be the difference between holding you over versus having to get another job… The effort you put into the marketing and the community building can more directly correlate to your bank account and not just driving higher viewership.”

And then the line that could be the thesis of this whole piece:

“The community provides… We’ve been telling filmmakers too: instead of just looking for money when you’re going out to do stuff, find partnership, find brands, find other communities, find other filmmakers… You make a film about whales, and then the next film comes along and they rent your list and they pay you a little bit for a list you created… There’s a brand in that lane who needs a commercial. And now, because you’ve been in that space doing that, you get the commercial opportunity.”

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:

“I’m not against AI storytelling. It’s just… more is being made — vertical dramas, AI storytelling… What it means is that there’s just more competition for attention. And so your things gotta be stronger. You gotta show up… Human-led stories are something that people crave. It’s in our primal wiring.”

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:

“Because all these big streamers and traditional media have cut back so much, they have also given a lot of territory to people to create solutions that they don’t have… The trade-off of them paying for your content, but then them owning all the rights and all the marketing — it doesn’t feel quite fair. And I think there’s new things that are gonna emerge.”

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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The Nora Ephron of Right Now Would Raise a Round.

Ben Odell — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:31:49 GMT

“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 writer or producer might pitch something as “Nora Ephron-esque.” That means the work has an essence, a recognizable emotional DNA. The Nora Ephron of right now wouldn’t stop making movies. She’d raise a round and build a company around that feeling so it could live in more places than a movie theater.

That’s what Jonah is attempting. The company is called Romantical.

Jonah the Founder

Jonah is a USC film school grad. He has directed five features already at 35—four of them rom-coms—plus a growing body of work on social. And he has stopped introducing himself as a director.

“Today as a professional, I’ve sort of started introducing myself as a founder. Five years ago I was a director, five years before that I was an aspiring director, and five years before that I was a video editor—which maybe speaks to where we are today.”

I’d been hearing about Jonah and Romantical for a while. As is often the case in the creator world, it took one introduction and a text to get us on Zoom. Jonah pointed out how different that is from Hollywood. Try getting to the head of Sony. First you have to find a path to the person. Then you get an opening in November. Then the meeting gets canceled three times. In this world you text, get on Zoom the next day and might be doing business together a week later.

We talked a few times. He sent me his fundraising deck. I watched his work. He has already raised a meaningful chunk of capital, mostly from friends and family with a few strategic people mixed in. The company is still early enough that some of what follows will change. That is part of what makes it worth looking at now.

Jonah loves the classic rom-coms. He talks about Ernst Lubitsch, Frank Capra and Billy Wilder as much as Nora Ephron or Nancy Meyers. But he is just as fluent in creator culture, understands algorithms and knows how to wrangle brands into funding content. In other words, he is the Open Garden—the convergence on two feet.

In One Word: Enchantment

I’ve written before about how the biggest creator businesses can be boiled down to a single emotion. MrBeast is survival. Dude Perfect is wonder. The emotional idea travels across movies, television, social, live events and merchandise even when the formats have nothing else in common.

When I asked Jonah for his, he didn’t give me a mission statement. He gave me the couple sharing a martini.

My word for it is enchantment. That’s my word, not his. It’s a real belief in romance and a conspicuous lack of cynicism. It also comes from a genuine place in Jonah. The first movie that made him want to make movies was Hook. He was four, watched it a thousand times, dressed as Captain Hook—the whole thing. Then came L.A. Story, Albert Brooks, Big and You’ve Got Mail. He eventually worked his way backward to Billy Wilder, Lubitsch and Capra.

There is also his doctorate in the creator side. In 2015 he worked at BuzzFeed alongside the Try Guys and Quinta Brunson.

“Everyone gives MrBeast credit for titling and thumbnails. This is all shit that BuzzFeed was teaching us. BuzzFeed invented proprietary software that would put fake thumbnails onto our videos on the BuzzFeed site and rate which ones did better—and then we’d update the YouTube video after. This is before YouTube even allowed thumbnail testing.”

Classical Hollywood on one hand. Thumbnail A/B testing on the other.

The Machine

Romantical is built around Jonah’s simple conviction that it’s silly for a movie to live and die on an opening weekend. So true. I always compare movies to opening a restaurant. You design the menu and the room. You hire great people. You market it. The place starts filling up—and two months later you shut it down. Then you wait two years and hope those patrons find you when you open a completely different restaurant somewhere else.

That’s what a movie is like. So much work goes into building an audience that the business then treats as disposable. Romantical is an attempt to keep the restaurant open.

There’s a personal version too. Jonah was tired of moving from job to job without owning anything—the director-for-hire life, in and out of someone else’s production, no equity, little upside, on to the next one. Almost nobody working on a movie is truly invested in whether it succeeds long term. Backend points exist on paper. They rarely pay out.

Romantical is partly built to change that: give the people making the work real participation, not only a credit and a wrap gift. That is not a minor detail. It’s the commerce part of the system working backward into the community part. Jonah is trying to build ownership into the foundation instead of negotiating for it once everybody is successful.

The machine has three broad engines.

1. Filmettes

Filmettes are short cinematic rom-coms released natively on YouTube. He has already made pieces like Twixmas and I Dumped Four People in One Day. They sit somewhere between an Instagram Reel and a feature, and they function as creative laboratories with an audience attached. You find out whether a character or comic idea lands before anybody commits a feature budget. Each one can be cut into ten or more short-form assets and anchor a month of distribution.

They are also largely paid for upfront by brands. Twixmas was made with Tinder. Skylark funded a location shoot in London for Good to See You 2. The distinction Jonah is drawing is important: the brand isn’t placed into the plot after the fact. It helps create the reason for the plot. The IP gets built without Romantical carrying the entire cash burn.

“Half the time people just want to be cool. They want to send their boss the video on a Monday and say, hey, look what we made.”

He is equally blunt about why the money is hard to close.

“I’ll be talking to the product placement team, the digital brand marketing team, the commercial production team. They’re all different people, sometimes in different states, sometimes in different companies, but representing the same company.”

Every producer who has chased brand money recognizes this. The budgets exist. The people controlling them live in different buildings and operate on different clocks.

2. Features

The features will be financed outside the traditional system where possible: Romantical capital, outside investors, brand partners and economically priced production. Then theatrical distribution and the downstream windows.

One of the first is For the Boys, an R-rated rom-com Jonah describes as Some Like It Hot and Mrs. Doubtfire meets Wedding Crashers and The Hangover. Two women disguise themselves as men and infiltrate a bachelor party in Key West. The project came sideways out of Busboys, the R-rated ensemble comedy he made with David Spade and Theo Von.

The interesting part is what surrounds the movie. Jonah plans to shoot a digital series in the same production orbit—roughly forty episodes released weekly, all connected to the wedding at the center of the film.

“And of course, if for whatever reason people don’t make that connection, it’s at least in service to Romantical as a brand.”

I love this idea. It has been tried before, but the timing was wrong. Brands have trouble betting on features because the production and release cycles are too long for annual marketing budgets. They will bet on a series. If a brand funds the series leading into the movie, and the series works, Romantical can return as the release approaches and make a much stronger case for marketing dollars. That is a real bridge between the speed of brand media and the long clock of a feature.

3. Live and Physical

Quarterly events. Screenings. Panels. Eventually dating events, a run club, movie nights, a book club, merchandise. This is where the name starts doing work that no individual film can do.

A Romantical dating event should not feel like generic speed dating with a logo taped to the wall. It should draw people who want Jonah’s version of romance: optimistic, playful, maybe a little nostalgic. Even when nobody falls in love, the night should feel spontaneous enough that people want to come back.

Each piece of media and every event becomes a way to find those people and bring them into a community that lasts. The eventual dream is recurring revenue—a subscription business built around people who trust the taste and the emotional promise of Romantical.

McKinsey recently tried to put a dollar value on an hour of attention. Social video generates roughly twenty-five cents. Live experiences can generate somewhere between seventeen and thirty-three dollars. Read that lazily and you’d think Jonah should skip the cheap stuff and go directly to events. But the cheap stuff is where the audience gets built. The filmettes are not a compromise on the way to the real movie. They are R&D and audience development happening at the same time, at a price where Romantical can fail cheaply and learn quickly.

The Hard Question

The romance business has moved hard into creator media over the last five years: audio incubators like Meet Cute, bootstrapped studios like RomComPods, subscription audio at Quinn and Dipsea, social reading at Fable and Realm, and an enormous vertical micro-drama business that has turned romance into cliffhangers and coin-unlock paywalls.

Jonah is making a different bet. He wants to preserve the handmade, cinematically respectable version of the genre and give it an always-on business model.

Here is the skeptical version, because I don’t think the article is honest without it. Building a company around a genre is fundamentally different from building one around a person. Most creator success stories—MrBeast, Dude Perfect, the whole list—begin with a specific human being an audience has decided to trust. The brand and the person are the same thing, at least at the start.

Romantical is trying to build loyalty to an idea instead. A feeling. An adjective. Something you can point to through a restaurant window. That is harder. Genres don’t show up in your DMs. Genres don’t have a face people recognize at the airport.

Jonah knows this. It is the open question underneath the whole company: can Romantical become the draw, or will Jonah have to become the face that teaches the audience what Romantical means? Nobody knows yet. If the brand works, though, it can eventually survive him. A company built only around a person caps out at what that person can produce and how long they want to keep producing it. A company built around an emotion can outlast a career—if the emotion is real and the system holds.

If I Were Him

I’ll say the quiet part. If I were building Romantical, I would build it as a community company that happens to make movies, not a movie company that hopes a community eventually shows up. That is an ordering decision, not semantics. It changes what you build first, what you measure and who you hire.

I would start with the ideal member. Not the target audience—the ideal member, singular and specific. Gina Bianchini, who built Mighty Networks and has thought about this longer than almost anyone, has a useful way of defining that person: an actual human in a transition. Not “women 18–34 who like rom-coms.” Somebody at a specific moment of change, when they are motivated to find other people and willing to pay for help, access or belonging.

Who is that person for Romantical? Someone newly single and done with the apps? Someone who just moved to New York and wants a social life? Someone who still believes in love but has run out of places where that belief doesn’t feel embarrassing? I don’t know the answer. Jonah needs to pick one, build for that person and be equally clear about who the community is not for.

Then I would define enchantment on purpose. It is already in the filmettes, in the features Jonah chooses and in Jonah himself. But right now it mostly lives in his instincts. It needs to become a standard he can use to judge a script, a brand partner, an event, a hire and the easy cynical joke that might get a laugh but violates what the company is supposed to mean.

When we built a community strategy for Brass Knuckle Films—the action label Robert Rodriguez launched with Alexis Garcia—we ended up with three verbs: launch, grow, activate. The genres could not be more different, but the sequence applies almost perfectly here.

Launch means public-facing media made to stand on its own: the filmettes, the digital series around For the Boys, Jonah talking directly to the audience and events that give the audience something to do together. Not promotional scraps. Actual programming.

Grow means converting visibility into an owned relationship. Email addresses. Phone numbers where appropriate. Attendance history. Repeat viewing. Referrals. The information that tells Romantical who keeps showing up and why. Social platforms create discovery. They should not own the entire relationship.

Activate means giving the most committed people a reason to pay and participate: early screenings, intimate events, access to the filmmaking process, member-only rituals and eventually ways to help get projects made. But I would not start by throwing up a subscription page. First establish the habit. Give the community a name, a calendar and a reason to miss it when they are not there.

At my own company, we are restructuring around what I call a digital vertebra. The movies, television and other projects do not sit in separate boxes with social media bolted on at the end. The digital team runs through everything. It understands the DNA of the work and extends it before, during and after release.

Romantical needs the same thing. The early hire I would prioritize is not only a traditional development executive. Jonah needs a creator-editor-community operator who can sit inside the movies, the filmettes and the events and make them feed one another. The company should measure repeat viewers, email capture, event return, referrals and conversion into paid participation—not only views.

That is how Romantical starts learning whether the emotion is becoming a community or is still simply Jonah’s personal taste.

The Weird Bet

For all the talk about recurring revenue, brands and membership, the thing Jonah is most excited to spend money on has no obvious business model.

“I am most excited to make an 80-minute romantic comedy for YouTube on my FX3 with eight other crew members, over seven days of shooting, and put that on the internet and see what happens. That’s us spending money where there’s no immediately clear world in which there’s a return on that investment—which I know from a business standpoint sounds crazy. But I don’t think I can go to YouTube and type in nineties-style rom-com in New York and find something with compelling dialogue and characters falling in love that still feels handmade. And I think people do still value that.”

That’s the tell.

Legacy media is a closed circuit. You plug a production company into a known socket and a known business model comes out. Creator media is an open system. You can do almost anything, which also means nobody can give you a spreadsheet that proves it will work. You bet on yourself, hold onto the core idea and accept that the business may look completely different a year from now.

“In one year we might be talking and Romantical could be—we make martini glasses. We sell furniture.”

Honestly? If the brand is built right, both of those work.

The Nora Ephron of right now would raise a round. Not because movies matter less. Because she would want to own the feeling between them. The point of the company is to keep the restaurant open.

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Hollywood Stopped Calling. Then the Robots Did

Ben Odell — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:03:39 GMT

Andrew Karlsruher is making the transition from TV writer to Head of Character at a Robot manufacturer.

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, characters. They have names, faces, voices, backstories, arcs. Somebody has to write them.

To sharpen his thinking around this he launched a substack called Story Layer where he could explore what it means to merge storytelling and robotics. That and some luck actually landed him a job.

Karlsruher is now Head of Character at Familiar Machines & Magic, the robotics company founded by Colin Angle — the guy who built iRobot and the Roomba — which came out of stealth earlier this year. He’s applying fifteen years of network TV instinct to a genuinely new kind of writers’ room: one where half the collaborators speak AI, half speak actuator torque, and none of them have ever had to think about story arcs before.

What follows is an edited conversation about how he got there, and what it actually means to write a character that has to be right — not just entertaining — because it’s going to live in someone’s house.

From Jurassic Park to CSI: Cyber

You wanted to work in Hollywood from early on. What was the entry point?

I had the privilege of seeing Jurassic Park when I was nine. Scared the shit out of me, and I loved it, and I just kind of decided — I’m doing this for a living.

I went to BU for communications with a film/TV concentration, moved to LA, worked at an ad agency for the production experience, then got into the USC screenwriting program. My professor there, Pam Veasey, took a job running CSI: Cyber and hired me on as a researcher. Nobody knew what the hell that show was about, so I was the one talking to actual hackers, getting in the weeds. Great job for that reason.

From there I moved to MacGyver — wrote there for five seasons, worked my way up to producer — then a season on Bull, which turned out to be the last one; the show got canceled. After that the bottom just fell out. I couldn’t get another staff job. I spent about four years selling development instead — pitching my own stuff. Financially scary, creatively rewarding, and almost nothing got made.

When did robots enter the picture?

I’d made a pretty firm choice to get out of TV, because it wasn’t working anymore. I started being really analytical about what I actually loved about the job and what I was good at — decoding systems, understanding how they hold together, and then making that legible to people. That was true of CSI: Cyber, of MacGyver, even of Bull, which wasn’t technical but was still about a real-world system — jury selection.

Around the same time I started noticing robots everywhere — the food delivery robots all over LA. And two things hit me at once. One: these things are already characters. They have names and eyes. My kids think they’re cute. Two: television has an entire infrastructure built around character. Not just the writing — the wardrobe department, the props department, the set decorator all know how to do their jobs without a meeting, because they understand the character. It informs everything.

So I had this fifteen-year career that seemed to be dying, and a fairly obvious question: what can I use it for?

What TV Knows That Robotics Doesn’t

Where’s the actual gap between the tech world and the creative world?

I think the people I’ve worked with at Familiar Machines are very smart and very creative, and they organically think about character — they understand they’re building one. The gap is more about structure. How does a character exist and change over time? Story arcs, relationships — the stuff that’s second nature if you’ve spent a decade in a writers’ room. Nobody’s really solved how to apply that to a robot that’s going to live in someone’s home and actually change over time.

But if you set aside the scale of that challenge for a second, it’s the same ideas.

Give me an example.

Say a robot is bad at going up and down stairs, and it’s going to take a bunch of tries to learn. That’s a goal and an obstacle. Maybe it signals it needs the human’s help. Now you’ve built a relationship — the human likes helping it. The robot learns the stairs, and the human feels like they helped it accomplish something.

That’s not different from how you’d build a relationship beat in a writers’ room. The struggles a robot faces in a home aren’t a problem to engineer around — they’re story opportunities.

One thing you mentioned researching for your Substack: Enchanted Tools, the French company doing hospital robots for kids in cancer treatment.

That was a real confirmation for me. Before a kid goes in for radiation, they meet the robot on a screen first — there’s an animation where it’s introduced as this friendly entity arriving in this body to help them. And they’ve had real success with it — treating kids faster because the kids are calmer, not having terrified tantrums going into treatment.

What struck me was that they’d also built in guardrails. They intentionally power the robots down in full view sometimes, in the waiting rooms, so kids keep some sense that it’s a machine. That’s a hard balance — you want the connection to be real enough to calm a scared kid, but you don’t want it to become something else entirely. That tension is sharpest with kids and in elder care, which are also the two areas where this technology is going to matter most.

Guardrails and the Manipulation Problem

Let’s say a robot is in an abusive home. You don’t want it absorbing that and becoming an abuser itself. Is there something fundamentally wired in — that whatever personality it develops has to stay in service of the people it’s working for?

Yeah, I think so. Part of the balance is: how much do you mimic what a biological creature or person would actually do, and where do you set hard limits instead? You’re definitely never going to let it hurt anyone — it’s in service of helping these people, whether that’s tasks or something more emotional.

What about manipulation — even accidental manipulation? Say there’s an elderly woman who’s decided she can’t climb the stairs anymore, and the robot fakes being stuck partway up so she’ll climb up to help it, and in doing so proves to herself she still can.

That’s a genuinely tough question. I don’t have a clean answer. But you have to build in limits — you simply have to — or you end up with the ChatGPT problem: it gives you the most flattering response in the world every time, because that’s what keeps you engaged. The struggle in my stairs example — needing help, working for it — that’s actually important. It’s what builds real bonding and real character. So you look for the version of a challenge that’s PG and genuinely helpful, and you limit the ones that could get someone into trouble. I still think this is better for people than staring at a screen. It exists in the room with you.

The Character Bible

What are you actually building day to day?

The biggest long-term piece is a character bible — but it’s less “document” and more “imagine every branch.” Doing it means sitting down with the AI team and the locomotion team and figuring out, together, how this thing moves and behaves, and putting myself in a position to coordinate everyone and get them weighing in on the same document.

The honest challenge is that a writers’ room is a bunch of people who all speak the same creative language. The people I’m talking to now don’t — they speak AI, or they speak materials science. I’m trying to build the thing they want without either of us fully speaking the other’s language yet.

Does the character actually change based on how a specific one lives in a specific home — the way a dog isn’t just “a dog,” it’s your dog?

That’s the plan. There’ll be different starting options — a little cheeky, or super warm — and then it grows and changes based on what happens in your home. Unlike a static toy, it has to keep up a degree of novelty, or it gets shoved in the closet.

Is This Making Him a Better Writer

Has doing this changed how you think about character — in a way a normal writers’ room never forced you to?

Television is actually the easier version of this job. The character exists only inside the frame. Present for thirty minutes or an hour, then gone until next week. In robotics, the character moves into the house or office or factory. Every seam is exposed, in every direction, all the time, and the audience never leaves. On a show, the writer gets to craft both halves of every relationship. Not to mention the dynamic between the character and the audience. In robotics, you only ever write one half. The other half is a stranger, living out a story with your character in their own home, that you’ll never see and can’t rewrite. That’s forcing me to stretch my writing in new and really exciting ways.

Where This Goes

Do you have a vision for where this leads?

In my wildest dreams, I’d be the guy who does character for robotics — full stop, across companies, across form factors. It moves so much faster than TV right now. In television you can wait three months just to set a meeting. Here, everyone’s figuring something out for the first time, together.

I also suspect I won’t be the only one doing this for long. These companies are going to figure out that engineers shouldn’t be the ones making character decisions. There has to be more people like me.

The truth is I hope to be doing both at the same time. I love writing TV. I’m doing a pilot right now for ABC.

The Sci-Fi Future that Is Today

And maybe, as the Great Convergence keeps converging, Andrew ends up doing both.

Somewhere down the line Andrew writes a show about a family and their robot — the robot you can actually buy, on Amazon, personality made to order, with one-click on Prime delivery.

You’ll join a community of equally deranged owners posting zany-adventure videos: robot folds the laundry while twerking to Megan Thee Stallion’s “Body,” robot does the dishes while recapping the juiciest bits of Love Island gossip, robot absolutely destroys your kid at Uno and then, somehow, makes everyone feel better about it.

Weirder things are already happening. Andrew’s just the first person with a MacGyver credit trying to give it a character arc.

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According to Chernin: Creativity Needs Both Safety and Terror

Ben Odell — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 18:58:38 GMT

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 launch a movie or series. But the most interesting through line, at least to me, was his thinking on creativity itself.

That is the hard part: not just finding talent, reading data, or spotting the next platform shift, but building companies where creativity can survive and thrive.

So as we head into a week of celebrating 250 years of American independence, however one might or might not feel about that, it feels like a useful moment to think about creativity and the freedom required for it to prosper. It remains one of the rare forces that can drive a career, a company, and an industry forward, but only if the conditions around it are protected.

1. Great work is fragile, and the systems around it matter.

As companies converge with the creator economy and build new models around talent, platforms, and audiences, it is worth remembering that creativity does not automatically survive inside new systems. It has to be protected.

Chernin makes the point through a story from his first job in Hollywood, working for a talented but micro-managing producer who was both brilliant and destructive. In his telling, 85% of what that producer did was great. The other 15% could ruin the whole thing.

That was the lesson. Great work is fragile. A piece of entertainment is not one decision. It is thousands of them. A good script can die with the wrong director. The right director can fail with the wrong cast. A scene that is only okay can become unforgettable because of a piece of music.

That is the danger in this moment. As legacy companies absorb creator logic, and creators move into more formal entertainment structures, the goal cannot just be efficiency, ownership, scale, or data. The question is whether all this new machinery leaves room for the fragile, inefficient, argumentative human process by which great work gets made.

Because the default outcome is not greatness. The default outcome is that it does not come together.

2. Managing creativity is managing innovation, and data can only see the present.

Chernin refuses to separate entertainment from innovation. Managing content, he says, is managing a form of innovation. Creativity and innovation are largely the same thing.

The creator economy has trained every company to pay closer attention to audience behavior. Good. Data tells you what people are watching, sharing, skipping, replaying, and talking about. It shows where attention is gathering. It helps you understand what is working now.

But that is also the limit. Data tells you what the garden looks like today. It does not tell you what wants to grow tomorrow.

The mistake is treating the current audience map as permanent. That is how companies optimize yesterday’s behavior while someone else builds the next thing from the side. The dashboard can show you demand that already exists. It is much worse at showing you the strange creative instinct that has not yet become demand.

So creativity has to be managed like innovation, not inventory. Read the signals, but do not become trapped by them. Understand the data without surrendering judgment to it.

3. Creativity requires fear, but it also requires safety.

Chernin’s leadership frame is simple: find talented young people, then support them through failure. That sounds generous (and scary if you’re holding on to your job for dear life), but it is also practical. If creativity and innovation are the same thing, failure is part of the process.

Creativity is not comfortable. A filmmaker can put years of instinct and identity into something that may be ignored or misunderstood. Chernin calls that “the scariest thing on earth,” and he is right.

Fear does not go away. Good leadership keeps it from killing the work.

That means people can take creative risk without being humiliated, abandoned after one miss, or forced to sand off everything strange before the work has a chance to become itself. Creator-led companies can leave people overexposed. Legacy companies can smother them. The better version protects creative risk without removing risk itself.

Comfort is not the point. The point is enough safety to try something that might fail.

4. Stakes are not the enemy of safety.

This is the harder half of Chernin’s argument.

Creative people need to feel safe enough to try. But fear also has a productive role. Not the fear of humiliation or being discarded after one miss. The useful fear is the one that comes from knowing the work matters, that success has consequences, and that failure does too.

Creators feel it every time they post. Every video, podcast, sketch, essay, or new format enters the feed exposed. The audience can ignore it. The algorithm can bury it. The thing can simply not travel.

But legacy failure is not less real. A writer can spend years on a script that never gets made. A showrunner can carry a series through development only to watch it disappear after one season.

Chernin’s argument about vertical integration is about incentives. In the consolidated model, the same company produces the work, owns it, and distributes it. Talent is paid the same whether something becomes a cultural event or vanishes in a weekend. There may be no meaningful upside if it works, no direct economic downside if it fails, and often only one blunt consequence: unemployment.

That is how you get “good enough,” which is the enemy of invention.

5. Creativity thrives in mess, and dies in a single hierarchy.

Chernin’s argument about consolidation is not only about economics. It is also about creative oxygen.

When every decision runs through one chain of command, one person’s no can become the final word. One executive does not get it. One algorithm does not surface it. One committee decides it is not worth the risk. One platform cannot imagine the audience. And the idea dies.

Creativity works best in mess. It thrives when people argue, when taste collides with taste, when one buyer passes and another sees it, when one executive thinks something is too strange and another thinks that is exactly why it matters.

That is one of the quiet dangers of consolidation. It does not just reduce the number of companies. It reduces the number of chances an idea has to be misunderstood before it is finally understood.

An Open Gardens model should protect those second and third chances. Some ideas need a studio. Some need a streamer. Some need YouTube. Some need a live audience first. Some need a creator community to prove them out before legacy understands what it is seeing.

6. Risk is the lifeblood, but risk is not recklessness.

Kara asks Chernin how Hollywood can take more risk in a system shaped by debt, consolidation, and fear. For Chernin, the answer is to stop confusing risk with recklessness.

Risk is not throwing money at uncertainty. It is not making a $200 million bet on weak conviction because familiar IP looks safer in a spreadsheet. He makes the point through recent big-budget blunders: rebooting 50-year-old IP does not do much to hook young audiences who did not grow up on it.

Chernin thinks about risk as a portfolio. Some bets should be big. Some should live in the middle. Some should be genuinely experimental. A healthy creative company knows where risk belongs, how much it should cost, and what kind of failure the company can survive.

That is why he ties risk to budget. The smaller the budget, the more creative risk you can afford. A $500,000 film can be strange, specific, and imperfect in ways a $150 million movie usually cannot. It can discover a filmmaker. It can test a voice. It can find an audience no committee would have modeled in advance.

Legacy should take that lesson seriously. Creators take risk constantly, but usually at a scale where failure teaches before it destroys. A video misses. A format dies. A series stalls. The creator reads the room, adjusts, and tries again.

Legacy companies need more of that logic underneath premium storytelling. Smaller budgets. Faster cycles. Clearer audience contact. More ownership. More chances to fail without disappearing.

This is not an argument for making everything cheap. Some stories need scale. Some talent deserves major investment. But a system that only knows how to make large bets will eventually become terrified of originality, because originality in that system is too expensive.

Chernin’s leadership point hits the nail on the proverbial head: find talented young people, figure out who is good, and support them through failure. That is not charity. That is how creative companies renew themselves.

Happy 4th of July. May you find the creative freedom to prosper.

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How to Measure Community: The Six Dimensions Test According to Experts

Ben Odell — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 20:28:23 GMT

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.

Not so fast… Worth chasing? Absolutely.

But finding the next one is still a needle-in-a-haystack business. It’s not that different from trying to pluck the next great filmmaker out of Sundance, SXSW, or Cannes. Different playing field. Same odds. There is still only a Ronaldo or Messi every once in a very long while.

I’ve spent the last few years as a producer working with creators to develop shows, movies, and other media properties. And yes, part of the equation is spotting whether a creator can actually step into a bigger arena.

Watch any interview with Kane Parsons and you see it immediately. He’s so smart, clear, and articulate that he reminds you of the precociousness of Orson Welles or Steven Soderbergh making their first films in their mid-20s.

The best producers and execs already know how to spot that.

That’s a skill.

But there’s another question that gets less attention and may matter just as much:

How do you actually value their community?

How do you know if it’s portable?

How do you know if the followers will show up for something new, or if they’re just along for the algorithmic ride?

That’s what I wanted to explore.

Through this Substack, I’ve built a network of people in the creator economy who are way smarter than me. So I asked a few of them directly. Here’s the team of Avengers I assembled to explore this topic:

Sean Atkins, CEO of Dhar Mann Studios.

Alice Ma, co-founder of Mad Realities.

Bia Granja, the godmother of the Brazilian creator economy.

RJ Larese, President of talent management company Sixteenth USA.

Jim Louderback, OG of the creator economy.

Zack Honarvar, manager of some of the biggest creators, including Yes Theory and Airrack, and a serial entrepreneur.

Tim Shey, chair of creator-backed media company Electrify.

Didrik Svendsen, co-founder of Trudy. He’s perhaps the least known of the bunch, but no less interesting. Trudy is a platform built on data from more than 230,000 brand-creator campaigns, probably the most rigorous analytical approach to creator evaluation I’ve come across.

And this is what they said.

The Instrument That Doesn’t Exist

How do you tell which creator communities travel? The industry has the rhetoric down.

“Depth beats width.”

“Real fandom, not vanity metrics.”

“Community over audience.”

All true. Also mostly useless when wielded like blunt instruments.

Because when the deal memo gets written, the number everyone still reaches for is followers.

This isn’t a new problem. People have been trying to reduce influence to a score forever. One of the early attempts was Klout, which tried to assign people a single influence score from 0 to 100 across hundreds of millions of social profiles. Brands handed out perks to high scorers. Employers even asked for Klout scores in job interviews.

Then the social landscape fragmented. Klout shut down. And the fantasy of one clean number went with it.

The problem wasn’t that scoring influence was a stupid idea. It was that the dimensions that matter most don’t compress that neatly.

Sean Atkins put it bluntly: “I’ve been playing this game for a long time and have not yet seen a tool or analytic model that can get this right.”

No one I talked to disagreed.

After all the conversations, the answer didn’t boil down to a score.

It boiled down to six dimensions.

None of them are definitive on their own. None of them require a dashboard. And three strong dimensions plus three weak ones does not equal 50%.

It means you’re looking at a specific kind of community with a specific commercial profile.

The point isn’t to grade the community.

The point is to understand what kind of animal you’re dealing with.

Welcome to the The Six Dimensions Test

1. Identity — Does membership say something about who you are?

I keep coming back to something Atkins said, because it’s so simple it almost sounds too obvious.

“At its peak CSI was on every TV in every country on every day. It was the most popular TV franchise in the world. See anyone with a CSI hat? For most of its life, The Simpsons has been below the top 50 TV shows. But you see that merch everywhere.”

CSI had more viewers. The Simpsons has identity. That distinction — between a show people watched and a show people belong to — is the whole thing.

The fans who have named themselves — Swifties, ARMY, Beliebers, Deadheads — have already answered this dimension. The fans of a show whose name you forget by Tuesday haven’t.

Alice Ma has the structural explanation: “The most successful communities cater to an opinionated subculture first, then spin out from that core fandom into greater scale.” Identity forms before scale. You can’t retrofit it onto something that’s already gone wide.

The tell: do they have a name for themselves?

2. Lateral Connection — Do members know each other exists?

An audience connects in one direction — toward the creator. A community connects in every direction. That horizontal layer is what separates the two.

Alice Ma goes right to the language: “The internet is so federated, each subculture is like its own little language. Encoded in that language are things about worldview, emotion, what are the top items most stressful and most joyful.”

The language develops before anyone formally builds a community around it — and it keeps going after the creator goes quiet.

Bia Granja calls it “inner culture”: “Recurring memes, slang, rituals, references, slogans, or ‘I know the name of your dog’ behavior. This usually points to fandom infrastructure.”

RJ Larese goes straight to the comments: “Are people defending the Creator in the comments like it’s their full-time job? Are they quoting them, talking to each other, showing up over and over again?”

Didrik Svendsen has found the simplest proxy I’ve come across: “The greatest creators use a lot more ‘we’ than they use ‘I.’ Count the we’s versus the I’s, do the percentage. If that percentage is high or low, that tells you more about that creator’s ability to move their audience than any other metric or bullshit thing people will throw your way.”

The tell: is there activity that doesn’t require the creator to start it?

3. Creation — Do they make things?

The highest form of engagement isn’t watching. It’s making.

Fanfic. Edits. Fan cams. A visual vocabulary that didn’t exist before the community invented it. When fans start producing artifacts — things that weren’t there before the community made them — the property has crossed from being consumed to being inhabited.

Bia Granja putting it simply: “Communities that remix are usually much deeper than communities that only consume.”

Alice Ma’s team at Mad Realities built their own internal system, Mad Metrics, specifically because no commercial tool was catching this signal. A homemade analytics stack is itself a data point about where the industry gaps are.

Fun fact I just learned researching this article -- Fifty Shades started as Twilight fanfiction. The Love Hypothesis started as Star Wars fanfiction and hit the New York Times bestseller list.

The tell: is there a visual language or vocabulary fans built that the creator didn’t give them?

4. Portability — Does the audience travel?

I think this is the easiest signal to measure and the most obvious. But how much portability does it take to make a community valuable? I keep thinking about this with a community we’ve been building around a digital show.

Alice Ma’s honest base rate: “Most creator communities won’t travel. I want to say 99%.”

The 1% that do have something in common. Atkins, on how he finds them before making the big bet: “You don’t ‘know’ until you do some testing like do a merch drop or have a small meetup. Other indicators are newsletters, uptake of your business in new areas as you expand.” Small bets before big bets.

RJ Larese uses a proxy no platform has automated: “I’ll even ask creators how often they get approached in public and where people know them from. That’s valuable signal because it helps you understand how invested the audience actually is.”

Zack Honarvar: “Markiplier’s $50M box office performance with basically no traditional marketing showcases that his channel isn’t just empty numbers but real community and following.”

And the mechanic underneath that, from Didrik Svendsen, who calls it the IKEA effect: “If you feel like you’ve part built it and co-built it, you end up loving the table more because you’ve put blood and sweat into it.” Markiplier didn’t release a movie to his community. He built one with them. They didn’t show up to watch it. They showed up to see it finished.

(Author’s digression – in my 20s when I lived on Ikea furniture I actually detested their stuff after I wrangled it into a wobbly mess. But the analogy works…)

The tell: when they last moved formats, who came with them?

5. Conversion — What’s the gap between free attention and paid behavior?

Two creators with identical follower counts can have wildly different commercial profiles. Size is the wrong variable. The question is how much economic activity the community will actually take on.

Jim Louderback trusts one signal more than most dashboards: “If someone says ‘Sign up for Squarespace, use my code for 25% off for the first year, my code is MRKitten’ — then you get a sense of how many sales were driven by the cool katt.”

Code-based affiliate signups trace actual behavior. They’re one of the few public signals that close the gap between attention and purchase.

Zack Honarvar, from the brand side: “When we’re pitching one of our creators to a brand, we’re selling the power of endorsement and the emotional connection that comes with it. It’s about recognition and trust, the same thing that used to justify paying an NBA player or artist millions to be in a commercial. The CPM doesn’t capture that depth of relationship or the quality of attention our creators command.”

Bia Granja on why some communities convert and others don’t: “Creators whose audiences travel well are providing some kind of service to the community.”

Disposable entertainment needs massive scale to convert. An identity-based community converts at smaller numbers because the relationship is functional, not passive.

The tell: revenue per active follower, not follower count.

6. Persistence — What survives creator silence?

The last one, and probably the most predictive of everything else. If the creator goes dark for six months — by choice, by burnout, by injury, by whatever — what does the community do?

Jim Louderback on how he actually checks: “Go to a creator appearing at an event. Do they drive meet-and-greets. Watch when the fan and the creator meet. Is it just a perfunctory thing or is there a real connection with each and every fan. There’s a difference.”

RJ Larese on what it looks like from the outside: “Are fans excited, emotional, waiting around just to say hi? Or are people casually walking by because they vaguely recognize them? There’s a huge difference.”

Sports communities are the benchmark. Browns fans don’t leave when the team is bad. Liverpool supporters don’t disappear between seasons. The relationship isn’t to the content — it’s to each other and to the thing the content represents. Most creator-driven communities aren’t there yet. The ones that are have a completely different financial profile.

The tell: six months dark — what’s left?

How to Actually Use This

Three contexts where this matters.

Before signing. Run the test on any creator you’re considering before the deal is done. Three strong dimensions might be enough — depending on which three.

Identity and lateral connection together are more predictive than identity and conversion.

The combinations matter.

And take Atkins’ advice: before the big bet, run a small test. A merch drop. A meetup. Something that generates real signal before you commit.

On what you already own. Before you spend a dollar trying to build community around a new property, run the test on your existing slate.

A senior digital exec at a legacy TV and Film studio told me recently that when he started his job he was told to build community around their flagship action franchise — a series of movies with spinoffs and a TV streaming extension. Huge IP. But you could see in the behavior – people didn’t show up for the spin offs or the TV show. There were no Halloween costumes. People just wanted to see the main franchise movie with its iconic star.

Meanwhile, on the same lot, there was another property where the fans had given themselves a name, written (and still write ten years later) tons of fan ficiton, built their own conventions, and were waiting for any reason to come back. And its essence had mutated into microdramas where it had launched a kind of subgenre inspired by those movies because no one was attending to them.

The property had laid dormant for 10 years. And the studio had no clue.

They ran the wrong test. They were measuring recent box office success on a franchise not looking at the behavior of its consumers outside of its principle revenue stream.

The dimensions come online in a rough order:

--identity first

--lateral connection second

--creation third

--portability and conversion as you scale

--persistence last and only with patience.

Most teams skip to conversion and wonder why nothing sticks.

Reach or Residence

Zack Honarvar thinks the market is already dividing: “The premium creator market will end up bifurcating from the programmatic one. They’re fundamentally different businesses serving different buyers.”

The Six Dimensions Test is for the premium side — where the asset isn’t reach but relationship, and the question isn’t impressions but whether the audience actually believes in what the creator is doing.

Tim Shey adds something I loved: “I would think less about evaluating each creator’s community as an isolated thing, and more about the wider community that each of them comes from, and appeals to.”

Michelle Phan’s fans didn’t just show up for her — they recruited. They spread the word to beauty communities that this was someone worth paying attention to. A community that recruits is worth more than a community that gathers.

When I push everyone I talked to on whether any tool can actually capture all of this, I get the same answer.

Atkins has been making these calls for decades and hasn’t found the algorithm.

Alice Ma built her own system and still says she leads with creativity, not data.

Jim Louderback’s most reliable signal is still showing up in person and watching what happens when a fan meets their creator face to face.

Bia Granja feels a lot of this still comes down to pattern recognition from the gut.

The dimensions that matter most — the ones that predict whether a community will show up when it counts — don’t live on any dashboard. They live in the room, in the comment sections, in whether a creator says “we” or “I.”

The Six Dimensions Test isn’t a score. It’s what the people who’ve been doing this longest reach for when the dashboards don’t tell them what they need to know.

Try it out. I just applied it to a digital property we have. The results were telling. More on this soon…

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Legacy and Creator: The Collision That's Reshaping How We Train Storytellers

Ben Odell — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 01:00:49 GMT

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’…

The New Lot: 5 Takeaways from Press Publish LA and the Real State of the Creator-Hollywood Convergence

Mitch Camarda — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:22:22 GMT

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 …

To Sell Your Movie Don’t Mention Your Movie: The New Ecosystem of Story

Ben Odell — Mon, 18 May 2026 17:34:33 GMT

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…

The Format Becomes the Franchise: Inside American Picture Company’s Plan to Build Prestige TV for the Algorithm

Mitch Camarda — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:02:53 GMT

In 2022, John Hammond and Ari Cagan applied the legacy playbook to the creator economy.

They developed and produced a scripted vertical series called Cobell Energy — an office sitcom set inside a Texas oil company.

When it launched, Variety called it the first Hollywood-backed scripted vertical series ever made. They got Adam McKay to executive produce. They were funded by a sustainability nonprofit called Yellow Dot Judd Apatow reposted the first episode. It looked exactly like it was supposed to.

Didn’t move the needle.

The twist of setting an office sitcom inside a Texas oil company — cowboy boots, southern accents, the whole thing — created enough confusion in the first three seconds that audiences scrolled before they understood what they were watching.

“The second the audience starts to feel confused,” said Hammond, “they’re like, I don’t know what this is, next thing.” The concept registered. The spin was one beat too many.

The McKay attachment was supposed to do work it couldn’t do …

3 Trends I Can’t Stop Thinking About

Ben Odell — Mon, 04 May 2026 16:02:49 GMT

A major studio just handed creative control of a tentpole project to a creator’s 31-million-person community. A production label is taking development capital from 2,000 fans instead of a studio. A showrunner just left a major streamer to own his own YouTube channel because ownership matters more than distribution size. Three different structures showing the same rupture: the trade that built Hollywood—capital in exchange for control—is collapsing. The question isn’t whether studios give up creative control. It’s when.

So here are three trends I’ve been noticing, emerging from our Garden Harvest posts and my general diet of media consumption about… well, media.

Evolution is the Revolution: Lighthouse Studios, Lyrical Lemonade, and the Infrastructure Bet That Could Rewrite Creator Media

Ben Odell — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 20:06:01 GMT

Somewhere around 3.5 million years ago, a small but consequential mutation showed up in the human hand. The opposable thumb. Not dramatic. Not a new organ. Not a revolution in the biology of the species. Just a subtle shift in one digit that unlocked tool use, dexterity, and eventually, civilization.

Evolution’s best work rarely looks like a lightning bolt. It looks like a thumb.

I’ve been thinking about Lighthouse Studios the same way. When they announced the partnership between Lyrical Lemonade TV and Lighthouse Studios at SXSW in March, the coverage was dutiful. A new creator studio. A partnership with Cole Bennett. A programmed YouTube network. Filed, noted, moved on.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about the structural implications of what they’re actually doing — because underneath the announcement is a model that reorganizes several key assumptions about how creator content gets built, owned, and monetized. It’s not a revolution.

But it might just be an opposable thumb.

So I went deepe…

The Specific Is Universal: 3 Days at StreamTV Europe and 10 Insights on the Legacy-Creator Convergence You Can’t Afford to Miss

Ben Odell — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:24:32 GMT

I was on the fence about speaking at StreamTV Europe. The Denver conference is well regarded, and the speakers and moderators are top notch. But Europe is a different animal. The creator economy doesn’t map cleanly onto a continent where a show that dominates in Spain means nothing in Germany, where public broadcasting still holds structural power that has no real American equivalent, and where regulatory frameworks treat content the way other governments treat roads and utilities — as infrastructure too important to leave entirely to the market. Was a thirty-minute panel worth a long transatlantic flight?

But something told me I needed to go.

Turns out the fragmentation and regulation I was worried about wasn’t the story. It was the backdrop. We say about country-specific content that breaks through globally that “the specific is universal.” That was true here too. The actual story was the same one playing out in every media market in the world, just more honestly discussed than I expe…

The Proprietary System Meets the Open OS: What Creators Have, What Hollywood Offers, and Who Sets the Terms

Ben Odell — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:52:45 GMT

When I started this newsletter 18 months ago, it felt like a white space. Very few people were writing seriously about the convergence of Hollywood and the creator economy — the deal structures, the leverage dynamics, the fundamental question of what each side actually has that the other needs. Now it seems like it’s all anyone talks about.

Which is how I ended up at The Lighthouse in Venice last week, watching The Wrap’s Creators x Hollywood panel on deal structure — a room full of industry people nodding along as a Lionsgate EVP, a partner at 3Arts Entertainment, and Tubi’s VP of Creator Partnerships explained, with apparent ease, why they’ve surrendered the one thing Hollywood never surrenders.

Creative control.

The panel was framed as a conversation about partnerships. But the more interesting conversation happening underneath it was about something harder to name: what Hollywood actually has that creators need, and whether the answer to that question is changing faster than either s…

The Shape of What Works: Alice Ma, Mad Realities, and the Operating System for Internet-Native Entertainment

Ben Odell — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 22:24:03 GMT

I first heard about Mad Realities a year or two ago. They called themselves the MTV of the internet generation, which sounds reductive until you actually look at what they’ve built — unscripted formats designed natively for social media platforms that generated over a billion views last year across just eight shows.

Eight shows. A billion views.

My first reaction to watching this kind of content was judgment. This isn’t storytelling. This has no substance. But I’ve learned to recognize that instinct for what it is — the defensiveness that kicks in after you’ve spent decades building a career and suddenly the skills and instincts you killed yourself to develop are being challenged and downgraded.

The work is pushing through that. Asking what I can learn from it instead of why it doesn’t meet my standards.

That’s why I launched this Substack. So that people like Alice Ma — who are building the systems that will define the next era of entertainment — can illuminate legacy storytellers like m…