The Garden Harvest: 10/31/25
Your weekly digest on the intersection of the Creator Economy and Legacy Media.
Happy Halloween, and welcome back to the Garden Harvest after our one-week hiatus.
Before we dive in, a quick anecdotal note: this is the first week where all three of the Fresh Clippings stories come straight from major Hollywood trades. When we first started Open Gardens, it was tough to find coverage of convergence within legacy media as most of the conversation was happening outside of it.
Well, not anymore.
As convergence accelerates, the story is shifting to how deeply legacy and creators are starting to intertwine: in business models, creative processes, and even union contracts.
Exciting times!
FRESH CLIPPINGS
The dynamics finally switched
This Hollywood Reporter piece reads like a compilation of every single Garden Harvest from the past six months, but the fact that it’s coming from Hollywood Reporter is kind of the point.
As you can imagine, it spotlights how creators are redefining Hollywood. Commanding studio meetings, brand deals, and production budgets on their own terms, they’re no longer just “influencers,” which makes it all the more surprising that the piece still calls them that.
And as we’ve been saying all along, though, this doesn’t mean that it’s the end of Hollywood. Not even close.
It’s a rebirth. It’s the convergence we’ve been preaching all along: the realization that the next frontier of entertainment is in the feedback loops between creators and their communities.
So much convergence…
There’s been a flood of headlines lately worth pausing on, so take a breath, because there’s a lot to unpack.
Pocket.watch has greenlit a new entertainment series featuring a host of young creator talent with Hulu
Fox, which owns Studio Ramsay Global, is expanding its food-themed holdings with an equity stake investment in Chain, the L.A.-based restaurant pop-up founded by The Office alum B.J. Novak. (we wrote about Chain a while back)
YouTube and social video specialist James Dolan has launched his own venture, Beam Digital, which will re-train people in production companies and distributors and simultaneously help meet the growing demand for expert digital channel managers
Paradigm has made a strategic partnership with Reign Maker Group, a newly launched holding company which will be able to leverage Reign Maker Group’s creator-first infrastructure and expertise in social media talent development, while providing Reign Maker’s clients and agency network access to Paradigm’s full-service capabilities including talent representation, branding, licensing, live, and scripted opportunities.
Tubi has continued its push into creator-led fare by striking a deal for a slate of films from Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat. The films, rolling out across 2026, are part of the Tubi for Creators program, and feature the likes of Kinigra Deon, DC Young Fly, Chico Bean and Karlous Miller. This marks Tubi’s first exclusive creator-led slate deal.
It feels like every corner of the industry is bending toward the same gravitational pull. What’s interesting now, though, is how normal these headlines all sound. A year ago, these would’ve been outliers.
The line between “Hollywood” and “Creator Economy” continues to disappear…
Lionsgate Joins the Fan Edit Era
When we talk about legacy needing the creator economy’s community engine, this is exactly what we mean.
Lionsgate is now officially partnering with TikTok creators to make fan edits using licensed clips from their library as part of a broader push to tap into creator fandom. Instead of issuing takedowns, the studio is leaning in, offering access to official assets.
It’s a notable pivot, yet a welcome one. It’s great to see studios utilizing fan edits as marketing gold rather than treating them as copyright headaches. Because the era of the passive consumer is long gone, fans want to play with and remix the content, not just consume it.
I love this quote from Briana McElroy, the head of worldwide digital marketing for Lionsgate Films says: “If we’re trying to have a conversation with fans online, we need to be able to speak their language.” She’s right, and that doesn’t happen by trying to emulate it and coming off as a “cool boomer” ruining the fun.
By hiring creators into the ecosystem rather than policing them, Lionsgate is moving from control to collaboration, integrating its IP into the viral loop itself.
For an industry that still spends millions chasing attention, empowering the people who already love your IP might be the smartest marketing move of all.
GARDEN VIEW
To drive this Lionsgate point home, here’s Snap’s Ryan Ferguson and strategist Eugene Healy discussing how brands can’t buy their way into relevance anymore. They have to earn it by joining communities, not interrupting them.
The smartest marketers (film and TV marketers as well) now think less about reach and more about participation. They let their audiences remix the content, treat creators as cultural translators, not “influencers,” and focus on belonging over broadcasting.
HARVEST QUOTE
“Every creative medium starts as slop.”
— Sequoia Capital partner Jess Lee.
An important reminder for all of us in both the legacy and creator worlds. Every wave of new technology mints a new class of creators, and every time, the old guard rolls its eyes. Bloggers weren’t “real writers,” now look at Substack. YouTubers weren’t “real filmmakers,” now look at Curry Barker, TikTok teens weren’t “real creators,” now look at… our entire culture?
Over time, as the tools improve, the work gets better, and the outsiders become part of the industry. With so much change happening in media, we need to think twice before dismissing the new.
Have a great weekend…