The Garden Harvest: 11/14/25
Your weekly digest on the intersection of the Creator Economy and Legacy Media.
FRESH CLIPPINGS
Why legacy media can’t win the time game
Doug Shapiro’s recent post makes a blunt but compelling argument: traditional media will never beat social platforms on sheer consumption time, not because of content budgets, but because of biology.
He explains that most of today’s growth in video, music, and gaming is happening in low-production-value spaces: TikTok clips, lo-fi Roblox worlds, functional music playlists. Quality hasn’t disappeared, but the definition of it has shifted.
Social platforms win because they tap into our “System 1” instincts: reflexive, effortless consumption with zero friction, i.e. it exploits our human tendency to not want to think. One touch. Infinite scroll. Personalized feeds. No stopping cues.
Legacy can’t fight that battle. Prestige TV will never out-scroll TikTok. But Shapiro argues it can win in a different arena: by activating “System 2,” the slower, more intentional mode of thinking where emotional investment lives. In other words, deep fandom.
The only viable strategy is to build things people care about deeply (worlds, characters, franchises, identities) and to reorganize around that, not around distribution channels. If social platforms win on volume, legacy media wins on meaning.
As we wrote about recently, it’s no longer about building horizontal, but about building vertical, i.e. selling more to fewer people.
The theaters are empty, and that’s an opportunity
For his debut Crowd Pleaser column for The Ankler and Letterboxd, Matthew Frank drove 4,000+ miles across 20 states, visiting 58 theaters to take the temperature of American moviegoing.
His conclusion? Audiences aren’t gone, movies are.
We all know the data… The October box office was the worst it’s been in 27 years (excluding Covid), and ticket sales are down 40 percent from 2019.
But here’s the striking part: everywhere he went, managers, staff, and audiences all said the same thing. They’re starving for new films. The demand is there. The seats are there. The fans are there. What’s missing is supply.
Exhibitors need product, and creators can make it. Not $200 million tentpoles, but mid-budget, fan-driven, community-backed movies that speak directly to audiences.
As I wrote about last week when I highlighted Baron Ryan’s new movie, Frank’s road trip reads like an open door for the next wave of filmmakers stemming from the digital world.
CAA Digital Media chief launches advisory platform for creators
After 15 years at CAA, veteran digital media exec David Freeman is leaving at the end of the year to launch his own company, Kynetic Media Ventures, an innovation studio and advisory platform built for creator / artist / athlete-led companies.
Freeman has spent the past decade and a half shaping CAA’s digital strategy and its creator division, helping the agency navigate the rise of TikTok, Instagram talent, and the new models connecting Hollywood to advertising and tech.
The bigger signal here is that one of Hollywood’s top digital minds is betting that the next decade of entertainment will belong to hybrid companies: part creator, part startup, part studio.
GARDEN VIEW
This week we have a sharp breakdown of how creators are increasingly shaping the future of Hollywood, not by replacing the system, but by merging with it.
The conversation captures the shift in real time: studios partnering with creators, creators building their own mini-studios, and audiences following the voices they trust.
A quick, essential watch for understanding the new pipeline between digital and and legacy.
HARVEST QUOTE
“It felt like the dream unfolding exactly the way I imagined it. And then it all collapsed.”
— Dhar Mann Studios CEO, Sean Atkins, reflecting on his early failures as an entrepreneur.
This hits especially hard right now for anyone in legacy media. The feeling he describes mirrors what so many across Hollywood are experiencing after waves of layoffs, shrinking slates, and an industry that sometimes feels unrecognizable.
His story is a reminder that collapse isn’t an ending, but the beginning of a new chapter. At a time when so many of us feel disoriented, reframing failure as the education that forces reinvention is a powerful mindset to move forward.
Have a great weekend…
"They’re starving for new films. The demand is there. The seats are there. The fans are there. What’s missing is supply"
Sorry, but these kind of comments really piss me off. There's no lack of supply. It's just that these theaters don't want to put the effort in to develop their own, local, indie interested audience. They want the indie filmmakers, who's already self funded the creation of their film, to rent their theater, do all the promotion, so they can sell their overpriced soda and popcorn. Hell, they won't even take your film if you let them have it for free. If anyone needs to change the way they run their business, it's theaters. They either stop sitting on their ass waiting for the next POS major studio film that nobody wants to see, to get delivered on their doorstep and watch their industry go the way of Blockbuster, who didn't adapt. Or they start being proactive and start changing how they source their movies. But stop expecting indie filmmakers to do all the work and carry all the risk.
The point about Roblox worlds being part of the low-production content that's winnin on time is spot on. These platforms have figured out how to tap into System 1 thinking in ways legacy media never could. The endless creation and exploration loop on Roblox keeps people engaged not through polish, but through participaton and social connection. Traditional studios keep trying to compete on the same teritory instead of leaning into what only they can offer.