The Garden Harvest: 9/26/25

Your weekly digest on the intersection of the Creator Economy and Legacy Media.

Sep 26, 2025

Welcome back to the Garden Harvest.

Each week, we gather and curate the freshest insights from the worlds of Creators and Legacy Media, so you can stay rooted in what matters and spot new opportunities where others can’t.

Let’s get into it…

FRESH CLIPPINGS

The Biggest Creator Calls in Legacy Reinforcements

MrBeast continues to expand beyond YouTube with Beast Games on Amazon, a theatrical feature in the works, and now the hire of longtime unscripted executive Corie Henson (formerly NBC) as President of Beast Industry Studios.

As you know from our previous updates, it feels like every other week yet another legacy media veteran crosses into the creator economy, and at this point the pattern is undeniable.

The surface level conclusion here is that, yes, the creator economy is growing, but if you look closer, you’ll see something else: creators want and need legacy expertise. Henson is the type of executive who knows how to scale franchises, manage formats across borders, and package talent for global platforms. If MrBeast, the biggest YouTuber in the world, is actively recruiting that skill set, doesn’t that tell us something?

We’ve been saying this for a while now: the lesson isn’t that legacy and creator are opposites, or that there’s only room for one to thrive, but that they’re complementary.

Honestly, we’d love to see more headlines of studios hiring creator economy folks.

The Creator Capital Markets

Megan Lightcap from Slow Ventures revisits creator financing with a sharp primer that charts how far the capital markets for creators have come. A few years ago, creators were locked out of the financial infrastructure available to traditional companies. Today, there’s a full menu: bootstrapping from ad revenue and merch sales, debt-like products such as revenue-based financing (Spotter, Viewture, Gigstar), and equity bets at both the company level (Feastables, Skims) and the holding-company level (Slow’s model). Each option comes with trade-offs on speed, ownership, leverage, and flexibility.

What stands out is how quickly this space has professionalized. Revenue-based advances used to be a fringe idea, and now they’re approaching a billion-dollar category. Equity in creator-led brands used to be rare, now it’s commonplace. And the idea of financing an entire creator ecosystem and treating them like a diversified media company is gaining traction.

Creators are starting to structure their businesses with the same capital sophistication as studios and networks. That should shape how we think about partnership. This isn’t a sideshow anymore; it’s an industry with its own capital stack, and it’s only going to getting better as it further matures.

Lionsgate’s AI Experiment

As we all know, last year Lionsgate struck a deal with Runway AI, giving the company access to its entire film library with the promise of building a custom generative model. Now, we have an idea of how it’s going.

The idea was bold. Imagine spinning up an anime version of John Wick in hours. But according to new reporting, the project has hit snags: the catalog isn’t nearly large enough to train a functional model, copyright and licensing questions abound, and the outputs haven’t matched the hype.

None of this means AI isn’t useful. In fact, Lionsgate is already applying it to postproduction, library licensing, and even developing trailers for films that haven’t yet been shot. What’s interesting here is the gap between ambition and execution. Even a studio library the size of Lionsgate’s doesn’t generate enough training data to create a standalone model. That says less about failure and more about scale.

Something interesting to keep track of as the ever-complex AI / studios relationship develops.

GARDEN VIEW

We’ve talked about micro-dramas before, and they’re still dominating the conversation. As part of our ongoing effort to better understand the dynamics driving the format and why audiences can’t seem to look away, here’s a deeper dive.

HARVEST QUOTE

“While Hollywood scrambles to figure out what’s next, creators are quietly building the future of cinema.”

— Max Reisinger, founder of Creator Camp, talking about American Baron’s upcoming film.

American Baron is a TikToker with over 5 million followers who has written, directed, and starred in his first feature film, Two Sleepy People. The movie was made in less than 100 days and produced for under $100K, and it’s heading straight to his audience in theaters this November.

So many things to unpack here, but let’s keep it short. Note that he said “cinema” above, not “content”.

Something that doesn’t get talked about enough is that not every creator wants to stay in short form. Some want to be filmmakers too. The question is: will legacy media support them?

Everyone stands to win from this.

Have a great weekend…