The Garden Harvest: Can the Internet Save Theatrical?
Your weekly digest on the intersection of the Creator Economy and Legacy Media.
FRESH CLIPPINGS
The Creator-to-Cinema Strategy
We’ve written before about companies like Creator Camp, and the idea that we’re still early in understanding creators as filmmakers. Recently, a single release offered a clearer signal of where distribution power is beginning to sit.
Long-time creator and first-time filmmaker Markiplier secured a 2,500+ screen theatrical release and roughly $7M in presales.
Without a studio.
Without a distributor.
Without a traditional marketing campaign.
What’s notable isn’t the scale of the release, but the sequence. It’s totally flipped.
When conversations with exhibitors began, the instinct from exhibitors was to start small. A limited release. A test. That logic assumed demand still needed to be discovered.
Well… it didn’t.
Once tickets went live, fans didn’t wait for awareness to build. They bought immediately. They contacted theaters directly. Screens expanded not because of persuasion, but because the signal was already loud enough.
This reverses the traditional order. Marketing and distribution usually precede demand. Here, demand arrived first and had to adjust itself around it.
That distinction matters.
This isn’t about virality or novelty. It’s the result of accumulated trust expressing itself all at once. Years of audience relationship-building compressed into a single release moment.
Now, let’s be real. Most films won’t move this way. Not every filmmaker is a YouTube veteran with 38 million subscribers.
But, this opens the door to a different pathway to theaters. One in which filmmakers arrive with some version of this advantage. Mark didn’t convince theaters to take a chance, the audience made the case for him.
The four lessons for filmmakers that Dana Harris-Bridson highlights are pretty straightforward:
Audience can’t be an afterthought
Process can be part of the story
Visibility is built long before release
Trust compounds
As this becomes more common, the role of legacy distributors and exhibitors doesn’t disappear. It just changes.
Can Exhibitors See This as an Opportunity?
Speaking of exhibitors, this trend opens up a new door.
Theaters have been almost entirely dependent on studio release calendars. When tentpoles move or disappear, their screens go dark. And with the Paramount Decrees gone, why do exhibitors still behave like tenants in a system they don’t control?
Austin Spicer argues that from a risk perspective, the biggest threat to exhibition isn’t bad movies. It’s no inventory.
And with many creators with built in audiences eager to release movies theatrically, perhaps this makes exhibition-led releases worth reconsidering. Not as ambition, but as insulation (they’re kind of already doing this through Fathom Entertainment).
It’s an opportunity for the AMCs of the world to see creators as filmmakers when other won’t. Not for charity, but as good business. A small slate of creator films would guarantee product and restore some control over windows.
Vertical integration isn’t a new idea here. It’s a familiar one, returning under new circumstances.
Curious to see which chain would be the first to greenlight a slate.
Studios Embrace Short Form
Per Business Insider, Paramount+ is making a significant push into short-form video and user-generated clips. Internally, the goal being discussed is scale.
This is being framed as a product initiative, not a programming one. Short-form is a stated priority for Q1. Speed appears to matter more than curation, at least initially.
What’s notable isn’t that Paramount wants short-form. It’s that the instinct is to import the format wholesale (volume, velocity, feed logic) into a subscription environment built for something else.
There’s an unresolved question here. Short-form works because it’s open, iterative, and creator-driven. Streaming platforms work because they’re controlled, curated, and finite. Combining the two isn’t impossible, but it’s not automatic either.
It’ll be an interesting one to track.
GARDEN VIEW
If you’re a young person working in Hollywood, then you’ve probably heard of Assistants vs. Agents. Founded by Warner Bailey, what started as a meme page has become a full-fledged media company, and they just hosted their first awards show. Not for stars. For entertainment assistants.
The response was immediate: 400+ tickets sold out in under 24 hours, an all-assistant audience, sponsors covered costs.
AvA isn’t a massive brand in algorithmic terms. If you don’t work in Hollywood, you may never encounter it. But that’s the point.
Bailey built something narrow, specific, and deeply resonant: media rooted in shared experience rather than scale.
In the fragmented landscape we live in, creators like Bailey are quietly proving that relevance beats reach, and that even the most niche audiences will show up when they feel seen.
HARVEST QUOTE
“This may mean the Netflix audience is completely separate from YouTube, allowing the most prolific creators to double down on revenue without worrying about cannibalization.”
— Puck’s Julia Alexander, discussing the effects of creators with strong YouTube audiences migrating to Netflix.
During the run of his Netflix series, Mark Rober’s YouTube channel added roughly 400,000 subscribers and over 260 million views, tracking closely with the pace of growth he saw in the months prior. The same pattern holds for Ms. Rachel, whose YouTube channel accumulated more than 420 million views after her Netflix debut, consistent with its historical performance.
Have a great weekend…
The Markiplier case really highlights how pre-existing trust changes the economics of theatrical. When demand precedes awareness rather than chasing it, the entire distribution model flips. I think what gets missed sometimes is that this only works becase the creator already spent years building that relationship, basically front-loading all the marketing before the product even exists.
Thanks for the analysis, thorough and accurate. Audience trust is the most important factor along with a real message in the content.