The Garden Harvest: Cannes Opens The Door
Your weekly digest on the intersection of the Creator Economy and Legacy Media.
FRESH CLIPPINGS
Cannes Opens the Door
If there is a single institution that represents the old guard of independent cinema, it is the Cannes Film Festival. Which is what makes this week’s announcement genuinely worth pausing on. For the first time in the festival’s history, the Marche du Film is hosting a Creator Economy Summit, a half-day forum explicitly designed to bridge traditional cinema and the creator economy, taking place just around the corner from where the world’s finest auteurs are premiering their latest work.
The framing from the organizers is careful but direct: The creator economy is reshaping how stories are developed, financed, and distributed. Creators are expanding into long-form storytelling and film production, and Cannes is acknowledging that this is no longer a peripheral conversation.
The symbolism matters as much as the substance. I’ve spent a year and a half tracking the convergence of creators and legacy media and seen it accelerate week after week. And when that convergence shows up at Cannes of all places, it stops being a trend and begins to settle into a permanent feature of the landscape.
Made By Us Studios Is Changing the Game
We talk a lot at Open Gardens about creators operating as fully realized media companies rather than talent for hire by legacy companies. Made By Us Studios, launching this week out of digital management company Made By All, is one of the clearer real-world expressions of that thesis we have seen yet.
Most deals treat creators as an input: attach their audience, distribute the output, keep the IP. The model they are describing is a structural departure. Made By Us is positioning creators as upstream partners in ownership, monetization, and long-term value creation from day one. Content is driven by built-in audience demand, developed in partnership with creators, and distributed through channels the creators already own. The studio doesn’t sit above the creator. It’s built around them and lets them keep ownership.
To run it, Made By All has brought in Tanya Cohen, formerly of Range Media Partners where she helped build integrated models across representation, production and ownership, and before that, WME, where she became the youngest partner in the agency’s history. Her hire alongside existing co-CEO Leanne Perice signals that this is being built with genuine Hollywood infrastructure behind it, not just a rebranded social media marketing operation.
The quote from Cohen worth holding onto: “the creator economy is no longer adjacent to Hollywood, it’s becoming its operating system.” That framing is exactly what this newsletter has been tracking across deal flow, platform strategy, and IP development for the past year and a half. The fact that executives at this level are now saying it out loud, and building companies around it, suggests the conversation has moved from thesis to execution.
Buzzfeed Gets Another Shot
Byron Allen just acquired a majority stake in BuzzFeed and will become its CEO.
For context on what Allen actually does: his Allen Media Group produces high-volume, low-cost content, courtroom shows, comedy blocks, lifestyle networks, and distributes it across a portfolio of local TV stations and cable networks he has been accumulating for years.
Which makes his YouTube ambitions the interesting part of this story. On the acquisition call, Allen was direct: BuzzFeed is officially chasing YouTube. That is a different game from anything in his current playbook.
The irony is that BuzzFeed was once genuinely ahead on YouTube and the fumbled spectacularly, as Simon Owens explains. “Why I Left BuzzFeed” became its own YouTube genre, which is not a legacy any media company wants. The HuffPost and Complex acquisitions then saddled the company with debt that consumed the capital that could have gone toward building on that early lead.
In his departure statement, founder Jonah Peretti outlined plans that actually point in a more interesting direction than Allen’s linear playbook might suggest. BuzzFeed Studios is being set up as a new entity spanning vertical micro-dramas, animation, digital video, and premium studio work including feature films, with Tasty also being spun out as its own independent operation. That structure, if executed seriously, looks less like a cheap content machine and more like the kind of multi-format creative infrastructure that the convergence moment actually calls for.
Allen’s acquisition at least clears some of the financial wreckage and gives BuzzFeed a stable floor to rebuild from. It will be an interesting story to track.
GARDEN VIEW
With the Backrooms feature hitting theaters on May 29, here's a conversation with Kane Parsons, the VFX artist who started the whole thing. He was 16 when he began posting his found footage Backrooms series on YouTube, turning a 4chan phenomenon into one of the more compelling analog horror universes on the internet.
Now, he's directing the feature adaptation for A24.
HARVEST QUOTE
“Fox Studios can’t become Dhar Mann tomorrow, and Dhar Mann can’t become Fox Studios. And neither one really wants to. As long as we can have an ‘and’ conversation [...] we can find a way to go forward.”
— Sean Atkins, CEO of Dhar Mann Studios
The best part of this quote is "neither really wants to."
That's the part that usually gets lost in these conversations. The convergence of creators and legacy media isn't about one side absorbing the other, and much less so about one side going away.
It's about each bringing what the other genuinely can't replicate on its own.
It’s solid advice. The whole point is the "and."
Have a great weekend…