FRESH CLIPPINGS
Openness as Strategy
We covered Wesley Wang launching his production company a while back. Well, this week he announced their first project:
A YouTube competition series where one creator wins $100,000 to make a movie. Wang is funding the prize and production costs through the studio’s angel investors, and applications are open now. Creators can submit a one-minute pitch on TikTok or Instagram, of which ten finalists will get flown to New York where the audience votes on the winner.
Wang’s own path through the traditional studio system shaped the idea. He has openly described running into creative friction and bureaucratic inefficiency there, not because of any one person’s fault, but as a byproduct of it simply being a large system. This competition is his attempt to give other young filmmakers a different way in.
The competition is of course interesting, but the mindset behind it matters more. It represents a kind of openness that has never really existed in legacy media, which has always been a closed system by design.
Franklin Leonard makes the analogy all the time about why he started The Black List. He says: imagine someone told you that if you want to play basketball in the NBA, you should move to Los Angeles and play pickup basketball next to the Staples Center. If you're really good, someone will see you and put you on the team.
Sounds crazy, right? Yet that’s how Hollywood has operated for decades.
Legacy studios could take a page from Wesley. Dedicating even a small portion of their annual budgets to fund new movies from new creators is a great way to find what might otherwise never surface.
A24’s Next Creator Bet
A24 is teaming with Spooky Pictures and Image Nation Studios to bring the SCP Foundation, one of the largest fan-built horror and science-fiction universes on the internet, to theaters for the first time. The project is an untitled extension of the V/H/S found-footage franchise, with worldwide rights secured and a 2027 theatrical target.
SCP started the same way Backrooms did, as a creepypasta posted to 4chan in 2008. What began as a single short story evolved into a sprawling, collaborative mythology built by thousands of contributors, involving a secret organization protecting humanity from anomalous entities. Along the way it spawned games, short films, and web series, all built by fans with no studio involvement and largely no financial return for the people doing the building.
Internet lore has become a source of new stories for horror precisely because of the rabid built-in audiences they carry. The plan, it seems, is to keep tapping into the most compelling of them.
It’s worth noting that SCP has always operated under a Creative Commons license that requires derivative works to carry the same open terms. That detail has not been addressed in this announcement, and it remains one of the more interesting unresolved questions in the entire internet horror gold rush. A community built collaboratively under an open license is now being adapted by one of the most brand-protective distributors in the business. Just recently, I wrote about A24 getting in trouble for going after Backrooms creators for making inspired artwork.
We’ll see what happens this time.
Netflix's Is Reshaping its Catalog
Per Ampere Analysis, Netflix’s short-form offering in the US grew from 8% to 13% of its total TV catalog in just three months following the rollout of publisher content from Condé Nast, BuzzFeed, and Hearst. Roughly 300 short-form seasons and more than 1,200 hours of content have been added to a catalog that has historically been dominated by traditional 21-to-60-minute episodes. This type of change confirms that the platform’s short-form push is more than just an experiment.
Meanwhile, Netflix signed another major YouTube star. Drew Binsky, the travel creator with 7.3 million YouTube subscribers and 22 million followers across platforms, is bringing a curated collection of his travelogues to Netflix, with new episodes going forward releasing day-and-date on Netflix alongside YouTube.
Now that Netflix is combining publisher-produced short-form programming with individually signed creator talent, are they just YouTube? And is that even the right strategy? Short-form could attract new viewers in the short term, but as Matt Belloni and others have argued, fighting YouTube at its own game is a losing bet. Differentiating through premium content might serve it far better in the long run.
This also ties back to the exclusivity conversation from last week. Binsky’s day-and-date arrangement means the content is no longer YouTube’s exclusively, and his 200 million monthly views represent exactly the kind of built-in audience Netflix wants living inside its own ecosystem rather than sitting entirely on someone else’s platform.
GARDEN VIEW
HARVEST QUOTE
"12 years ago, creator / fan events stood alone. A roomful of youtubers was enough to entice people to attend. But today that’s different. The most successful events seem to be “Creators Plus” or “Plus Creators”"
— Media Strategist (and so much more) Jim Louderback
Have a great weekend…