FRESH CLIPPINGS
Disney Opens El Capitan to Creators
Disney held an event called Created in LA last week that effectively functioned like the unveiling of a creator operating strategy. Monica Kahn and Josh Lawson each gave a solid breakdown.
The event itself was built by Jon Youshaei, a former YouTube and Instagram executive turned creator, who pitched Disney on the idea of premiering creator-made videos as actual feature films on the big screen. Night one took place at the El Capitan Theatre, where The Sticks and Zach King premiered new work in a setting usually reserved for studio releases.
Dana Walden, Disney’s President and Chief Creative Officer, told the room that creators understand their audiences intimately and adjust in real time in a way traditional production never could. Asad Ayaz, Disney’s Chief Brand Officer, made an even more pointed observation the next day on the studio lot: Disney itself was started by a creator, a storyteller who began with shorts and expanded into movies, products, and an entire theme park world. A century later, the same studio is applying that same model to today’s creators.
Sounds like a lot of marketing. And it is…
But there was some substance too.
The following day on the lot, Ayaz laid out actual pathways into Disney projects for creators, spanning scripted series, features, and brand campaigns. Dhar Mann broke down what it actually takes to run his operation, 65 sets and 10 crews shipping five TV-length episodes a week.
When Open Gardens first started almost two years ago, I remember trying to reframe the conversation from creators as a distribution channel to creators as the media itself. And now, here we are.
It will be interesting to see how Disney puts all of this into action moving forward.
101 Studios Bets on the Next Bourdain
101 Studios, the company behind Yellowstone and Tulsa King, is getting into the food content business. The studio is launching Yes Chef Studios in partnership with Yes Chef Group, founded by Jack Goldburg and Liam Henning, and committing up to $25 million to the venture. Goldburg is the creator behind Jack’s Dining Room, a food and travel program with over a million YouTube subscribers and three million Instagram followers.
101 CEO David Glasser was direct about what he was looking for. He has scripted TV, feature film, and unscripted all covered, but had never cracked food. He had been hunting for the next Anthony Bourdain, and found a creator who was not a one-hit wonder, but someone building a loyal audience.
Yes Chef Studios will produce long-form scripted and unscripted programming around food, culture, travel, and hospitality, with the goal of eventually selling projects to major streamers or networks. But just as important, finding and developing the next generation of food creators. Glasser described wanting to identify who the other Jacks are and bring them into the fold the same way.
Goldburg’s own framing of the partnership is interesting, though, because it’s always the legacy studios that have something to gain, and the question of does the creator even need legacy always comes circling around. He sees 101’s production expertise, directing talent, and Hollywood relationships as the missing piece that turns a loyal YouTube following into something that can truly stand out in a market where everyone has access to everything. Together, as he put it, it’s game over for competitors trying to do this piecemeal.
What makes this particularly interesting is Glasser’s framing of it as a test case for more creator deals. Jack’s Dining Room could become the template for how the studio (and other copycats) approaches creator-led deals more broadly. So instead of pitching one idea to a streamer and hoping it lands, he’s inviting creators to come be part of a factory built specifically to cross them over into long-form content.
Cracks in Netflix's Creator Push
Lucas Shaw reported in his newsletter that YouTube has successfully gotten at least one major creator to reconsider a deal with Netflix. Nick DiGiovanni, the chef with more than 46 million YouTube subscribers, has told Netflix he wants to revisit the agreement they announced just a couple of months ago.
DiGiovanni was one of the first big YouTube stars to agree to post new videos simultaneously on both platforms, a day-and-date arrangement that we have covered as one of the more aggressive moves in Netflix’s creator push. According to Lucas’s reporting, YouTube has been actively pushing back against these deals, offering creators financial incentives to keep YouTube as their primary outlet, alongside other kinds of consequences such as reduced visibility at events like Brandcast, loss of preferred advertising access, and so on.
DiGiovanni has not made a final decision it seems. Netflix, for its part, is caught in an uncomfortable position. It does not want to let talent out of signed deals and risk an exodus, but it also does not want to launch this entire creator strategy surrounded by partners who already feel burned.
This is worth keeping tabs on. If DiGiovanni successfully walks back his Netflix deal, it becomes a real test case for how much leverage YouTube’s retention strategy actually has, and whether the big checks and implicit threats are enough to pull creators back from deals they already signed.
GARDEN VIEW
HARVEST QUOTE
"NFLX has lacked big original series and it's showing."
— Wells Fargo analyst Steven Cahall
As we’ve covered here in the past few weeks / months, Steven sees the recent push into YouTube-style podcasts, short-form video, and influencer content as a potential distraction from the thing that actually drives subscriptions in the first place. His framing is blunt: if the ambition is to turn Netflix into a broader content hub, the risk is losing sight of the watercooler moments that built the brand to begin with will affect is.
He recently downgraded the stock…
Have a great weekend.