The Garden Harvest: The Desperate Race for Creator IP
Your weekly digest on the intersection of the Creator Economy and Legacy Media.
FRESH CLIPPINGS
The Desperate Race for Creator IP
The hunt for the next Backrooms or Obsession is underway, almost to a comical point. Though the people who have been watching this space for years are suddenly finding themselves with a lot of leverage they did not have six months ago.
Multiple producers and creators held off on taking their projects to market until after Backrooms hit theaters in May, sensing that studio executives were about to develop a powerful appetite for internet-derived IP. The instinct proved correct. Projects that had been sitting in development conversations suddenly attracted bidding wars within days of the box office results coming in.
Internet horror, whether found-footage YouTube series, viral creepypastas, or fan-built fictional universes, has been generating massive audiences for years with essentially no financial return for the people who made it. Backrooms and Obsession demonstrating to studios that the audience was already there and willing to show up in theaters effectively changed the negotiating position of everyone sitting on similar IP overnight.
The ownership questions the piece raises but does not fully resolve are going to become increasingly important as this rush accelerates. It talks about the SCP Foundation, a collaborative online fiction collective where hundreds of authors have spent more than a decade building an interconnected universe of supernatural horror under a Creative Commons license.
Well, it is now reportedly being targeted for adaptation. Creative Commons licensing, which requires derivative works to carry the same open license, is not a framework Hollywood’s IP-hoarding infrastructure was designed to work with. How those contracts get structured, and whether the original creators of these collaborative universes retain anything meaningful when the machine comes for their work, is a question the industry will have to answer.
Now that Hollywood has arrived to monetize Creator IP, the question of who benefits, and on what terms, will be a central point on the convergence timeline.
The Deals
Trevor Henderson, the creature designer whose viral internet creations have now accumulated billions of views, landed two major studio acquisitions in the span of a week. Warner Bros. won a five-studio bidding war for Siren Head, with Brian Duffield directing and Zach Cregger co-writing. Duffield and Cregger, mind you, are two of the hotter creative forces working in Hollywood horror right now, which tells you how seriously WB is treating the IP.
Then, before that deal had even settled, Sony’s TriStar moved pre-emptively to acquire Cartoon Cat, Henderson’s other viral creature, before anyone else could bid. Henderson had made essentially nothing from either character for years despite their ubiquity across YouTube, games, and fan communities. Two weeks later, he is a millionaire with two studio deals and his original rights largely intact on Cartoon Cat.
The Mandela Catalogue went even bigger. Alex Kister’s analog horror YouTube series, which has accumulated over 100 million views across its official episodes alone, sold following an 11-studio bidding war to United Artists, Amblin Entertainment, and Amazon MGM Studios. Steven Spielberg is producing. Kister, who is 22, will direct the feature from a screenplay he adapted himself.
What these three deals have in common is that none of these properties were discovered by Hollywood. They were built by creators over years with audiences that chose to show up without any marketing budget or institutional support behind them.
YouTube Formalizes the TV Format
Elsewhere, YouTube announced that creators can now organize their video playlists into shows and seasons, complete with episodes, consistent branding, and series-level metadata. The feature lets creators either restructure existing playlists or build new shows from scratch through YouTube Studio.
The platform’s own definition of a show is interesting: “a collection of high-quality episodes with a clear connection across them, consistent hosts where possible, a uniform look and thumbnail style, and higher production quality for both video and audio.”
Sounds a lot like the language of a television network describing programming standards and not very much like a social media platform describing user-generated content. After all, they’re winning Emmys now.
This is a pretty meaningful step in the continuation of YouTube’s push to the living room. Giving creators the tools to present their work as a “show” rather than a “playlist” (words matter) is how you get audiences to change their perspective on what the platform is.
GARDEN VIEW
A little more on internet IP. While studios chase creator horror and creature lore, Italian Brainrot is getting its moment. This video captures a fascinating battle playing out in real time over brainrot internet IP.
HARVEST QUOTE
"Netflix is never going to beat YouTube at its own game, no matter how many food influencers or quack psychologists it signs up for shows."
— Entertainment journalist Matt Belloni on Netflix’s recent short-form video ambitions
I wrote about this topic last week, and the conversation has only gotten louder since. Simon Owens recently wrote about the dilution of the Netflix brand, and the argument gaining traction among analysts is a simple one: better, more premium, and more curated is the winning position for Netflix, both with advertisers and on Wall Street, while also delivering the most attentive audience in subscription streaming.
Trying to out-YouTube YouTube seems like a lost cause for legacy media.
Have a great weekend…