The Garden Harvest: Tubi Doubles Down on Creators
Your weekly digest on the intersection of the Creator Economy and Legacy Media.
FRESH CLIPPINGS
Tubi Doubles Down on Creators
Tubi is continuing to build what looks like the most deliberate bridge from digital platforms to premium long-form storytelling of any streamer operating right now. The latest move is a partnership with TikTok that gives selected creators a pathway to developing original series exclusively for Tubi, with TikTok using its Spotlight program to drive its own audience to the finished shows. Both scripted and unscripted projects are on the table, and an initial cohort is expected to enter the incubator program this summer.
The model is straightforward and worth paying attention to. TikTok surfaces the talent and the built-in audience, Tubi provides the infrastructure and the platform for longer-form work, and creators get the thing most of them are actively looking for: a real shot at developing beyond short-form content without having to give up the creative control or the authenticity that made them worth watching in the first place.
Tubi already has evidence this works. Kelon Campbell’s Terri Joe: Missionary in Miami brought his TikTok-native characters into a feature film format and debuted at number eight on Variety’s streaming original movies chart. That’s not a novelty result. It’s a proof of concept.
The broader context here is Fox. Tubi sits inside the same company that, as we highlighted last week, recently launched Fox Creator Studios and signed Frankie Quiñones to a scripted development deal.
These moves are not happening in isolation.
A New Type of Studio
Linden Lane Films is a new studio built around a premise that’s become harder to argue with: the most valuable thing a creator has isn’t their subscriber count, it’s their audience relationship. The company, led by Hollywood actor Stephen Kunken alongside entrepreneur Morgan Rothschild and consultant David Baum, has signed the Stokes Twins and Ben Azelart and structured itself around two distinct but connected operations:
Linden Lane Films handles traditional feature and streaming distribution.
Linden Lane Labs is the creator incubator where those same talents develop original long-form IP, reacting to trends in real time rather than waiting for a slot in a broadcast calendar.
That second part is the interesting piece. The Labs content is explicitly designed to be immediate and responsive, living on the platforms where creators’ audiences already are, while the film studio operates on a more conventional timeline with theatrical and streaming releases. The idea is that the short-form feed and the bigger projects feed each other, with social content keeping audiences warm and engaged between larger releases, and the films lending the whole operation a sense of scale and ambition that pure creator content rarely achieves on its own.
It’s a structure that mirrors what the smarter players in the convergence space are figuring out more broadly. The creators who are building something durable are the ones treating short-form as a distribution engine rather than the end product. Linden Lane is essentially institutionalizing that instinct.
Brass Knuckle Films Has a Slate
A year ago at SXSW, Robert Rodriguez and Alexis Garcia launched Brass Knuckle Films, an action label backed by fan investors rather than traditional studio money. This week, back at SXSW, they announced what that investment is actually going to make.
The initial slate has five projects. Three are Rodriguez originals, including Smooth Operators, an action film written by DJ Cotrona and Brooks McLaren, and Future Proof, a character-driven thriller co-written with TJ Fixman. The other two came directly from investor-pitched ideas, which is the detail worth pausing on. As we first highlighted last year, this isn’t a production company that consulted its audience after the fact. The community has been part of the creative process from the start.
Since launching, Brass Knuckle has raised $2 million from over 2,000 individual investors. That number is modest by Hollywood standards but the model is the point. Rodriguez is one of independent film’s most recognizable names, and he’s deliberately chosen to build his next chapter around his fans rather than institutional backing. The announcement of a “Best Logline Wins” contest for investors, where the community competes to have their idea developed, makes the participatory ethos even more explicit.
We highlighted this at launch because it felt like an early signal of something worth tracking. A filmmaker with real credentials treating his audience as collaborators and co-investors rather than passive consumers is a meaningful bet on where the relationship between creators and their communities is headed. A year in, with a real slate and a growing investor base, that bet is starting to look less like an experiment and more like a business.
GARDEN VIEW
Following the success of Iron Lung which became the talk of the town last month, Theo Von and David Spade are taking their new film Busboys directly to Cinemark and Regal theaters on April 17, with no studio and no distributor involved.
Reed Duchscher, CEO of Night, the management firm behind Von, put it plainly: just them.
This raises the same question that Markiplier did: how much of the success depends on the model, and how much does it depend on the creator specifically? This one will be an interesting data point either way.
Separately, the director Jonah Feingold is cooking up a Brass Knuckle-type of venture, which we’ll dive into next week.
HARVEST QUOTE
“We’re starting to call it the Acrobat Cinematic Universe”
— Jared Carneson, head of social media at Adobe
Once you get past the cringe of hearing Adobe being called a cinematic universe, the underlying move is something we’ve been tracking recently as it relates to branded entertainment. The company just launched The Marketers, a five-part workplace comedy on YouTube starring Hasan Minhaj and Patty Guggenheim, with creator cameos from The Try Guys.
It promotes Adobe Acrobat, but it's structured like a TV show, with recurring characters, running jokes and the explicit ambition to build an ongoing entertainment franchise around a software product.
It's the branded entertainment thesis in its most literal form.
Have a great weekend…