The Return of the Middle: A Fireside Chat with Sean Atkins, CEO of Dhar Mann Studios
Sean Atkins joined my Columbia Film School class last week — a group of filmmakers about to graduate into the most disrupted entertainment landscape in decades.
I wanted them to hear from someone who started at ground zero of the creator economy and now sits at the greatest point of convergence between legacy media and digital creators.
Sean’s résumé reads like a timeline of media transformation: Disney in its early cable expansion, MTV during its reinvention era, HBO when “streaming” was a dirty word, and Jellysmack at the height of the creator boom.
He’s now the CEO of Dhar Mann Studios, one of the largest independent entertainment companies on the internet — a studio that looks, in his words, “like Warner Bros. built inside a YouTube channel.”
This was the third week of class in a series of conversations with leaders of the creator economy — people who have not only disrupted legacy media but who also, in their own way, still believe in the emotional power of legacy storytelling.
Some of my students, many of whom are artists at their core, were understandably skeptical. They weren’t sure how speaking to these executives and creators — people who speak in systems and scale — would help them find a creative path forward.
So before Sean joined, I told them why I feel this is important: understanding how the business is changing isn’t a detour from artistry — it’s the terrain artists now have to walk through. It doesn’t matter whether you like the content Dhar Mann makes. What matters is how the system around it works — how filmmakers might one day use similar structures to support their own work.
I reminded them: you can always decide to ignore everything you learn here. But it’s better to know what you’re ignoring, because these macro shifts are changing everything.
During the lecture we covered a wide range of ideas — from Sean’s origin story to the influences that gave him the curiosity, range, and insight to forge a path against the prevailing wisdom of media. He’s spent his career swimming upstream, fighting headwinds inside every legacy institution he’s entered, only to land — almost poetically — at the literal center of the modern media universe.
But one idea in particular stayed with me. Against all current logic, Sean believes that the “middle” — the space in media that seems to have vanished — isn’t dead at all. It’s being reborn right now, in the chaos of disruption.
The Death (and Rebirth) of the Middle
“Most of that died,” Sean said. “The middle died.”
He meant the era when movies like The Goonies, Poltergeist, When Harry Met Sally, and You’ve Got Mail were studio staples — not blockbusters, not indies, but films that lived in the accessible center of popular culture.
That space disappeared as Hollywood consolidated and streamers chased global tentpoles. The syndication ecosystem that once gave birth to Star Trek: The Next Generation or Xena: Warrior Princess evaporated.
Television polarized into prestige and reality; film polarized into Marvel and microbudget.
“There used to be thirty romantic comedies released in theaters every year,” Sean said. “Now there’s maybe one.”
The result? The creative middle class collapsed. But Sean doesn’t see decline. He sees a reset.
“As the means of distribution and production head toward zero,” he said, “that opens the opportunity for more voices to get to the table and be seen and heard.”
That’s an interesting way to look at it: once creation and distribution cost almost nothing, the middle comes roaring back — only this time, it’s not built by studios. It’s built by creators.
From Syndication to Self-Distribution
Sean sees what’s happening now as the third great industrial revolution in media — and the closest thing we’ve had to the syndication boom.
“When production and distribution costs collapse, new creative classes always emerge,” he said.
That was true when home video turned every living room into a film school. It was true when Miramax proved that smart, low-cost storytelling could be wildly profitable. And it’s true now, when one person with an iPhone can reach more people than NBC in 1987.
“It’ll just take one talented person,” Sean said, “and they’ll be able to make a syndicated-level version of Star Trek.”
He’s not exaggerating. The creator economy has matured to the point where self-funded, story-driven production is not just possible — it’s scalable.
The economics of the middle could come back if the creation process and distribution pipes bring costs down; its just the ownership that changes hands.
A Career at the Fault Line
Sean’s own life could be a case study in disruption. He went to film school on the West Coast, where, as he put it, he was “objectively the least talented person there.” But he found another superpower: pattern recognition.
“The good news,” he told my students, “is you can suck and still have a pretty good career.”
His childhood was shaped by a mix of unlikely influences — he spent part of it growing up overseas and, for a time, worked as a child actor after landing a lead role in a school play he’d auditioned for to impress a crush.
His mother, a musician who taught herself to code, built software for small businesses in the early 1980s, and that blend of art and technology left a lasting mark.
When he was eight, she warned him never to touch her computer before leaving on a trip. By the time she returned, he had in his words, helped build one of the largest software-piracy rings in Asia. (That story probably deserves its own substack).
“The notion that technology and creativity were separate just never existed for me,” he said.
That hybrid mindset carried him through a career at Disney, HBO, and MTV — always entering divisions that were underperforming or unloved. He jokes that he’s drawn to “start-it-up, turn-it-around” environments, where the rules aren’t yet written.
“At HBO, nobody wanted to do HBO GO,” he said. “So by the time I did my first creator deal, I already had that outsider mindset.”
That first deal was in 2005 — the same year YouTube launched.
“YouTube’s 20th anniversary was my 20th anniversary,” he laughed. “It’s not like media companies didn’t know what was happening,” he said. “It just wasn’t at the margins they wanted. By the time they wake up, it’s a little late.”
Jellysmack and the Creator Map
By the time Sean joined Jellysmack, he’d spent years navigating the gap between media incumbents and emerging talent. Jellysmack — a tech-driven company that helps creators grow and monetize their videos across multiple platforms using data and automation — gave him a panoramic view of the new ecosystem. There, he oversaw operations for more than 6,000 creators.
“There’s probably not a major creator whose data I haven’t seen,” he said.
That vantage point showed him the anatomy of creative scale: irrational vision, resilience, and an obsession with iteration.
“No creator has a story that goes, ‘I made content and instantly succeeded,’” Sean said. “It’s always, ‘Ten people watched. Then eleven. But that’s ten percent better.’”
It’s a mindset traditional studios never developed — the humility to fail in public and improve incrementally.
“Everyone starts at zero,” he said. “You need the sheer force of will to power through that.”
That same insight led him to Dhar Mann — a creator who’d built a fully functioning studio lot, mission-driven and profitable, without a dollar of outside capital.
The Dhar Mann Model
When Sean first walked through Dhar Mann Studios, it reminded him of Warner Bros. — a backlot filled with working sets, production crews, and purpose.
“It’s a visceral indication of how much has changed,” he said.
Dhar’s backstory reads like a myth. The son of immigrants who faced religious persecution, he endured a volatile childhood, early success, bankruptcy, and public humiliation.
“By thirty, he had lost everything,” Sean said. “Six hundred dollars to his name. Rent due in three weeks. He was depressed, bankrupt, and had shut off his social media.”
Then something shifted. He started reading biographies of people who’d endured hardship — from Lincoln to Mandela — and realized failure was the common denominator.
“Maybe failure is a requirement for success,” he thought.
He began filming small, moral parables using friends and family. The early views were dismal. He was convinced Facebook was suppressing him. But he kept going.
A year later, one video broke through — a simple story of empathy: a husband scolds his wife for a messy house, then discovers she made the mess cooking a special dinner for him.
That video hit a million views. The next one hit 250 million.
“Failure is a requirement for success,” Sean repeated.
The lesson: iteration compounds faster than inspiration.
Dhar reinvested every dollar into new sets, often stealing furniture from his own apartment.
“When I take people on tours,” Sean said, “the first set is just one corner of a room. The furniture’s still from their old apartment.”
It’s now a full-fledged studio — over a hundred employees, half a dozen stages, and an audience in the hundreds of millions.
Reclaiming the Emotional Middle
Dhar Mann’s success isn’t about algorithm hacks; it’s about emotional consistency.
“If you look at the top-grossing books and films of all time,” Sean said, “they tend to be family-oriented and universal. Yet our industry rarely celebrates positivity.”
The modern attention economy optimizes for outrage. Dhar flipped that logic.
“The titles look terrible,” Sean admitted. “But they’re bait and switch every time. ‘Racist Karen Gets Taught a Lesson’ starts with anger and ends with empathy.”
It’s the same emotional DNA that powered telenovelas, K-dramas, and early Disney — moral stories of redemption and humanity.
Hollywood abandoned that space as it chased awards and irony. But online, it thrives.
“There’s a yearning in society,” Sean said. “People want to feel good in a world that’s constantly dark. To a certain extent, it’s the fact that he’s fine not being cool that makes him cool.”
That’s the new middle: earnest, emotional, and unapologetically populist.
The Business of Art
When one of my students asked how filmmakers could make work that mattered and survived economically, Sean didn’t hesitate.
“Never forget you work in show business,” he said. “The best way to protect the creative you want to make is to make sure there’s a business to be had.”
He’s not dismissing art. He’s acknowledging the economics.
“There’s an audience for everything,” he said. “You just have to find them and figure out how to reach them.”
That’s the essential truth of the open garden: there are no curators anymore. No Sundance gatekeepers. Just creators and audiences.
“In the YouTube world,” Sean said, “you kind of can’t blame anyone. You either made something the audience wants, or you didn’t.”
It’s brutal but freeing.
“In the old system, you could always blame the executives,” he said. “In the new one, the audience is the executive.”
Constraint as Catalyst
Sean is transparent about economics with his team. A Dhar Mann episode costs around $100,000, which means it needs roughly five million views in 30 days to break even.
“So if you pitch me something,” he said, “I have to ask: will it hit those numbers? If not, maybe it should go on a smaller channel where the cost is $10,000. At that price, I’ll greenlight it instantly.”
For him, constraint isn’t limitation — it’s focus.
“Creativity explodes when there’s constraint and struggles when there’s none.”
He told a story about a creative who wanted to make a courtroom drama. The filmmaker noticed that the studio’s court, hospital, and office sets were next to each other. So he wrote the show around those spaces, shot three episodes a day, and used AI to recreate flashbacks.
“He’s now making a CSI-style series for ten grand an episode,” Sean said.
Constraint became the creative engine.
“If I give you three weeks, two paintbrushes, and a four-by-seven frame, I’ll get a piece of art,” he said. “Give you unlimited money and time, and you’ll freeze.”
It’s the same logic that powered Robert Rodriguez, early Pixar, and modern creators — art through scarcity.
The Audience as the New Studio
Dhar Mann’s audience is massive and surprisingly diverse.
“Once a creator reaches scale, they reach everyone,” Sean said. “But if you look at the center of gravity [for Dhar Mann], it’s 13 to 21.”
Younger viewers on YouTube, older on Facebook — parents and teens watching together.
“He’s always positioned as a family brand,” Sean said. “Think early WB — written for young adults but inclusive of family.”
Different production teams target each demo: YouTube for teens, Facebook for moms, podcasts for the 18–35 range. It’s a studio system rebuilt around communities, not channels.
When Sean first joined, he assumed the audience skewed tween. He was wrong.
“We were in New York,” he said. “People kept recognizing Dhar — families, young adults, everyone. Mom, dad, nineteen-year-old, thirteen-year-old. Even twenty-something women in Dumbo saying, ‘I grew up with you.”
That’s not a niche audience; that’s mainstream America rediscovered through a digital studio.
Hollywood’s Blind Spot
Sean recently met with a major theatrical distributor about bringing a Dhar Mann feature to theaters. The conversation revealed everything broken about the legacy mindset.
“I told them, ‘We have a massive community — we’ll start by asking them what they want.’ They said, ‘You don’t understand theatrical.”
The distributor insisted the only thing that mattered was the director’s name.
They told him having the right director attached was more valuable than Dhar Mann’s billion fans. It’s a stunning disconnect: prestige over proof, names over numbers.
Why would a creator who owns his studio, controls his IP, and reaches 45 million viewers per video choose to enter that system?
“He can make a 90-minute film for $90,000, post it, and reach more people than most indies ever will,” Sean said.'
That’s not arrogance, Sean exudes none really. He’s just calling them like he sees them.
(And to be fair, some distributors are beginning to open their eyes to this shift. I just hope that some of the early failed experiments don’t make them throw out the baby with the algorithmic bathwater.)
The Return of the Middle
When Sean says the middle is coming back, he doesn’t mean budgets. He means access.
The space where stories can live between billion-dollar franchises and personal art films. Where commerce and culture meet without institutional permission.
The tools are cheap. The audiences are everywhere. The middle didn’t die — it just left the lot.
It’s being rebuilt in warehouses, spare bedrooms, and algorithmic ecosystems that reward consistency over connections.
Hollywood’s middle used to be the creative heartbeat of the business. Now it’s the creative rebellion against it.
Back to the Students
After Sean signed off, I looked around the room. My students were quiet — thoughtful in that way people get when something just reframed the map in their head.
For many of them, the kind of personal, handmade stories they want to tell can feel invisible in a system that rewards volume and virility. But Sean’s point about the middle coming back isn’t just an economic prediction — it’s a creative invitation.
If cost and access are collapsing, then intimacy, authenticity, and small-scale vision can finally compete on equal terms. The tools that let Dhar Mann reach hundreds of millions can also let a filmmaker reach a few thousand people who truly care. The math changes, but the dream doesn’t.
That’s the hopeful part. The new middle won’t be built by algorithms — it’ll be built by artists who learn to use them without losing themselves.
As someone in “the middle”, this was a refreshing read. I think Sean is right. I look forward to watching this moment in time play out!