YouTube is taking over Hollywood

0:02Welcome to the BirdCast, the flagship podcast of overall deals. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show, we're going to talk about YouTube, and specifically the way in which YouTube is taking over Hollywood. Over the last couple of weeks, two movies you may have heard of, Backrooms and Obsession, have become genuine box office success stories, despite the fact, or maybe because of the fact, that they were both made by people who came up as creators and particularly on YouTube. Plus, there's this movie, The Amazing Digital Circus, The Last Act, which is just a direct, basically, lifting of a YouTube video and playing into movie theaters.

0:39That, over this past weekend, was the number five movie in theaters ahead of Star Wars, The Mandalorian, and Grogu. This has been a trend for some time. You go back to things like Iron Lung, which was a movie made by a YouTuber known as Markiplier. That movie was a hit. We've started to see more and more creators. creators in this sort of most internet-y sense, begin to take on Hollywood. And it's really starting to work. And what I want to know is where is all of this going? Are we about to see a bunch of new people get their shot in Hollywood? What does it even mean to get your shot in Hollywood when you've built a huge audience online?

1:14And is the future just watching YouTube videos on giant screens while we eat popcorn? Julia Alexander, a media correspondent at Puck and my former Verge colleague, is going to come on the show and talk about all of that and lots more. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Thursday, June 11th, 2026. It's World Cup Day. Today is the first day of the world's biggest sports tournament, which means I will be getting essentially no work done for the next five weeks or so. In the US, as with all sports streaming, watching the World Cup is far too complicated.

1:46But Fox Sports and Fox 1 have all of the games if you pay for that in one way or another. And you can also see them on Peacock in Spanish. It's not quite that simple, but it's almost that simple. And as The Verge's Andrew Webster points out today, it's still not clear where we're all supposed to go to talk about the games. Sports Twitter used to be a thing, but it's long gone. And we need a new one. Stat. Please. Meanwhile, iFixit did a teardown of the Trump phone and confirmed what we already knew and have known for a very long time. It's just a ripoff. It's a ripoff of the HTC U24 Pro, specifically, with a couple of teeny tiny changes to the battery and the chipset.

2:22HTC used to be a big name in smartphones, but most of the company was sold to Google a while back. So I agree with The Verge's Don Preston, whose theory is that HTC probably contracted with a third-party manufacturer to make the U24, and the Trump mobile team basically called the same folks and said like, yeah, we'll have what they're having. The U24 Pro, by the way, very much made in China. Just saying. Finally, Apple and Google both added support for Thread 1.4, an update to the smart home network protocol that is supposed to make it easier to get all of your devices on a single network, all communicating with one another.

2:54I say supposed to, because right now the Apple TV implementation is in developer beta and The Verge's Gen 2e couldn't even get the Google TV streamer to work at all. Such is the slow, steady progress of the smart home. But it'll work eventually, we hope. You can read more about all of this at theverge.com. That is 90 seconds on The Verge for June 11th. Support for this show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. Do you have a pet? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill of over$1 ,000. And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch Pet Insurance comes in.

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4:20Julia Alexander, welcome back to The Vergecast. Thank you so much for having me. I love being back on The Vergecast. So we need to talk about the young people. This is what we're here for. But my first question is, have you seen either Backrooms or Obsession yet? These are like the new YouTube-turned-Hollywood-crazed movies. I have not seen either one. Have you seen either one? I haven't seen either one. I think the last movie I saw in theaters was Scream 7. So this feels like the great next extension of it, though. Right. I really feel like there's a definite line in the sand of ages, whether you went to the movie theater the last couple of weeks to see Scream or you went to see Backrooms and Obsession.

4:59And you and I are unfortunately both on the wrong side of that line. But the trend here is fascinating to me, right? We have all at once a bunch of I'm reluctant to call them YouTubers. I actually want to talk about whether it's fair to call these people YouTubers. But you have a bunch of people who really sort of cut their teeth on YouTube and on social platforms who are not just making Hollywood movies, right? Like that pipeline is interesting and I want to talk about it. But the fact that not only are they making these movies, they're enormous, unexpected, runaway successes. How are you thinking about the large trend at play here?

5:37I'm so excited that you asked that because I think there's a lot of hyperbole about what this means. I think there's a group of traditional studio executives in Hollywood who are in their 60s and 70s who see this and think, great, the next MCU is just like the YouTuber cinematic universe. And we're going to throw a ton of money at YouTubers with big audiences and Mr. Beast will win an Oscar for us in five years. And then I think there's the actual conversation, which is just this idea that there was a group of talent who instead of going through a gatekept system that was traditional Hollywood and the traditional studio system who came up through that kind of creative pipeline, just decided to use the Internet as a distribution platform that we all knew it to be and started posting really great content on YouTube, built up followings, and then converted a percentage of that audience base into theater goers.

6:32And I think the distinction is if you give audiences the ability to have really unique original content in this kind of sea of oversaturated franchise slop, they will turn out, I should say. And also, if you can combine that with these relationships that they've built with creators and their channels over the past decade, the past seven years, the past five years, they will also continue to turn out. Okay. Yeah, it seems like the right way to think about it is not we should just put YouTube on movie theater screens. Although there is some of that happening and we should talk about that too. But there's just this turn, it seems like, happening where if I'm Cain Parsons, right?

7:13I'm a teenager who has cool creative ideas and wants to go make things. I can A, make them and publish them in public and B, develop a real proven audience for it. Which to me is like, there's something in that turn and then you have a studio like A24, which I think has gone way out of its way to try to bring up young directors and try to take swings and try to do new things. And like a thing I've seen a lot of actors talk about is it's increasingly hard to get a job in Hollywood if you don't already have a big social following. And this to me feels to some extent just like of a piece with that, where it used to be that A24 would just have to take a big swing on a completely unproven person.

7:57But now you're taking a still big swing on somebody who like demonstrably went out and built an audience of people who like this thing that they made. So at least maybe the sort of, the pipeline has not changed. It's just weirdly less of a risk for everybody now. You can look at what A24 did with the Falupu brothers who were original YouTubers who I remember covering back in my days at The Verge because they were seeing all their content be demonetized because they would do these really great but graphic Mortal Kombat IRL type videos. Oh, I remember those. Yeah. They were so great. And I remember talking to them for a story about how YouTube was demonetizing their content.

8:38They didn't know what to do next. And they always wanted to be filmmakers within the traditional studio system, which I think is also an important part of this conversation. And they worked with a studio and a distributor like A24 who wanted to take these bets. And so they ended up becoming or moving away from YouTube into this kind of, again, traditional Hollywood system. And so I think if you look at a Cain Parsons or if we talk about Obsession, whatever it might be, the idea that they built up audiences on a platform that they weren't, I would argue, intending to become a PewDiePie Mr. Beast.

9:12It was not like they wanted to be YouTubers, but they had a platform that allowed them to find an audience through this free distribution access, which, as you know, and we all know, is the story of the internet. Then I think there's the conversation around Markiplier and Iron Lung and this idea of, I have this audience of the last 15 years. I'm going to self-produce this film. I'm going to kind of basically self-finance this film. We're going to distribute it in more than 3 ,000 theaters. And this is the successful story of a YouTuber moving into a film space rather than filmmakers using YouTube as a means to get into that traditional studio system.

9:50Okay, so you kind of just half answered one of the questions I was going to ask you, which is, is this moment actually sort of a new phenomenon, right? I think one way to look at this is that it is a lot of this story happening all at once. And so it's just obvious to look at, right? A bunch of new creators who all kind of cut their teeth in the same place are now making successful movies. Put like that, that's extremely not a new phenomenon. But there's also a way to look at this that is like, OK, this is the official YouTuber takeover of Hollywood. And I don't think it's quite that. And my sense is you don't either.

10:29And that actually there is something to this is this is just a bunch of a longstanding trend that just kind of happens to all be happening all at once. After this weekend, I called up a few sources who are effectively running or part of development teams within creator-centric divisions at all these legacy studios and networks. Every company now has one. They're looking at how do we work with talent who are coming from the creator sphere. Most of that YouTube, but it may include TikTok, it may include Instagram, whoever it might be. How do we work with them on projects that we both want to distribute under our banner?

11:07So that could be a film like A24 and Jason Blum over at Blumhouse. That could be a streaming show that might go to a Netflix, a Hulu. Or how do we work with them on developing original IP for their own channels? And what we're investing in is basically the channel and saying that we think we can continue growing this and it's going to become a portion of our business. And there's a component of that strategy, which feels like the multi-channel networks of 2017, 2018. The full screens of the world and the maker studios. And in many ways, sources I talked to are like, they were just early to it.

11:42And now we've got this kind of understanding of what YouTube and YouTubers are from executives. So I think there's a component of all these different execs trying to figure out what YouTubers are to them. I also think there is this component, though, of creatives have always found interesting ways to get around the traditional gatekeeping system. And you can think about the independent film scene in the 90s, obviously the Quentin Tarantino era. You could also think about Mike Judge and Beavis and Butthead and that being shared on the back end of either the South Park or the Simpsons tape that then people started watching and it got around to people in Hollywood.

12:20And so although the distribution mechanics have changed with technology advances, the idea of creators and creatives coming in from these separate or alternative pipelines is not new. I think YouTube, to your point, David, about having a built-in audience, YouTube just comes with very public subscriber and follower numbers and engagement metrics and sentiment metrics around the type of content that people are doing that then lead studio executives to say, okay, we think we can work with this creator on this project. So that way of looking at it feels like a total context collapse of how all of this stuff works in a way that I'm actually really sort of surprised by.

13:03Because I think the way I was looking at this is like, OK, YouTube, great way to get lots of audience. Kind of terrible way to make a lot of money, right? Traditional Hollywood system, very good at making money. Not as good as they used to be, but still very good at making money. They know how to put it on the screen and sell tickets. And that is a way to go and make something with a much bigger budget and ideally make lots more money. So my assumption has always been that even for somebody like Markiplier, who essentially just made a sort of bigger budget version of the stuff that he makes on YouTube and is betting that his audience will sort of turn out for that in theaters, and that worked out great.

13:43The move there is just here's another way to make a lot more money in a much more sort of traditional, understandable, stable way. But what you're describing is like the YouTube and theatrical worlds just running directly into each other and maybe the difference between those two things just completely disappearing entirely. I think a lot about the upfronts, which is, of course, when all the brands come together into New York City and they tell advertisers why they should advertise on the NFL and why they should advertise on Dick Wolf shows. There was a great moment. The only two things on television.

14:19The only two things on television. The NFL and Dick Wolf shows. I go directly from watching my New Orleans Saints lose to watching police win in any Dick Wolf show. Something with Chicago at the beginning. Something with Chicago. That's it. Yeah. I think a lot about it was either I think it was two years ago. It was when Amazon had announced Beast Games, which was Mr. Beast's competition show based on kind of Squid Game. And it was this hundred million dollar reported deal. They were they were investing in Mr. Beast to make this original content for Amazon. And that same week, it was like the next day or two days later, Mr.

14:51Beast was on stage with Neil Mohan, who's the CEO of YouTube, and said, why would I ever leave YouTube? Like, why would I ever go and do something exclusively in the Hollywood system? when my audience is here. And the larger part of that conversation that you can see play out, and I'm going to use Mr. Beast not as the only creator, but I think as kind of, you know, this large creator who has all these opportunities available to him as a example of what may happen with creators. If you look at what he then does over the next couple of years, he's publicly talking to Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg about how he uses their platforms to monetize the same video, but cut for kind of different audiences.

15:26And I think what we're entering, which is really fun is this period of true non-exclusivity for top creators who go like, I'm going to go make a movie with A24 because I have this filmmaker talent inside of me I really want to explore and I came up on YouTube. But I'm also going to continue producing long-form content or short-form content for these platforms and monetizing it because I understand that it takes years to develop a project in Hollywood. It may or may not go anywhere. Tons of, as you know, David, tons of projects don't actually go anywhere. And so I'm not going to give up the advantage of scale and reach on a platform like YouTube, even though I'm not going to rely purely on the monetization from AdSense or whatever it might be.

16:08So the future of being a creator within this world might look like you have an overall deal with Universal Pictures or with 20th Century Fox or whatever you're doing, and you're focusing on developing projects every few years where you're doing this big, big, big push into the mainstream. And then you've got an extended podcast that you're monetizing through Patreon, and then you're doing stuff with Instagram brand deals via reels. And I think that moment of Hollywood understandably saying, we're not going to have the type of star structure we had in the 30s and 40s up through the 90s, where we have a talent that we really rely on, that we're going to pay a ton of money to have exclusive Christopher Nolan movies.

16:45But instead, we're going to try and tap into the converting of an audience that we are not seeing that come to theaters that we are losing out to YouTube is where that merge kind of happens. That's interesting. That also strikes me as the end of a very particular kind of celebrity too. Like I think about we still have this group of movie stars, like true capital M movie stars who don't make TV shows. They don't really have YouTube channels. They don't do all of this other stuff. And in a lot of ways, that sort of mystique and the fact that we are not so overrun by them is part of their power, right?

17:23Like Leonardo DiCaprio makes a movie and then kind of disappears. And there is something that makes him powerful in that. And it feels like the next generation of people will not interact with the world and their art in that way at all. That in fact, everybody is going to be everywhere all the time, because that's just how the business works now? I think there's a percentage of actors, and I'll use the term auteur, who's still going to come up and say, I'm interested in pursuing more traditional art forms, and I want to spend my time working with truly great visionaries, and I want to spend my time thinking about my career as an actor, my career as a director, my career as a writer.

18:05Timothee Chalamet is probably, there you go, he's probably like the example of that right now. Timothee Chalamet, Michael B. Jordan, kind of within that, where they're really hyper-focused on choosing the projects they want to work with. At the same time, it's a very select percentage of people. And, you know, Timothee Chalamet grew up in New York City around a lot of playwrights. There's Michael B. Jordan, who worked very hard to get to where he is, had this early break on Friday Night Lights. And so the ability for them in their late 20s, 30s to then say, I'm going to focus squarely on this comes from a place of kind of proven talent.

18:39I think if you are, I think about Steven Spielberg saying, if you're a young kid with access to an iPhone, just start uploading. Like, you might as well just start shooting and trying to find things that way. And it's funny that the film system is coming into this now. Because if you look at the TV system, if you look at Broad City, if you look at High Maintenance, if you look at Insecure, I mean, like Issa Rae, Abby Jacobson, Alana Glazer, Ben Sinclair, who did High Maintenance, all of them came from Vimeo YouTube. They were all producing for the web. And then people like Amy Poehler or people like Casey Bloys at HBO said, these are great.

19:15And we think these can work as extended TV shows. And so now I think you're looking at Hollywood studios saying, okay, well, we weren't seeing full feature films necessarily on YouTube that we think could convert to a theatrical release in 4 ,500 theaters. But we are seeing talent who has expressed interest in doing that, who we then look at the script, we go through the traditional process of greenlighting a project and say, OK, also, if we can convert 20 percent of these two million subscribers into theater goers, we might have an ability to kind of bring back those younger audiences to theaters.

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21:35So the 2026 midterms is shaping up to be an all-out brawl. But the biggest fight may not be between Democrats and Republicans, but over the congressional maps itself. Gerrymandering is not a good thing. We don't like it. And then all of a sudden we're going out and telling people, vote for this. So I'm in Ashland, Virginia, a small town just outside of Richmond, which calls itself the center of the universe. And that checks out because it's the center of the political universe, at least when it comes to the 2026 midterms. That's because Ashland sits in Virginia's first congressional district, which is one of only about 35 or so that are actually competitive.

22:12That makes Virginia particularly important when it comes to the question of gerrymandering. The gerrymandering is a major problem, but it's not like Democrats drew first blood with this one. Donald Trump doesn't think he should be held accountable by anybody, so he's trying to change the rules because he doesn't like the game. We've shown what we're capable of. Now let's keep up the push through the midterms. America actually will be in your feeds and on YouTube every Saturday with an interesting interview in politics or culture. Big news this week for all my Gordon Gekkos, my Robin Hooders, my Claude Squad, Anthropic, which is newly the most valuable AI company in the world, announced it would be going public.

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23:41So let's talk about the bringing back younger audiences, because I think the last time you were on the show, we tried to fix movie theaters. We did. And I would say given what has happened And since then, we kind of did it. We did it. Like, there was us on the first cast, and then everything got better in the theatrical business. So, like, you're welcome, everybody. But I do think one of the big bets going on here is that young people want to go out in the world and hang out with each other, right? Like, one other example we haven't really talked about is The Amazing Digital Circus, which is this incredibly successful animated YouTube series that is just putting its finale in theaters for two weeks and then putting it on YouTube.