Conor McClay

This film, by 20-year-old YouTuber Kane Parsons, is a blockbuster movie hit.

And this one by 26-year-old Curry Barker, who is one half of the YouTube sketch comedy duo, outperformed the latest Star Wars offering.

The one with Sigourney Weaver and that cute mini Yoda thing.

We've all heard stories of the Mandalorian bounty hunter.

Two low-budget horror films, both in theaters now by creators taking a different route to Hollywood and bringing their own online communities with them.

They used a platform that went just 20 years ago from a place where pirated material landed to the world's biggest home of original video content.

Hi, I'm Connor McClay, and on The Detail today, we're looking at this digital first phenomenon with Dr Kenny Ching, who has somewhat provocatively suggested in a newsroom article that New Zealand is backing the wrong end of the pipeline when it comes to subsidising movie and game production.

I'm excited too.

So what does your day-to-day consist of?

What are you researching right now?

That's what everyone's interested in.

So from your perspective, how do these digital communities, broadly speaking, differ from traditional communities?

So these communities would build themselves more around aspects of media rather than on who the individuals are?

So YouTube has gone more from the community to the platform as a whole.

Exactly.

The community housed on.

Exactly, right?

Yep.

So we're here to talk about this – I don't know if I'd even describe it as a new phenomenon, but this new trend that we've had of recently we've got a few creators who started on YouTube and are popular on YouTube who have made it big in Hollywood.

Yep.