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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of overall deals. I'm your friend, David Pearce. 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. That, 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.
Chapter 2: What recent movies have YouTubers directed that are succeeding at the box office?
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 wanna 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?
Chapter 3: How has YouTube's influence on Hollywood evolved over time?
And 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. But Fox Sports and Fox One 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.
Chapter 4: What does the success of The Amazing Digital Circus signify for YouTube creators?
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. HTC 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. I 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.
When it comes to home improvement, even the most experienced DIYer has a limit.
I'm not going to come in here with the blowtorch and get it hot and solder and put the copper pipes. I'm not doing it. I call it very nice man to handle it.
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Chapter 5: Are traditional Hollywood executives adapting to the rise of YouTube creators?
When to call the experts and when to do it yourself. That's this week on Explain It To Me. Find new episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts.
Julia Alexander, welcome back to The Verge cast. Thank you so much for having me. I love being back on The Verge cast.
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 craze 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 Back Rooms and Obsession. And 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?
I'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 gate kept system that was traditional Hollywood and the traditional studio system who came up through that kind of creative pipeline.
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Chapter 6: What is the significance of A24's approach to working with YouTube talent?
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? I'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. Right. 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.
But 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 pipeline has not changed. It's just weirdly less of a risk for everybody now.
You can look at what A24 did with the Fulupu 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 that.
They were so great. And I remember talking to them for a story about how YouTube was demonetizing their content. They 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.
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Chapter 7: How do YouTube stars leverage their audience for success in film?
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 Kane 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. It 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... distributed 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.
OK, 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 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 not that's extremely not a new phenomenon but there's also a way to look at this that is like okay 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 and that actually there is something to this is this is just a bunch of a long-standing 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? So 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. Interesting.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of YouTube's ambition to become the future of Hollywood?
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.
That seems right. 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 $100 million reported deal. 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. Beast 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.
And 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. 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
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