The most consequential shift in the creator economy is not that YouTubers and TikTokers are being cast in movies. It is that they are financing, producing, and directing them. A generation of creators who taught themselves to write, shoot, edit, and distribute content for online audiences has discovered that those are, essentially, the skills of a studio. Increasingly, they are not waiting to be hired by Hollywood. They are building companies that Hollywood must reckon with — and, in some cases, that Hollywood is paying handsomely to partner with.
This is the deeper story of the social-to-screen migration: the move from talent in front of the camera to ownership behind it.
Issa Rae: The Web Series That Became an Empire
No single career better illustrates the arc from scrappy online creator to industry power broker than Issa Rae’s. In February 2011, Rae premiered The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl on YouTube — a low-budget web series shot for almost nothing. When she needed money to finish the first season, she turned to Kickstarter, and in August 2011 the campaign raised $56,269 from 1,960 backers. The show became a viral phenomenon, won a Shorty Award, and landed Rae on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list. Its second season found an unlikely home on Pharrell Williams’ i am OTHER platform.
The web series was the seed. In 2016, its DNA was adapted into Insecure, the HBO comedy Rae co-created and starred in, which ran until 2021 and became a critical landmark. But Rae’s real transformation was into a producer and mogul. She built a production operation — anchored by her company Hoorae and its labels — designed to develop talent and content on her own terms. The industry responded by writing enormous checks: as Variety reported, in 2021 Rae signed a five-year overall deal with WarnerMedia described as an eight-figure film and television arrangement. She later inked a first-look producing deal at Paramount, per The Hollywood Reporter. A woman who once raised $56,000 from strangers to finish a YouTube season now sits inside the studio system as a producer with her own slate. Her career is the template.
The Try Guys: Walking Out to Own the House
For years, the Try Guys — Keith Habersberger, Ned Fulmer, Zach Kornfeld, and Eugene Lee Yang — were among BuzzFeed’s most popular on-camera talent, their videos drawing hundreds of millions of views. Then, in June 2018, they did what an earlier generation of media talent rarely could: they left. As The Hollywood Reporter and Tubefilter reported, the four departed BuzzFeed to launch their own production company, 2nd Try LLC.
The move was a declaration of a new economic logic. Rather than generating value for a media company as employees, the Try Guys chose to own their content, their audience relationship, and their upside. They built an independent media business — producing their own shows, merchandise, and ventures — on the foundation of an audience they had cultivated. It was a recognition that in the creator economy, the talent and the studio can be the same people.
MrBeast: Production at Blockbuster Scale
If Issa Rae represents the artistic crossover and the Try Guys the entrepreneurial one, Jimmy Donaldson — MrBeast — represents sheer industrial scale. Donaldson turned an obsessive mastery of YouTube into one of the most-watched channels on Earth, then aimed that production apparatus at traditional media.
The result was Beast Games, which premiered on Amazon Prime Video in December 2024. The show was staged at a scale that dwarfed most conventional productions: it featured 1,000 contestants competing for a prize pool that made headlines, was built around a purpose-constructed set, and, according to Guinness World Records, broke more than 40 records during its production. Widely reported budget figures placed the show around $100 million, and Donaldson himself acknowledged that he lost “tens of millions of dollars” on it — a candid admission of the financial risk involved in operating at that scale. Amazon’s verdict on the gamble was decisive: as Variety, Deadline, and Amazon confirmed, in May 2025 Prime Video renewed Beast Games for two additional seasons.
What makes MrBeast significant is not just the spectacle but the corporate architecture beneath it. Donaldson operates a sprawling production and business enterprise, and Beast Games demonstrated that a creator-run operation could deliver a tentpole unscripted series that a major streamer would bet on repeatedly. The YouTuber did not audition for television; he brought his own studio to it.
Dhar Mann: Building a Studio on Morality Tales
Dhar Mann took a different route to the same destination. After an earlier career as an entrepreneur, Mann built Dhar Mann Studios around short, scripted, morality-driven videos — parables with clear lessons, produced at a relentless pace. What began as social content grew into a full production operation with a physical studio, a large staff, and a content machine generating billions of views across platforms.
Estimates of Mann’s wealth and his company’s revenue circulate widely across outlets and should be treated with caution, as such figures are often unverified and vary considerably. What is not in dispute is the model: Mann built a vertically integrated content studio — writing, casting, filming, and distributing at industrial volume — funded by the enormous advertising and audience value of his own channels. He is a producer in the most literal sense, running a company whose product is scripted video made for a digital-first audience.
Smosh: The Original YouTubers, Bought and Bought Back
Smosh is a piece of internet history — one of the earliest YouTube comedy sensations, founded by Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox in the mid-2000s. Its journey through the media business maps the entire evolution of the creator economy. The brand was eventually acquired by Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal’s Mythical Entertainment, a deal The Hollywood Reporter reported at around $10 million. Then, in June 2023, in a moment that captured the maturation of creator ownership, Variety reported that Padilla and Hecox reunited to buy Smosh back from Mythical, returning the brand to its original founders.
The Smosh saga shows creators operating as principals in genuine M&A activity — buying, selling, and reacquiring media brands. Mythical itself, built by Rhett and Link on the back of their Good Mythical Morning daily show, is a creator-founded production company substantial enough to acquire other creator brands. These are not performers hoping to be discovered; they are executives moving assets.
Cole Bennett and the Music-Video Auteur Pipeline
Cole Bennett built Lyrical Lemonade from a blog and YouTube channel into one of the most influential forces in hip-hop visuals. As a director, Bennett developed a distinctive, hyper-kinetic style that helped launch and define the careers of a wave of young rappers, turning the music video — a form many had written off — into a career-making, viewership-driving art form. Bennett’s rise represents the creator-as-director pipeline: someone who learned filmmaking by making content, built an audience and a brand around it, and expanded outward into larger film and entertainment ambitions. Lyrical Lemonade grew from a personal channel into a media company, festival organizer, and production house.
The Lonely Island: The Original Blueprint
Before “creator economy” was a phrase, the Lonely Island — Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone — proved the model. The trio built a following by making comedy videos and posting them online, which led to their arrival at Saturday Night Live, where their SNL Digital Shorts (including the viral “Lazy Sunday” and “Dick in a Box”) essentially invented the modern viral comedy short for a mass audience.
Crucially, they parlayed that into ownership behind the camera. They made feature films including Hot Rod and the music-industry satire Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016). And through their production entity, they moved into producing work beyond their own performances — most notably the acclaimed time-loop romantic comedy Palm Springs (2020), which Schaffer’s collaborators produced and which became a festival sensation and a hit for Hulu and Neon. The Lonely Island’s trajectory — from self-made online videos to a production company greenlighting other filmmakers’ work — was the prototype that today’s creators are scaling up.
Emma Chamberlain, A24, and the Taste-Maker Economy
Emma Chamberlain represents the newest evolution: the creator as brand-builder and cultural curator rather than traditional filmmaker. Chamberlain rose as a YouTube vlogger whose casual, jump-cut editing style influenced an entire generation of creators. Rather than chasing acting roles, she diversified into business and media, most prominently with Chamberlain Coffee — a company whose valuation and revenue have been the subject of considerable reporting, with figures such as a roughly $33 million business widely cited by outlets including profiles of her ventures, though such valuations should be read as reported estimates. She also built a podcast, Anything Goes, into a significant media property, and notably stepped back from the grind of daily YouTube to focus on these ventures.
Chamberlain’s model matters because of what it signals about creators and prestige media. The independent studio A24 has become emblematic of the crossover between internet-native cultural cachet and film-industry credibility, courting and collaborating with a generation of talent whose sensibility was formed online. Creators like Chamberlain hold something studios covet: taste, a direct audience relationship, and cultural authority. The next phase of the creator-to-Hollywood story may be less about creators learning to make movies and more about film companies partnering with creators to borrow their audiences and their instincts.
Conclusion: From Talent to Ownership
The through-line connecting Issa Rae’s Kickstarter, the Try Guys’ exit from BuzzFeed, MrBeast’s $100 million reality show, Smosh’s reacquisition, and the Lonely Island’s production slate is ownership. These creators grasped, earlier than the industry expected, that the skills of digital content-making are the skills of production, and that the audience they built was an asset to be leveraged, not merely rented to a studio. Hollywood is no longer just casting creators. It is signing overall deals with them, renewing their series, and partnering with their companies. The camera that once pointed at them is now, increasingly, one they own.
