Creators are crashing through Hollywood, but there’s a ceiling

Creators aren’t replacing Hollywood stars, but they are leveraging their brands and views to get Hollywood-style representation, or build new production pipelines around IP with a built-in audience. That’s enticing for both struggling studios and advertisers looking for safer bets. 

But there is still a ceiling on how far most creators can climb. One creator and four creator agency reps who spoke with Digiday said big Hollywood creator deals need to be sustainable, IP needs to be scalable, and genres should be clearly defined. Though capital is flowing, slop could slip in. And creators hoping to get snatched up by a talent agency thanks to their TikToks or their IP bought for a cool few million won’t all be successful.

It’s undeniable, however, that Hollywood is paying more attention (and money) to creators. 

Leanne Perice, founder and CEO of management firm Made By All, calls the space “Creator Hollywood.” She’s worked towards pulling mega creators into Hollywood for years and is now incubating projects at the company’s in-house studio, Made By Us. 

She points to co-CEO Tanya Cohen, and her recent exit from management company Range Media Partners, as a clear sign that things have shifted. 

“Creators have become the top of the pile, we are number one,” said Ed Simpson, CEO of the newly launched Wonderloom Media, a digital-first, creator economy platform started with massive IP owner and investment firm, Content Partners. “We are the incumbent, and from there it shifts down. Three years ago was a different story, but now this is where innovation happens.”

Simpson credits the rise in creator TV as the major accelerant for this creator-led Hollywood push, and creators’ ability to iterate faster and far cheaper than Tinseltown productions (on average one-and-a-half to two years, according to Backstage), which have remained stagnant in the years after the strike, as the reason they’ve taken center stage in an industry plagued by production costs.

“On YouTube, quality is innovative – what’s amusing, what’s quick, what’s funny – you can figure that out rapidly at a much lower cost,” Simpson said. “This isn’t the same as regular TV, it’s actually better because it’s designed to hook in viewers by a process of iteration and elimination. It’s almost Darwinism, at its best. It’s content survival at its best.”

That survivability and scalability is why Wonderloom acquired true-crime YouTuber Dr. Insanity, with plans to further scale his 5-million-strong subscriber channel and build the studio into a creator-led Warner Bros. or Paramount.

The model hinges on treating social content as the top of the funnel. “Everything that used to be top of the funnel and used to be incumbent has become areas where additional revenue can be made,” Simpson said. “We can take content from YouTube and funnel it out and put it on streaming or linear, but that’s secondary to YouTube or social media.”

Alponse Lordo, partner at Content Partners Capital, told Digiday the company’s role is to help creators monetize the content they own over a long period of time, and that they’re setting the stage for others to follow suit. 

“This is a first-mover transaction in many ways…we’re library buyers and we’re seeing library value,” Lordo said. 

Buying up billion-view YouTube libraries can give creators more cash and creates more structured inventory for media buyers – especially after the platform’s recent update gave creators tools to swap out baked-in ads to re-negotiate deals. 

“In many ways, Alphonse and I are the bridge to Hollywood,” Simpson said. 

They’re not the only bridge. Talent agencies like UTA and CAA are increasingly signing creators, while more boutique spots are building rosters that straddle social media and the big screen. Those who spoke with Digiday said they look for creators with built-in audiences around a specific and obvious niche, who can create high-quality content with relative ease, and who have carved out space for themselves and their communities. They stressed that each deal is unique and requires close collaboration. 

“I’ve worked with a lot of smaller agencies that are all building that arm, repping both creator and entertainment rosters,” said Jo Wong, chief revenue officer at agentic AI creator commerce platform POP.STORE. “That’s going to grow even more in the next few years.”

Creators like Bransen Gates hope that their online virality can translate to representation that secures acting roles. Gates, who has 24.5 million likes on TikTok and over 817,000 followers on Instagram, went viral for his videos in which he lip syncs to timely audio, like the spoken word part of a Chappell Roan song, or a particularly unhinged Donald Trump speech. 

“I always planned to use it as a stepping stone. I’ve been an actor for most of my life, and once I saw that this was kind of the direction that people were taking to get into show business, that’s why I started doing it,” Gates told Digiday. He recently signed with a talent agency and got a publicist, but declined to provide details. 

“Hopefully, in the next year I will be a series regular on something,” he said. It’s not a far stretch: creators like Addison Rae, Caleb Hearon, Charlie D’Amelio and Liza Koshy have all broken into Hollywood by way of content creation. 

Creator Hollywood is its own beast

Though creators are colliding more and more with Hollywood, massive blockbusters like Obsession, the $25 million investments in Skibidi Toilet, and Hearon’s cameo alongside Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada 2 are not the norm.

“The Odyssey is what you and I would consider top-tier Hollywood, right? Christopher Nolan is never gonna hire a chick-flick horror guy creator, let’s be very candid,” Wong said. 

Instead, Wong and others believe creators can corner the market in specific genres and on specific platforms – and many of them already have.

“Horror has been an obvious entry point because it’s relatively inexpensive and audiences are willing to embrace emerging talent, but the next wave will likely be comedy, unscripted competition, sports, documentaries, family entertainment, and creator-led franchises that can expand across film, television, gaming, live events, and consumer products,” said Jonathan Chanti. 

Comedy is a major focus for Perice’s Made By Us, who recognizes that creators each have different skill sets in the space.

“Because my clients dominate viewership in the entertainment and comedy verticals, our next move is to come out with a whole slate of comedy films that we produce, finance, build the infrastructure around, and allow our clients to start in or potentially direct,” she said.

Recognizing a creator’s strength and ensuring the content produced fits that can help avoid oversaturating the market with low-quality long-form content.

“It’s about identifying content that in the immediate term resonates as much on platform as well as it does off platform. That means our Venn Diagram is much more limited to areas that work off platform as well, so that’s food, travel, true crime,” Simpson said of Wonderloom. 

And though Hollywood has a vested interest in creators’ unique, owned IP, Wong told Digiday creators shouldn’t expect massive deals like Skibidi Toilet to become the norm.

“If you look at Mr. Beast, he clearly owns the IP for his Beast Games, right? But when I look at the creator world, only the top 1% of creators can do that – even Addison Rae doesn’t own the IP for her show, it’s in partnership with Netflix because she still needs the distribution,” Wong said. “The only people who truly own IP will be massively huge.”

Instead, she believes smaller asset buys (newsletter acquisitions, library purchases) that include creators’ communities will become the norm in the next few years. 

With so many creators crashing into Hollywood, Chanti warned of the dangers of oversaturation and what that can do to content quality.

“One thing the market isn’t fully recognizing yet is that there’s currently a lot of steak being created with very little sizzle. The industry is rushing to greenlight creator projects because of the audience attached to the talent, but many of those projects won’t have staying power,” he said. 

For Chanti, that content could generate an initial spike in views because of the creator’s built-in audience, but could taper off because the quality just isn’t up to snuff. 

“I think we’re about to see a race to the bottom before we see the next generation of breakout creator entertainment. That’s a natural part of any emerging industry. Everyone is experimenting, capital is flowing, and studios are trying to figure out what works. We’re still in the first inning,” Chanti said. “The creators who ultimately win will be those who evolve from content creators into world builders, partnering with experienced writers, producers, and showrunners to create entertainment that resonates beyond their existing audience.”