THE YEAR CREATORS WENT HOLLYWOOD
PART 4… BUT FIRST… A BRIEF INTERMISSION
If you’ve reached this point in the story, you might have picked up on a rather distinct tone brewing: one of cynicism.
See, rumors about MrBeast’s game show with Amazon Prime Video started swirling in January, right around the time I touched down in Los Angeles. The now-confirmed one hundred million-dollar deal threatened to upend the entire studio system.
Here was a twenty-five-year-old YouTuber based in Greenville, North Carolina, an American city pretty much as far away from Hollywood culturally, and physically, as you can get. Yet he leveraged his hundreds of millions of subscribers—and billions of eyeballs tuning in each month—to negotiate a record budget, IP ownership, and the right to distribute the show wherever he pleases in the future.
This deal became the entry point into my exploration, and a catalyst for a hypothesis I’d hear: YouTube is becoming Hollywood faster than Hollywood is becoming YouTube.
Creators, the theory went, were building their own production companies and fostering direct relationships with their audiences. By winning the attention economy game on increasingly popular platforms, it was only a matter of time before the studio heads came begging to collaborate, or else risk fading into obscurity.
Yet this thesis paints an overly simplistic picture. This time felt different because of the scale at which MrBeast does everything — but that scale is the exception, not the rule. Creators have been given opportunities in Hollywood for fifteen years now. Studios have just struggled to consistently figure out what to do with them.
For every Felicia Day, there have been many more Rhett and Links or Freddie Wongs—longtime creators who launched successful web series but never secured sustainable funding from traditional sources.
For every RackaRacka—two brothers who turned high-octane stunt videos on YouTube into a hit horror film distributed by A24—there have been many more Lilly Singhs or Casey Neistats, whose films (Doin’ It and Under the Influence, respectively) both remain unsold after noteworthy South By Southwest premieres.
YouTube (the company) even tried its hand at producing original films that starred creators, though stop me if you remember The Thinning, a 2016 Logan Paul-led vehicle that The Verge described as “such a mess” that it “doesn’t know what to make of its own premise.”
By early April, the more I unraveled this thread—the more creators I talked to and the more stones I turned over—the further away the original thesis felt.
That is, until I got a call one Friday afternoon.
The pitch is quick and to the point. Sam Denby—the creator behind Wendover Productions, an edutainment YouTube channel that has spun out several hit properties like travel competition series Jet Lag: The Game—is kicking off production for a secretive new show.
That show, The Getaway, begins filming in Las Vegas in seventy-two hours. Creator-owned streaming service Nebula, a company Sam co-founded, greenlit the project with a budget in the low six-figure range. The Nebula-exclusive premiere is set for July.
Did I want to come to Vegas and see the production up close?
Two days later, I hop on a flight and touch down in Sin City.
“We’re packing up every single day, going to all these different sites and trying to do things with the same quality you get in studios,” Sam, pictured directing the production from his team’s grip truck, tells me. / Photography by Nathan Graber-Lipperman
The next morning, Sam explains the premise of their reality competition show. Six contestants (all YouTube creators) have been dropped into a casino heist as they compete to win challenges—with a big twist.
It’s a pretty great set-up that I think viewers will enjoy. But for the purpose of my time in Vegas, I’m less interested to learn about the show itself, and more interested to hear from the folks behind the camera.
“Very, very different,” Sam says when I ask him to compare this production to a season of Jet Lag. That show mainly consists of him and his co-stars, Adam Chase and Ben Doyle, filming on iPhones and recording audio on simple lavalier mics. Post-production comprises the heaviest lift, as a high percentage of Jet Lag is visualized through motion graphics.
For The Getaway, “we have an eighteen-person crew,” Sam tells me. “We not only have Camera One, Camera Two, Camera Three, we have a grip truck and an audio [engineer]. It’s a completely different world for us. We’re packing up every single day, going to all these different sites and trying to do things with the same quality you get in studios.”
The first shoot of the day takes us to the “Neon Museum,” an eclectic spot full of retro neon signs on the outskirts of the Vegas strip. Everything from music videos to movies have been shot here (“Ice Cube is my favorite person who came by,” a representative from the museum tells me). Opening it up for a YouTube creator’s production is a first.
With a walkie-talkie in hand and an earpiece inserted, Sam bounces around the set, watching footage live in the truck and discussing shots with his director of photography, an experienced cinematographer named Valentina Vee. In Sam’s words, it’s a lot of “catching up to speed and pretending like I know what I’m doing.”
“Part of the intention of Nebula is to develop talent,” he tells me. “Nebula wants me to learn how to play the role of director and lead a big project…so that we can do more and more stuff like this.”
The phrase I hear often on set is “leveling up.” “If Step One is to build a successful YouTube channel, and Step Ten is to get a Netflix deal, where the hell are Steps Two through Nine?” Nebula CEO Dave Wiskus likes to say, referring to the current career progression for creators. “Whoever can build a bridge between what we call the ‘creator economy’ and traditional entertainment and media…that’s the winner. That’s what we’re trying to be.”
And the goal of building this talent development pipeline isn’t limited to just Sam. Adam Chase is quick to point out that the entire Wendover team—composed of roughly seven writers and producers—helped develop The Getaway. It’s most of the team’s first time on a formal set. Everything is a learning experience, from game design to hiring a stunt driver to even ensuring the catered Panera lunches arrive on time.
“The only reason for us to take on something new and something big is if it’s exciting to us,” Adam tells me. “Not to be a Nebula shill, but who else is gonna give a team that works primarily in YouTube this budget to do this concept, and have as much creative control over it as we’ve had?”
"The Getaway — Official Trailer," Nebula (June 2024)
The trailer for Wendover Productions reality competition series with Nebula, The Getaway, which starts with a heist in Las Vegas.
Is The Getaway—small crews, quick production timelines, and a built-in community of diehard Wendover fans from the jump—a glimpse into the future of Hollywood? To be honest, I’m not certain. Nebula charges five dollars a month, and claims to have over six hundred eighty-thousand paying subscribers. Still, there’s a likely scenario where all this effort (and investment) into premium, original content simply doesn’t resonate on a level that justifies its budget.
Yet what I found in the arid Vegas desert was a group of people willing to take a risk on this new infrastructure they’re laying, leading with conviction at a time when the feeling appears to be lacking around town.
Filming for The Getaway begins at the Neon Museum in Las Vegas. / Photography by Nathan Graber-Lipperman
“The future Oscar winners, Emmy winners…those future folks are on YouTube right now,” Trenton Waterson, the VP of Nebula Production, tells me. Trenton joined the company in 2022 after fifteen years working as a producer. His previous stops at Marvel Studios and Netflix lent him an up-close look at some of the most famous filmmakers in the world.
“I won’t be surprised when any of these creators are, you know, winning an Oscar in the next ten or fifteen years for the stories they’re telling,” he predicts.
