YouTube is taking over Hollywood
6/11/202634 min
Movies directed by YouTubers are suddenly blowing up at the box office. Backrooms and Obsession are both smash hits, and The Amazing Digital Circus had a big debut last week. Is this the moment YouTube truly takes over Hollywood? Julia Alexander, media correspondent at Puck, walks us through the much longer history of YouTube on the big screen, and helps us figure out where this all goes next. Is the future just really, really big YouTube videos? Further reading: Backrooms is at the forefront of horror’s YouTube wave Iron Lung’s path to theaters was unique, even if the movie isn’t YouTube is everything and everything is YouTube Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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First 90 secondsDavid Pierce· Host0:00
[rock music] Welcome to "The Vergecast," the flagship podcast of overall deals. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show, we're gonna 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 in new 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. 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 the sort of most internetty 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? 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 gonna come on the show and talk about all of that and lots more. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today.