Imagine if you could dedicate 4 entire days of your life to studying that new thing everybody in your industry keeps talking about. (And that is giving you major FOMO.)
Imagine stepping away from your day-to-day work and immersing yourself in something new and exciting.
That’s exactly what I’ve been doing lately. :)
For the past month, I’ve dedicated myself to studying the convergence between Hollywood and the Creator Economy, what the industry is now calling HollyTube.
I was on a mission to decode where the Creator Economy is headed now that creators have officially taken over the mainstream and, more recently, the entertainment industry.
By now, you’ve probably heard about the ridiculously HUGE success of Backrooms and Obsession, two movies directed by creators that are forcing Hollywood executives to start watching YouTube (LOL!) in search of the next digital-native talent or IP hit.
Alongside the success of Markiplier’s Iron Lung, these aren’t isolated cases. Three YouTube creators have now launched major theatrical releases in 2026, making this convergence feel almost inevitable.
Creators have been climbing this ladder, from single viral posts to formats and IP, for a while now. Probably not by choice, but because they needed to survive crowded feeds, the organic reach recession, build ownership and create something that lasts and compounds over time.
And that was exactly the topic of the immersion I hosted in Los Angeles last month: HollyTube!
I put a hand-picked group of selected creators, operators and executives into a Waymo and took them through 50 straight hours of visits and conversations with people from TikTok, Netflix, Hollywood, some of the largest YouTube channels in the world, talent companies, producers and founders building at the center of this shift.
For years, Hollywood and the Creator Economy operated with completely different playbooks. One was built around gatekeepers, large budgets and top-down decision making. The other was built around audiences, experimentation and direct feedback loops.
That’s what our group went after. We went to those meetings looking for the patterns, trying to decode the playbooks, to read into the tensions, to notice the recurring ideas across the room.
Right now, I’m gonna share the 3 biggest drivers for this convergence so you can get a little taste of what we learned, because a few big reports are coming in the following weeks: one with the most relevant signals, evidences and implications for the industry, one with the models and playbooks that are surfacing right now, and one with a deep dive into the most amazing cases studies.
The full reports are still being written. For now, I want to share three ideas that kept showing up across conversations:
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