YouTube Finally Breaks Through to Hollywood

Plus: Anthropic files S-1, Jensen gives keynote at Computex, Bernie proposes government takeover of AI companies

Jun 01, 2026

Happy Monday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business is the breakout success of YouTuber-directed horror films Obsession and Backrooms.

Today’s lineup

Notion Special Projects Adam Iscoe at 12:00 PM
Saris Founder & CEO Danial Jameel at 12:30 PM
Gigascale Capital Founding Partner Mike Schroepfer at 12:40 PM
Default Co-Founder & CEO Nico Ferreyra at 12:55 PM
Brilliant Co-Founder & CEO Sue Khim at 1:05 PM

Run of Show

YouTube Finally Breaks Through to Hollywood

This feels extremely long overdue, but 2026 has really become the year that Hollywood and YouTube finally found a way to work together in perfect harmony. Hollywood has faced so many challenges over the past few decades. Piracy, better TV shows, streaming, COVID, strikes, competition from other production markets, and many more. Throughout all of that, there was a silver lining of the creator economy growing to fill the gaps. Sure, the number of traditional Hollywood shoot days (and jobs) were in decline, but the number of people making a living in front of or behind a camera was growing overall thanks to the broader content boom. This was always unsatisfying to cinephiles though, TikToks just don’t have the staying power of a cultural moment like Titanic.

The Oscars will officially be streamed on YouTube in 2029, and by then, the trend that really broke out in 2026 will be even more undeniable. Just look at the stats:

Kane Parsons’ Backrooms opened to roughly $81.5 million in North America and $118 million worldwide on a reported $10 million budget.
Curry Barker’s Obsession kept climbing in its third weekend and hit $104.7 million domestic, becoming Focus Features’ highest-grossing domestic release, from a movie widely reported to have cost around $1 million.
Markiplier’s Iron Lung had a reported $3 million production budget and opened to about $18.2 million domestically, before ultimately grossing ~$41.1 million domestic / $51.2 million worldwide.

It’s easy to point to these as “YouTuber with a big audience converts to theatrical sales” but it’s not that clean. Ryan’s World the Movie: Titan Universe Adventure, grossed only $624k on a $10M budget, despite Ryan’s World being an enormous children’s YouTube brand. Smosh: The Movie and Lazer Team from Rooster Teeth were both earlier attempts to cross the YouTube to Hollywood gap that both fell short of expectations.

What’s different about Backrooms, Obsession, and Iron Lung is that the filmmakers had shown the type of creativity and risk-taking that underlies so many Hollywood successes. These creators aren’t just big influencers with millions of casual fans. They do have big audiences, but they also stand above their peers in terms of artistic vision. Curry Barker had a YouTube sketch channel called That’s a Bad Idea where he learned how to quickly and effectively write, act, and edit for a tight audience feedback loop. Backrooms has a similar story, Kane Parsons, known as Kane Pixels, produced his original series, The Backrooms, in Blender and After Effects. The internet myth laid a bit of the groundwork, but he was able to take it in his own direction with lore he built up over several videos. Markiplier did have an objectively huge audience, but still went “full-stack” when producing Iron Lung. He even talked about building a server rack in his bathroom to render VFX shots on a faster turnaround.

Being able to create something engaging for social media virality is probably somewhat important to creating a film that works in theaters, but the bigger value is being a “full stack” filmmaker. Gone are the days of showing up to Hollywood with a manuscript and expecting a studio to do the rest for you. The traditionally segmented teams on productions are simply too expensive to be deployed on anything but existing IP. New projects will come from filmmakers who have experience and a view for every part of the filmmaking process.

Up next, we have two similar projects potentially in the works. One is from Wesley Wang, who went viral for a non-horror YouTube short film called “nothing, except everything.” TriStar picked it up with Darren Aronofsky’s Protozoa producing and Wang set to adapt it as writer-director. Then there’s also the much sillier, but extremely viral Skibidi Toilet. Created by Alexey Gerasimov in 2023, the project reportedly has Michael Bay involved, but there are some IP issues to work through since the series was produced in Source Filmmaker and uses assets from Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source pretty liberally. There will undoubtedly be other unpredictable breakouts in the coming years, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Hollywood executives combing through obscure YouTube playlists for new gems. — John

Bernie Sanders says the government should take half of the “big AI companies”

In an op-ed in the NYT today, Bernie announced that he will be introducing the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would create an American sovereign wealth fund by ‘taxing’ OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI for 50% of their stock. “The federal government would have the power, through its voting shares and an equal representation on each company’s board, to block decisions that hurt our citizens and to push for policies that help them.” The fund would provide direct payments to Americans as it grows. Read the op-ed here. — Brandon

Jensen gives Computex 2026 keynote

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made several announcements during his keynote speech at Computex, Taiwan’s annual technology expo. He introduced the Nvidia RTX Spark Superchip, an ARM-based chip for PCs designed to process AI workloads locally; he announced that the enterprise Vera Rubin CPU is now in full production; and he announced several foundation models — a world model, an open-weight flagship AI model, and a model specifically designed for humanoid robots.

A lot of the attention from the keynote is going to the RTX Spark, which is being viewed as Microsoft’s attempt to create its own ‘Apple silicon moment’. And Microsoft coordinated its announcement of its new Surface Laptop Ultra, which will be optimized for RTX Spark, and will be released this fall.

Watch a cutdown of Jensen’s keynote here. —Brandon

Clip Spotlight: Brad Gerstner says he’s working on an initiative to pay communities who host data centers

Friday on TBPN, Altimeter Capital founder and man behind Trump Accounts Brad Gerstner said he's working with the White House and all the major AI players on an initiative that "would deliver a very tangible and profound dividend" to the communities where they're building data centers.