What creators need from Hollywood
My conversation with Dhar Mann at the biggest Creator Camp in history. Inside the new power dynamic between creators and legacy studios.
“I got you a 10-minute interview with Dhar Mann tomorrow.
Does that work for you?”
I was about to drop the pen on a Friday afternoon when I saw this message in my inbox. It was from Adobe, a partner with whom I’ve been experimenting a lot with AI and editing tools.
WOW, ADOBE, HECK YEAH I WANT TO INTERVIEW THE MAN! <3
For those of you who don’t know him:
Dhar Mann is one of the most vertically integrated creator founders I know. Really, he is more than just a YouTuber (which is already a lot). He is truly a studio founder.
He runs a 125k sqft production campus in California, produces episodic narrative content at TV scale to a combined audience of 115 million across platforms. He is the NFL’s Chief of Kindness (because he is!). And he recently closed an exclusive partnership with Samsung to produce 13 original, scripted episodes for a dedicated channel on the FAST and another deal to produce 40 microdramas to Fox (while retaining creative leverage!) <<< we talk about this a lot in the interview!
I was already scheduled to attend “Dhar x Adobe’s Creator Training Camp”, the event alone looked amazing: for the first time, he was opening his Hollywood campus and transforming his 75+ working sets into the world’s biggest creator training camp.
ALL FOR FREE!
For a whole day, 250 selected creators had the chance to learn from and collab with 20 of the top creators in the US! There were talks and panels, free food, drinks and candy, cool and fun sets and props to use, creators to shoot with and Adobe integrated seamlessly into the whole workflow.
But I wasn’t there just to absorb the vibe.
I had 10 minutes with Dhar and a lot of questions that had been sitting in my head for months.
Ted Sarandos just said everything is TV now. Instagram built a TV app. Netflix, Disney and Fox are chasing creators. YouTube episodes are 22 minutes long, the exact runtime of a TV show.
So what does that mean for Dhar and the whole Creator Economy?
Let’s hear it from the man:
If everything is TV, are creators the networks?
“Creators don’t necessarily think about a device first”, he told me.
They don’t think if they are making a video for a phone or a TV, they just think about how to make the best content possible and build a community that is excited about the next video.
Despite jumping in the short vertical video frenzy, as time went by, Youtube started prioritizing longer form content. He says that eight years ago the content length threshold sat at eight minutes. Now it has shifted to around 22 minutes!
That push naturally forced creators “to think of story lines with longer arcs, trying to retain audiences for long periods of time”.
If you think of the Fox deal, it’s important not only because it’s the first of its kind, but because what he’s actually producing here is not 40 shorts, it’s actually 40 films!
“Fox came in and they truly saw the vision... a lot of folks were offering to do like five films or so. Fox came in and said, “What if we did 40?“, said Dhar.
For those who don’t know what that means, lemme break it down for you: the usual microdrama is like a full 2 hour feature film, broken down in 60-80 episodes, each one of them having strong hooks and cliffhangers that will make the audience watch to the end (or past the paywall, hopefully).
There’s no creator out there who could produce at that scale. But there aren’t many legacy media companies who could either.
What’s the difference between a creator and a studio at this point?
Why Hollywood No Longer Controls Creators?
There is a very VERY important power shift happening right now in the convergence of Hollywood and the Creator Economy.
Viewers have already moved. They’re watching creators now, and traditional platforms are just catching up to that reality. Right now, “folks like Netflix and Fox and Amazon and all these big giants actually have mandates within their companies to go and try to strike deals with as many creators as possible”, said Dhar.
For the first time, creators have options. And when you don’t desperately need the check, you negotiate from a very different seat at the table.
In his deal with Fox, that he credits Sean Atkins (his CEO) for, they walked into a room a lot of creators would be afraid of and walked out still owning his content.
“When big networks try to control the creative, then that makes the creative suffer.”, Dhar Mann
Last year I heard AdamW (who was also there, btw) saying that he doesn’t need Netflix because he is his own Netflix:
“Why would I take my audience to Netflix or Hulu? I already have the audience here. Why can’t I make a $5 million movie, post it on my own channel, own all the content, and license it later?” AdamW.
And earlier this year we saw how youtuber Markiplier bypassed traditional studios and created a 3 million dollar indie movie, Iron Lung, that became a box-office phenomenon, making almost 50 million dollars as per today. Youtubers want to be seen as peers.
Right now, it feels like Hollywood needs creators more than creators need Hollywood.
What does a creator actually need from Hollywood?
If you listen to Dhar…
First, culture.
There’s something very human in the way he talks about platform deals. He grew up watching Disney. Now he has three daughters and Disney shapes their world too. “The idea of doing something with them would be so exciting,” he told me. Legacy platforms still carry emotional and cultural weight.
Then there’s distribution.
After his deal with Samsung TV, he realized he could reach audiences that aren’t even on YouTube. So that means new screens, demographics and distribution layers.
And then scale.
“As a creator, sure, you can have a lot of success. But it’s also risky,” he said. When a platform funds a project, “they can do it on a bigger level than you might be able to do on your own.”
Creators aren’t selling out to Hollywood. They’re walking in, taking what’s useful - distribution, funding, cultural weight - and walking back out with their IP intact. Hollywood, on the other hand, unlocks the audience its been chasing for years and that was just sitting in a creator’s comments section.
How do you actually produce at this scale without breaking?
And then there’s the operational layer I really wanted to talk to him about. The man is a machine!
He produces 5 hours of original, scripted content every week PLUS 40 microdramas with Fox and 13 with Samsung PLUS running a 125k sqft campus PLUS feeding multiple platforms PLUS maintaining YouTube consistency…
So of course I had to ask him about AI.
Dhar has been using Adobe tools since the beginning of his creator journey. But now, AI is quietly changing how a studio like his operates by smoothing the friction.
He gave me a very practical example. They once missed an important shot during production. In the past, that could mean reshoots, extra cost, delay. Now? “With Adobe Firefly, we can just use generative AI to create that shot,” he said.
But he’s also very clear about where AI stops. “Anytime we’ve tried to rely on it too much, our audience is very quick to call it out,” he said. AI can make the machine faster, but it doesn’t make the story matter.
“It’s the emotional connection and that human connection that matters more than ever", he told me.
And looking around at 250 creators spending a full day learning, shooting and building together inside his campus, it was hard to argue with that.
You can’t generate that with a prompt.
I had the best day.
Thanks, Adobe and Dhar, for having me.