As Hollywood studios chase creator culture, ownership gets complicated

• Media
• Marketing
• Media Buying
• Future of TV

• Special Projects
• Digiday+ Research
• WTF Series
• Newsletters

As Hollywood studios chase creator culture, ownership gets complicated

After the runaway success of creator-led films this year, Hollywood is hungry for creators and is looking to gobble up more and more of their IP.

But the Backrooms and A24 copyright show there could be some bumps ahead. Acquiring IP that has been planted, cultivated, and propagated online calls into question the nature of its ownership. As Hollywood spends millions on IP like the Skibidi Toilet memes and the analog horror franchise, The Mandela Catalogue, expect this question to be asked a lot in the coming years.

Backrooms, which at the time of writing has earned nearly $390 million globally, is based off a meme of the same name that was built and disseminated on the the internet. Its director, Kane Parsons, started publishing a web series based on the concept back in 2022, though its origins lie in a 2019 4chan thread from an anonymous poster – a creepypasta, or short, user-generated horror story meant to be iterated upon and shared around platforms.

Last month a Reddit user posted that his Backrooms-inspired artwork received a takedown request on online marketplace Redbubble. The request was reportedly on behalf of A24 Films LLC. Parsons replied to the post, saying it “should not be happening” and that he was looking into it. Shortly after, A24 released a statement, saying it “makes no claim of ownership over the yellow wallpaper, the original post referencing it, or any of the community works that have since been built around it.”

As The Wrap reports, no one owns the rights to Backrooms as a concept.

Skibidi Toilet is different. It’s owned by Invisible Narratives, a studio built to turn creator IP into franchises. The company raised $25 million to develop Skibidi Toilet TV and film projects, but before it could cash in, it had to fight for the IP itself. Invisible Narratives just prevailed in a year-plus legal battle against Dubai-based Next Level Apps Technology.

The fight started in February 2025 when Invisible Narratives sued Next Level for falsely claiming copyright infringement on Skibidi Toilet. Last week, the two sides settled. Along the way, Next Level had tried registering the Skibidi Toilet copyright in multiple jurisdictions — pressure that got the series temporarily pulled from YouTube last year.

“Protecting our core IP rights is what gives us the freedom to be genuinely collaborative with creators and their communities everywhere else — that partnership is what makes these franchises work,” a spokesperson from Invisible Narratives told Digiday in an email.

Agency execs think this will keep happening since much of Hollywood doesn’t fully understand the creator content phenomenon.

“Unlike traditional box-office sensations like Marvel or Harry Potter, creator-led entertainment is stemming from broader internet culture and ideas versus original characters and settings that can be tied to a specific originator,” said Julia Pascual, senior social and influencer strategist at AntiSocial. “There is often not a singular creator behind it all. It becomes a collective effort…When a larger entertainment entity wants to claim ownership over an idea that took the effort of many, that’s where a community will have something to say about it.”

Creator-led IP has something Hollywood’s usual model doesn’t: a long tail, built by a steady drip of content and reinvention from smaller creators. Hollywood, still used to treating IP as precious and untouchable, doesn’t always know how to handle that, which can end up throttling the very thing that made the IP work. Sometimes that means staking a copyright claim over something that started on a forum. Sometimes it means exerting narrative control tight enough to alienate the fans who built the thing in the first place.

“That openness is the risk,” said Maggie Reznikoff, chief client officer at Open Influence. “Smaller creators producing offshoots can keep a world culturally active, deepen the lore and introduce new audiences. They can also create confusion around canon, quality and commercial rights.”

For Reznikoff, the “winners” in this creator IP race will be the ones who can establish clear ownership and licensing structures without closing the ecosystem that created the demand in the first place.

With massive blockbusters based off of legacy IP like Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu and Supergirl massively underperforming this year, creator IP could start to compete with the likes of Star Wars, DC, and Marvel – just not with the same studio controlled franchise model.

“The larger shift is that the next major franchise may begin as a shared internet language rather than a studio pitch,” Reznikoff said. “Studios will need to learn how to steward those worlds without sanitizing or over-controlling them.”

Dan Levitt, svp of original content at The Team, told Digiday there’s definitely a feeding frenzy as Hollywood rushes to snatch up creator IP in the wake of successful films like Obsession and Backrooms. But there’s a catch.

“Each of them succeeded for different reasons, and they’re being lumped together,” he said. “But [people] aren’t really understanding why it worked or if there’s a community around it. I’m interested to see which things work and which don’t…fundamentally if you don’t understand the community you’re buying into and what motivates them and what they don’t like, you risk making a very problematic mistake.”

He referenced the Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise, owned entirely by its creator, Scott Cawthon. “That’s, I’d imagine, a billion dollar franchise…you got one guy that controls that. He’s not going to be the last,” Levitt said.

Still, the trend is clearly moving toward acquisition. Expect more friction between studios and creators as both sides try to scale these brands without losing what made them work in the first place.

Levitt also notes that some creators don’t even need IP acquisition or distribution help – there’s no set formula. He points to Iron Lung, a film creator Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach wrote, started in, directed, and self-released in January of this year, earning $51 million worldwide on a $3 million budget.

“Mark did it on his own, his way, knocking down doors. There’s no right way to do it. Obviously Obsession doesn’t get anywhere as big if it’s not with Focus and Blumhouse,” he said. “It’s about finding the balance – how do we take something, keep the essence of it, and cater to the community without damaging it?”

More in Media

WTF is a stealth crawler?

As AI bot traffic surges, lawmakers are cracking down on stealth crawlers, which scrape publisher content while masking who they are.

How a fitness creator built her own global wellness platform

Gabby George leveraged her social media success into a subscription-based fitness platform to diversify revenue.

Time has started serving ads to AI agents

Time is selling ads targeting AI bots, betting that markdown pages will make its content (and advertisers) more visible in AI search.