When Disney, Netflix or Fox announce a new programme with a YouTuber, colleagues from traditional media write to Sean Atkins that another creator has just landed a classic Hollywood deal worth eight figures. Atkins, CEO of Dhar Mann Studios and a former MTV president, replies that they are reading the press release through the lens they grew up with. According to him, major studios are not searching YouTube for the next Taylor Sheridan to whom they would give an exclusive producing deal. “Legacy players are not combing through YouTube hoping to find the next Taylor Sheridan to hand a hundred-million-dollar overall deal to,” he wrote on LinkedIn. Hollywood can make classic projects on its own.
What studios look for in creators, Atkins describes as a joint effort to solve a structural problem. “What these creator deals more often represent is a joint effort to solve a structural breakdown in media economics,” he summarises. Budgets for an hour of premium content were built for a world of mass linear audiences. That world has disappeared, but the costs have stayed.
Production budgets never adjusted to fragmented attention
When Atkins worked in television, an hour of premium drama or unscripted programming cost seven figures per episode, and that made sense, because “twenty million people were sitting on the couch watching the exact same broadcast at 8 PM on a Tuesday.” Attention has since splintered into hundreds of narrow ecosystems. Production costs, however, never fell to match that reality. “Traditional production costs never adjusted downward to match that reality,” Atkins writes. Major studios are therefore sitting on balance sheets where the old distribution model no longer covers the fixed costs of producing large volumes of content.
Creator studios run on a different economic framework. They produce hours of original content a year, with a cost structure built for a fragmented world, and they receive audience feedback within hours of upload. “Creator studios operate on an entirely different economic framework sized to the reality of the new fragmented world,” Atkins summarises. When a major studio teams up with a creator, he says, it studies how to build story-driven content that survives in a fragmented world.
Dhar Mann signed deals with both Disney and Fox
The deals of Atkins's own studio show how this works in practice. Dhar Mann Studios, which according to an August announcement has more than 170 million followers and gathers almost 300 million views a week, signed a deal with Disney in August 2026. Disney ordered a twenty-episode series for young audiences and families. Asad Ayaz, Chief Marketing and Brand Officer of The Walt Disney Company, and Debra O'Connell, Chairman of Disney Entertainment Television, commented that “Dhar has built a distinctive voice and an enormous global following, with stories that are uniquely his own.” Dhar Mann himself said: “for me, this is so much bigger than a content deal. I grew up with Disney stories.”
Half a year earlier, in January 2026, the same studio signed a multi-year deal with Fox Entertainment and the Holywater platform for 40 scripted vertical microdramas. They will run on the My Drama app, and Fox will distribute them worldwide through Fox Entertainment Global. Dhar Mann keeps ownership and creative control over the content. Rob Wade, CEO of Fox Entertainment, called him one of the most distinctive and influential voices in entertainment today.
MrBeast took his format to Prime Video
The same logic lies behind the deal MrBeast signed with Amazon in 2024. According to reports at the time, Amazon MGM Studios paid around $100 million for the competition series Beast Games, and MrBeast kept creative control. He summed up his aim in one sentence. “My goal is to make the greatest show possible and prove YouTubers and creators can succeed on other platforms,” he said at the announcement. The first season, with a thousand contestants and a prize that eventually grew to $10 million, premiered on Prime Video in more than 240 countries on 19 December 2024. Within 25 days it had 50 million viewers, making it the most-watched unscripted show in Prime Video's history. Amazon ordered two more seasons. “Following its record-breaking first season, we are thrilled to announce that two more seasons of Beast Games are on the way,” said Vernon Sanders, head of television at Amazon MGM Studios.
European broadcasters face the same fragmentation
The pressure Atkins describes is not only American. European broadcasters face the same fragmented attention, further divided by language, currency and the regulatory frameworks of individual markets. RTL's advertising arm, RTL AdAlliance, is therefore bundling linear TV, CTV and online video into a single “total video” package with Smartclip, which the company says reaches more than 400 million viewers a month across Europe, a scale comparable to the big platforms. “Unlike the US, where advertisers can reach scale within a single market, Europe requires navigating many distinct ecosystems,” says Stephen Byrne, VP of Global Supply at RTL AdAlliance. While American studios look to creators for a new cost model, European players first piece back together the scale that their markets have fragmented.
Atkins describes the whole movement as a meeting of two operating systems that are jointly mapping what sustainable entertainment production will look like in the next generation. “These partnerships are essentially two different operating systems meeting to map out what sustainable entertainment production looks like over the next generation,” he writes. In all three deals, creators kept control over what gets made and ownership of the result. In negotiations with Hollywood, the creator therefore enters as the operator of a model that the other side came to study.
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