For the last decade, the comedy duo Smosh — Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla — have captivated a horde of teenagers with a steady stream of short and silly videos posted to YouTube.
Next month they will make the leap to feature length with Smosh: The Movie. A buddy comedy with an absurdist streak and sly jokes about the cyberworld they inhabit, it will test whether an audience that scarfs down those quick bites has the appetite for a 90-minute film — especially when the full meal costs US$9.99 to download.
“A lot of people think our generation can’t watch anything past the six-minute mark,” Hecox said. “But that’s just not true.”
Photo: AP
Plenty of Hollywood players, dazzled by Internet stars’ DIY industriousness and intense connection with an audience of millions, agree. Two other movies featuring popular digital personalities are opening the same week. In Bad Night, the YouTube stars Lauren Elizabeth Luthringshausen and Jenn McAllister play high school students mistaken for art thieves after wandering off from a field trip. And the supernatural film The Chosen features the YouTube and Vine comedian Kian Lawley as a teenager forced to battle his demon-possessed niece.
By year’s end, at least a dozen more movies featuring Internet stars are expected to be released online and in a smattering of theaters.
‘DIGITAL STARS’
“Are we going to wake up next summer and see a bunch of tent-pole features that are in 4,000 theaters starring a digital star instead of Brad Pitt? No,” said Brent Weinstein, a partner at the United Talent Agency and the head of its digital media division. But we are “going to see a lot more of these digital stars finding real, meaningful and meaty opportunities,” not only in made-for-digital films but also in traditional ones. “It’s undeniable,” he said.
But that onslaught comes with plenty of risks.
More so than any previous generation of stars, these actors have a strikingly intimate connection with their audiences. They understand what their fans expect from them and deliver it, in many cases on a daily basis, on YouTube and social media outlets like Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Snapchat and more. Deviate too much from the persona the fans have come to love, choose one too many cheesy projects, allow more traditional pursuits to interrupt their social media presence, and that relationship could tear apart.
Movie stardom was never an overarching desire for the Smosh duo. Best friends growing up in suburban Sacramento, California, the two started out by playing around with a Web cam belonging to Padilla’s father. They wanted to do what plenty of other teenage boys like to do — make themselves, and their friends, laugh. So they shot a video of themselves in Padilla’s bedroom lip-syncing to the theme song from Power Rangers, complete with herky-jerky dance moves and the brandishing of toy swords.
“It was basically out of boredom — sheer boredom,” said Hecox, who like Padilla is 27.
They uploaded the video to their Myspace page, and encouraged by the reaction, filmed others. When a stranger posted their take on Mortal Kombat to a new site called YouTube in 2005, their lip-syncing oeuvre went viral and a business was born.
GOING VIRAL
Ten years later, Smosh’s YouTube network includes a cartoon channel, a gaming site and even a Spanish-language version — the main channel has 20.6 million subscribers and the network, over 35.3 million — and Smosh has released successful albums and a mobile gaming app. But the decision to venture into moviedom came only recently, requiring both the right idea and a maturing digital landscape.
The plot: On the eve of their five-year high school reunion, Padilla discovers an embarrassing video of himself that could ruin his chances with a high school crush. He convinces Hecox that the only solution is to get YouTube to take down the video. Antics and many cameos of YouTube stars ensue.
In the view of the duo and the movie’s producers, the film stays true to the characters the two have played in videos for nearly a decade. “Who better to make a movie about YouTube infamy and then subsequent fame?” said Barry Blumberg, chief content officer of Defy Media, which owns Smosh and is producing the movie with AwesomenessTV.
Also bolstering the producers’ confidence in the prospects of the Smosh movie is the reception for last year’s digital films Camp Takota and Expelled.
In the early years of Web video, the few movie projects that slapped together a concept with emerging digital stars typically led to middling results. (Witness “Ryan & Sean’s Not So Excellent Adventure” from 2008.) But Grace Helbig, Hannah Hart and Mamrie Hart of Camp Takota, fixtures in one another’s YouTube videos and real-life friends, and Cameron Dallas of Expelled, whose six-second bursts of comedy are followed by 7.7 million people on the video-sharing service Vine, proved that a younger generation would pay US$9.99 to download such movies.
In Camp Takota, Helbig, 29, who recently finished filming her first season of a talk show for E!, plays an aspiring publishing executive who after one particularly terrible day decides to become a counselor at the summer camp of her youth. There she is reunited with former friends played by Mamrie Hart and Hannah Hart (who are not related).
STRONG INVESTMENT
In Expelled, Dallas, 20, is a troublemaking teenager who enlists his friends in desperate attempts to keep the news of his expulsion from his parents.
Unlike box-office numbers, revenue figures for movies released digitally are not public. But the movies, each with budgets under US$1 million, have proved profitable, according to their backers and stars.
Mamrie Hart, 31, a co-writer of Camp Takota, said the investment was recouped in four days. As for Expelled, the movie landed in Rentrak’s Top 20 list of digital downloads and rentals for three weeks running after its release last December.
“Put it this way: It did well enough that I’ll be making six movies this year, and I’m not asking anybody’s permission,” said Brian Robbins, chief executive of AwesomenessTV.
In Hollywood, the gold rush then began in earnest, even though the revenue for any of those movies has yet to reach the US$10 million mark, according to industry executives.
Among those making the leap was GRB Entertainment, which has spent nearly three decades primarily making reality TV shows like Intervention. Yet Gary Benz, the company’s president and chief executive, said that revenue from downloads wasn’t the only thing pushing him into films. Camp Takota did a brisk business in T-shirts, posters and friendship bracelets. And the stars themselves were doing a lot of the promoting, which keeps marketing costs to a minimum. “I just said, ‘You know what, I want in,’” Benz said.
The result is Bad Night. In a nifty bit of reverse engineering, GRB Entertainment first lined up Luthringshausen and McAllister (JennXPenn), who came with 3 million YouTube subscribers between them. Then it hired writers and directors and worked on the concept with input from the two digital stars, who are now roommates in Los Angeles. As part of the deal, they have made a commitment to exhaustively market the film to their mainly young female fans.
The film will have a theatrical premiere, complete with red carpet, at the Arclight Hollywood cinema on July 21, and will be available the same day on Vimeo On Demand for US$9.99.
GRB has already begun working on its second film with digital stars, a sci-fi story, and plans to have three or four more in production next year. Full Screen, a digital multichannel network, has three movies on its slate, including The Outfield, which pairs Dallas of Expelled with Nash Grier, whose Vine account has 11.8 million followers. And Hollywood’s bigger players, including Walt Disney (which paid US$500 million last year for the online video company Maker Studios), Sony, Fox, Relativity, Legendary and Lakeshore all have projects in the works, according to agents and executives fielding pitches from them. The budgets are getting bigger, too, in some cases rising to as much as US$2 million.
Along with this groundswell of enthusiasm there is trepidation.
“There are 50,000 YouTube channels, and we can count on our hands the number of YouTubers that we believe who can successfully do a movie and have a fan base that would actually come to buy it,” said Ken Treusch, a partner in Bleecker Street Entertainment and the manager for Helbig and other Internet personalities.
All of these stars continue to feed their sites with videos on a regular basis.
The Smosh guys, no matter how swamped, post a video every Friday. And even if Smosh: The Movie leads to traditional film offers, they don’t plan to forsake what made them famous in the first place.
“We would never leave YouTube to go full time into movies or TV,” Hecox said. “It’s just our space.”
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