Creator+, a film studio and pay-per-view app that raised $12 million in 2021 to produce movies starring digital talent, is in talks to sell various aspects of its business, from its technology to its completed films and other IP, cofounder Benjamin Grubbs confirmed to Business Insider in a statement.
The company began winding down operations at the end of last year, a source familiar with the matter told BI.
Creator+’s business launched in 2021 and aimed to produce six feature films that year that would begin airing in 2022, cofounder Jonathan Shambroom previously told BI. The company tapped digital-native talent, including TikTokers Griffin Johnson and Noah Beck, to appear in its projects.
The platform rolled out as interest in TikTokers and YouTubers was surging.
The pandemic forced social distancing and a resulting boom in watch time on social apps. The idea of bringing digital talent to streaming apps was on the rise, with platforms like Hulu and Netflix releasing reality shows about the TikTok-famous family the D’Amelios and the content group known as “Hype House” in 2021 and 2022, respectively. Entertainment startups like Brat and Amp Studios were also pushing to bring digital talent onto more screens.
Earlier attempts to launch streaming businesses around influencers had faltered, including Jason Kilar’s 2014 project Vessel and Fullscreen Media’s Netflix-style subscription service that launched in 2016.
Creator+ took a slightly different approach, offering pay-per-view video rentals through its streaming platform while licensing content to other distributors like Amazon. It planned to keep its production costs in the low seven figures, telling BI that creators are used to working on smaller budgets.
“There’s a mind-dizzying array of subscription choices out there for people today, and we saw the opportunity to do something different,” Shambroom told BI in an interview tied to the company’s 2021 launch.
Creator+ appears to have since shut down its direct-to-consumer rentals, but Grubbs told BI that feature films like the Madelaine Petsch-starring “Jane” will still be available to rent and watch through platforms including Amazon while the company pursues a sale of its assets.
“The company reviewed acquisition offers for various aspects of its business — completed films, films in development, technology, brand IP, etc. — in Q4 2023 and is expected to conclude a transaction related to these assets in Q1 2024,” Grubbs said.
The Creator+ website was down on Monday afternoon. It began working again after BI reached out for comment.
It’s been a challenging 18 months for startups across the creator economy. Some have failed to meet expectations on the stock market, while others have resorted to layoffs or shut down altogether as investor appetite dipped significantly between 2022 and 2023.
Investors and industry professionals told BI that creators are better served as a vehicle to launch a separate business in areas like e-commerce rather than as a product or customer on their own.
“I think of the creator phenomenon as a very kind of broad through line across a lot of different verticals and sectors,” Rex Woodbury, founder and managing partner at the VC firm Daybreak, told BI in January. “The venture-scale generational companies are, yes, creator companies, but they’re also typically fitting into another bucket.”
Read the full article here