Tomorrow, a movie called Backrooms opens in theaters nationwide. It's an A24 horror film starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, produced by James Wan and Shawn Levy, with a 30,000-square-foot practical set built to replicate an infinite labyrinth of eerie, fluorescent-lit hallways.
It was created by a 20-year-old who made the original on his laptop using free 3D software.
Kane Parsons was 16 when he uploaded a nine-minute found-footage short to YouTube in January 2022 based on a creepypasta internet meme. It's been viewed nearly 190 million times. Four years later, he's directing a feature film for one of the most prestigious studios in independent cinema.
This is not just a fun origin story. It's a signal — one of many — that the IP pipeline has fundamentally inverted. And most of the industry hasn't fully reckoned with what that means.
The Old Model: Top Down
For the better part of a century, intellectual property flowed in one direction. Studios and publishers originated it. They hired writers, developed concepts, greenlit projects, and then spent enormous sums hoping an audience would show up. The IP started at the top of the funnel and worked its way down to consumers.
This model had a certain brutal logic to it. When creating content was expensive and distribution was gatekept, the institutions with capital and access got to decide what stories existed. Everyone else was audience.
The entire infrastructure of the entertainment industry — agents, managers, development executives, option agreements, pilot seasons, packaging — was built to serve this top-down flow. It's an elaborate system designed to answer one question: which ideas, out of the thousands pitched, should we spend millions of dollars bringing to life?
And the honest answer, most of the time, was: we're guessing.
The New Model: Bottom Up
Here's what's different now. The best new IP increasingly doesn't originate in development rooms. It comes from creators on platforms — and it arrives pre-validated with real audience data.
Backrooms is the most cinematic example, but it's far from the only one. Solo Leveling started as a Korean web novel, became a webtoon with 14.3 billion cumulative views worldwide, got an anime adaptation that swept nine categories at the 2025 Crunchyroll Anime Awards including Anime of the Year, and is now getting a Netflix live-action series starring one of Korea's biggest actors. Naver WEBTOON's LINE Manga service announced a project to produce 20 webtoons as anime adaptations in a single year. Tower of God went from a webtoon to a Crunchyroll original. The list keeps growing.
And it's not just comics and webtoons. Subway Takes started as a guy interviewing strangers on the New York subway and is now a show. Chicken Shop Date went from YouTube to the Oscars red carpet. Creators are building audiences in the millions on platforms that didn't exist a decade ago, and every one of those audiences represents a proof point that traditional development could never provide.
This is the inversion: IP now starts at the bottom — with a creator and an audience — and works its way up to production. The audience shows up first. The investment comes second. The guessing gets replaced by data.
The Gap in the Middle
So far, so good. But here's the problem: the system for turning bottom-up IP into produced content is still designed for the old top-down model.
Kane Parsons uploaded his Backrooms video in 2022. The A24 deal was announced in early 2023. The film wrapped production in August 2025. It releases in May 2026. That's four years from viral moment to theater. And this is a success story — Parsons had A24, James Wan, and Shawn Levy behind him. Imagine the timeline for a creator who doesn't catch lightning in a bottle quite so dramatically.
The traditional path from "creator with proven audience" to "produced adaptation" still runs through the same bottlenecks it always has. Agents. Option agreements. Development cycles. Pilot seasons. Studio politics. A creator can have millions of readers or viewers and still face a multi-year slog through infrastructure that was built for a completely different era.
This is the gap. The bottom-up IP model produces thousands of properties with proven audiences every year. The top-down production system can process dozens of them. The mismatch is enormous, and it's widening.
Distribution Is Solved. Production Isn't.
Here's the thing that makes this moment different from five years ago: the distribution side of the equation is largely figured out.
TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Spotify — these platforms are already there, already hungry, already monetizing vertical and serialized content at massive scale. Netflix just launched Clips, its vertical video feed. Disney+ rolled out Verts. Paramount+ and Peacock have their own short-form feeds. Amazon is in the mix. The places where adapted content can live and reach audiences are multiplying faster than anyone can track.
The gap isn't distribution. The gap is production.
The ability to take a piece of creator-originated IP with a proven audience and actually produce it into high-quality video — voice acting, animation, sound design, cinematic polish — at a cost structure and speed that makes sense for the volume of IP that exists. That's the bottleneck. Not "where does it go?" but "who makes it?"
The Production Spectrum
And this is where it gets nuanced, because not every piece of IP needs the same treatment.
On one end of the spectrum, you have creators who can now self-produce and distribute through existing platforms. The tools are better and cheaper than ever. A creator with a great comic and some animation skills can put something on YouTube or TikTok tomorrow and start building an audience. Some of those creators will get picked up — the way Kane Parsons did, the way Chicken Shop Date did — and land deals with bigger players. That path is real, and it's more accessible than it's ever been.
But there's a massive middle tier that self-production can't reach. IP that deserves professional voice acting, not a creator doing all the voices into a USB mic. Stories that need real sound design and cinematic pacing to land emotionally. Content that has to feel produced — polished enough to sit on a platform next to Netflix originals or in a vertical feed alongside professionally made micro-dramas — but that can't justify the cost or timeline of a traditional studio production.
That middle tier is where the real opportunity lives. Not tentpole blockbusters. Not DIY creator content. The space in between — professional-quality production at cost structures and timelines that are orders of magnitude more efficient than the traditional system.
Some platforms are already building this bridge internally. WEBTOON is a good example. Its LINE Manga service announced an initiative to produce 20 webtoons as anime adaptations — the big-swing version of in-house adaptation, taking top-performing IP and moving it straight into production. But the more telling move is quieter: WEBTOON has started running produced video episodes inside its own app, right next to the source comics, where the audience already is. Take a webtoon with a proven readership, produce it into video with voice, animation, and sound, and distribute it natively to the exact people who already love it. That's the entire thesis of this piece compressed into a single product decision — pre-validated IP, professionally produced, distributed where the audience lives.
Those in-app video episodes are produced by StoryCo. We built our company around precisely this gap — the middle tier between DIY creator content and traditional studio production — because we believe it's where the next decade of storytelling gets made. Working with a platform like WEBTOON to bring its IP to life as video, at a cadence and cost structure that actually matches the volume of great content sitting in the catalog, is a glimpse of what the new pipeline looks like.
But the opportunity is much bigger than any one platform. The fundamental question is: what does a production model look like that's designed from the ground up for bottom-up IP? One that's fast — months, not years. Efficient — viable for mid-tier IP, not just guaranteed hits. Flexible across formats — vertical video, motion comics, animated series, audio — because different IP lends itself to different treatments. And repeatable — not a one-off miracle, but a system that can process volume.
That model is the missing infrastructure of the creator economy.
The Clock Is Ticking
Here's why this matters right now, not in five years. The volume of creator-originated IP is accelerating. Every day, more stories are being published on more platforms to more audiences in more languages. The proof points are piling up faster than the production system can absorb them.
The distribution ecosystem is ready and waiting. Platforms are competing for content to fill their vertical feeds, their audio libraries, their serialized programming slates. The audience behavior is trained. The monetization models work.
What's missing is the production layer that can match the speed and volume of the creator economy on one side with the appetite of the distribution platforms on the other. Whoever builds that layer — efficiently, at quality, at scale — isn't just going to build a business. They're going to define how the next generation of stories reaches the world.
The pipeline flipped. The distribution is there. The question is who builds the production engine for what comes next.