If you’ve never heard of “Skibidi Toilet,” just ask anyone under 25 in your immediate surroundings. If they’re not around: it’s a viral computer-animated YouTube video, originally created by Georgian filmmaker Alexey Gerasimov (aka DaFuq!?Boom!) which has now spawned an entire series. The video features a humanoid head popping out of a toilet and singing a goofy song (the “Skibidi Toilet Song,” of course), while being filmed by CCTV cameras.
It’s weird and befuddling, even a bit off-putting, in the style of content produced for tweens desperate for entertainment that will irritate their parents. But it’s also wildly popular online, with 76 total installments to date, each with 30-50 million views or more. So naturally, “Bad Boys” and “The Rock” legend Michael Bay hopes to turn it into a film and TV franchise.
This is unsurprising. Latching on to popular social trends, repackaging them, and commodifying them is what Hollywood studios do. Once it’s well established that the public likes something – a character, a story, a real person, an idea, anything really – the entertainment industry grabs the rights to it, slaps their brand names in front of it, and distributes it back out to the masses, after taking the lion’s share of the revenue off the top. Then maybe throwing the creators an occasional scrap, to avoid lawsuits. This is the business model, fueling everything from Marvel Studios series to streaming adaptations of airport novels to reality shows featuring TikTok stars.
Obviously, adapting some kinds of intellectual property into film and TV-ready content is easier than others. Animated films featuring sentient Barbie dolls have long been a hit on video and streaming platforms for years, but it took decades before the creative team of Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach, and Margot Robbie unlocked how to make a live-action film work.
When it comes to adapting viral internet culture, mainstream Hollywood has struggled in the past, even when its own content sparked the initial trend. In 2005, screenwriter Josh Friedman wrote a blog post in which he discussed a script that was making its way around Hollywood, called “Snakes on a Plane.” The ridiculous-sounding title grabbed the internet’s attention, and when it was revealed that the film was actually in production, and was to star Samuel L. Jackson, it became a full-on internet sensation. The Guardian writer Mark Brown called it “the most internet-hyped film of all time.”
While studio New Line Cinema was going to tone down the project’s B-movie leanings – including a proposed title change from “Snakes on a Plane” to “Pacific Air Flight 121” – the internet hype shifted their plans, and pushed them to lean into the chaotic zaniness. New, more violent sequences were shot. The film was pushed from a PG-13 rating up to an R, and Jackson was even given a new catchphrase – “I’ve had it with these motherf**king snakes on this motherf**king plane” – to bring everything more in line with the audience’s now sky-high expectations.
But it was all for naught. While industry insiders had predicted “Snakes on a Plane” would open to a $20-$30 million weekend at the US box office, it only hit $15.25 million, and then fell to sixth place in Week 2. New Line founder Robert K. Shaye ultimately declared the film a dud.
We’ve seen this pattern repeat itself over and over again in the nearly 20 years since “Snakes on a Plane” debuted. In 2022, after social media users made jokes about Sony’s “Morbius” – a financially unsuccessful attempt to expand a franchise of Spider-Man villain characters – the studio actually re-released the movie in over 1,000 theaters, hoping to capitalize on all the attention. But it grossed just $289 per screen that weekend.
The messaging here couldn’t be more clear. Just because people enjoy watching or discussing something online doesn’t mean they’ll spend $15-$20 or more on a movie ticket. Additionally, trying too hard to capitalize on internet popularity or viral fame can give a studio or a larger brand a negative reputation.
Sony’s next Spider-Verse live-action release, 2024’s “Madame Web,” was instantly earning social media comparisons to “Morbius” based solely on its title and trailer. The film went massively viral before its opening. But nonetheless debuted at the lowest box office ever for any Sony Spider-Man movie.
Obviously, there are major exceptions to this rule. 2023’s “Five Nights at Freddy’s” movie was one of last year’s biggest hits, and seemed to genuinely please and delight fans of the iconic video game franchise. The film even managed to bake in sly references to the fan community and YouTuber cameos without seeming desperate to please or try hard.
Some of this obviously comes down to authenticity. “Hazbin Hotel” started out as a YouTube pilot before becoming a well-liked Amazon Prime Video original series, but it was produced and developed by the same creator, Vivienne Medrano.
“Five Nights at Freddy’s,” the film, was produced with a deep understanding of the games, and clearly came from a place of love and affection for the franchise. It was a celebration of the internet community that grew up around them, not an attempt to remove them from their original context or recontextualize them for a wider, mainstream audience.
“Snakes on a Plane” was just some screenplay, to which internet users attached their own individual meanings and significance. “Five Nights at Freddy’s” originated online; Hollywood filmmakers were simply reworking its core ideas cinematically.
But “Five Nights at Freddy’s” is also a relatively natural fit for the cinema. The games are bizarre and surprisingly straightforward in terms of gameplay, but they’re rooted in a narrative that’s already clearly inspired by horror movies. A night watchman at a Chuck E. Cheese-esque pizza restaurant must face off against the uncanny animatronic band members, who magically come to homicidal life.
It’s not impossibly difficult to imagine how you could turn that story into a movie. In fact, years before a licensed “Five Nights at Freddy’s” film was released, Nicolas Cage starred in a different movie with essentially the same concept: 2021’s “Willy’s Wonderland.”
It’s not quite as simple to envision how “Skibidi Toilet” works in the context of a movie. The creative team behind 2025’s big-budget “Minecraft” film faces a similar challenge. How to make the experience feel somehow relevant and connected to its original inspiration, while also doing the conventional everyday things a movie or TV show must do. But this is the core challenge. Fail to truly fuse that connection and you get Paramount+’s “Halo,” a costly and lavishly produced boondoggle that was rejected by the franchise’s hardcore fan base, but too bewildering and “inside baseball” to attract newcomers. It was canceled after two seasons, but with a “Game of Thrones”-esque cost of $10 million per episode.
There’s one more aspect to the “Skibidi Toilet” project that’s worth discussing. Bay has partnered on the project with Adam Goodman, the former president of Paramount Pictures, through their collaborative independent studio Invisible Narratives. The company already had a pre-standing licensing deal with Gerasimov, selling Skibidi Toilet movie merch and spinoff projects.
Two interesting things to note about Goodman and Bay’s approach here. Rather than simply paying off the “Skibidi Toilet” creator and then bringing in a more experienced creative team to develop a show or film franchise, Taylor Lorenz over at The Washington Post suggests that they’re working closely with Gerasimov on spinoff ideas. At least in theory, this should give the project that much-needed sense of authenticity. This isn’t just some dumb adults doing their own take on “Skibidi Toilet.” It’s the original creator expanding his vision, a “success story” that his early fans can feel like they were a part of and witnessed first-hand. That’s precisely how you extend an internet brand into different media while bringing original fans along.
Additionally, Goodman and Bay are taking a more forward-looking view toward copyright with their licensed brands. Rather than shutting down everyday internet users making their own “Skibidi Toilet” content, Invisible Narratives encourages fans to play around in their sandbox. The Roblox platform features dozens of “Skibidi Toilet” inspired games and environments, some with tens of millions of fans of their own. Rather than watering down or threatening the strength of the original IP, this kind of open and free-wheeling environment makes the franchise far easier to evangelize and promote. The fans are doing the hard work on Bay and Goodman’s behalf.
So despite the complexity of basing an entire franchise around a fight between CCTV cameras and singing toilet heads, there seems to be at least some hope for this project’s future. At least, more than “Madame Web” ever had.
