Creator Dhar Mann on Partnering With Hollywood Studios and His Vision for Creator City in Los Angeles — SkimNews
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- Dhar Mann outlined plans for Creator City, a four-acre Los Angeles campus with nine sound stages, ~175 sets, and capacity for 15 concurrent productions, set for a 'rather grand' opening during Super Bowl week
- Dhar Mann Studios now produces five half-hours of scripted content per week, compressing the script-to-screen timeline to as little as 7 days for an hour of digital content (21 days for longer episodes)
- Mann announced 'Unlikely Families,' a new Samsung TV Plus original scripted series launching in the coming months, following 'Unlikely Romances,' which debuted on the platform in June
- Mann detailed distribution partnerships reaching Samsung TV Plus (100M+ households, where he's the first original creator), Disney+ (135M subscribers), and Fox (40 vertical dramas in development)
- Dhar Mann Studios has diversified revenue from 95% YouTube/Facebook dependence 2.5 years ago to under 40% today, projected at ~30% next year, per CEO Sean Atkins' efforts
- Creator City will feature real branded sets (Starbucks, Target) as founding partners rather than unbranded generic sets, framing brands as 'a part of' storytelling rather than interruptions to it
- Mann committed to launching one new series every month on his YouTube channel starting in December, bypassing the legacy pilot-and-order model in favor of 'throw as many darts on the wall and see which one sticks'
Why it matters: Mann's nine-stage Creator City and script-to-screen turnaround of 7 days shows creator-led studios are now operating at legacy-studio scale and speed while undercutting their economics — Disney+, Samsung, and Fox are paying him not for what they do, but for what he does, as he noted.
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