“I don’t think that there’s ever been anything that we’ve been involved with that mirrors the growth of this,” said Adam Goodman, CEO and founder of Invisible Narratives and former president of Paramount Pictures, in an interview with the Post. Goodman has overseen films such as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, and shows including SpongeBob SquarePants. “I think YouTube is one of the greatest breeding grounds of new IP. It’s a business as significant financially as everything we’ve seen in the traditional entertainment business. It’s just a little different.”
Skibidi Toilet initially came onto Invisible Narratives’ radar after Bay became enthralled with Gerasimov’s YouTube channel. When Skibidi Toilet took off on the platform last year, Invisible Narratives struck a deal to build out the business through licensing and partnerships.
Skibidi Toilet is popular, especially with Gen Alpha, children born after the year 2010. Skibidi Toilet-themed toys will soon hit the shelves of every major retailer, thanks to a deal the company struck with Bonkers Toys. The National Electrical Contractors Association has been contracted to produce a line of Skibidi Toilet drones and RV vehicles. And licensing agreements aimed at expanding the brand into products such as Skibidi Toilet bedding, apparel, plush toys, and more have been inked, according to the company.
“I’ve never seen a digital property that has generated this much interest,” said Will Hanisch, head of brand development at Invisible Narratives.
“We have built a team of execs and creative people who have worked on some of the biggest Hollywood franchises in the world,” said Goodman. “All of us are taking [Skibidi Toilet] just as seriously and treating it with the same amount of reverence as any of the big, billion-dollar franchises that we have been lucky enough to work with.”
While Skibidi’s initial success was born out of an organic fandom on YouTube, Invisible Narratives has built a sprawling marketing engine around the franchise to constantly reach new audiences. The company partnered with popular video games, including Minecraft, to integrate Skibidi Toilet skins and characters into the game. And, some of the most popular games on Roblox, an online gaming platform, are Skibidi Toilet-themed, earning a collective revenue of tens of millions of dollars a year. “Much of our audience has discovered Skibidi because they’re coming to us from YouTube,” Goodman said, “but a whole other massive audience is discovering Skibidi through Roblox.”
At any given point in time there are somewhere between 80,000 to 225,000 concurrent users playing Skibidi Toilet-themed games in Roblox, said Joseph Jurbala, a partner at Bloxology, a licensing agency that manages the Skibidi Toilet gaming business in partnership with Invisible Narratives. The two largest Skibidi Toilet games on Roblox average about 20 million monthly users.
Invisible Narratives also allows dozens of YouTube channels to produce their own fan-driven Skibidi Toilet content. Unlike traditional entertainment companies, which exercise a tightly controlled grip over their intellectual property online and usually crack down on unapproved usage, Invisible Narratives encourages fans to create their own Skibidi Toilet content to boost the brand.
“We made a decision that’s counter to everything we know as traditional entertainment executives,” said Goodman. “I worked at Paramount at a time when Viacom was in a lawsuit with YouTube [over IP]. We’re doing the opposite … we made an early decision to say, these channels can be really additive in building out the popularity of this.”
As the popularity of the franchise has risen, a film and TV show is also in the works.
Goodman said he and the team at Invisible Narratives view Gerasimov, also known as Boom, as a film-making prodigy and hope to develop his talent. “Michael Bay and Boom spend a lot of time together talking about process, collaboration, iteration, and we’re exposing Boom to some artists who have worked on some of the biggest franchises in the world,” he said.
While some might be tempted to write off Skibidi Toilet as a viral meme or short-lived phenomenon, Goodman said he believes the series has the potential to become the next major entertainment franchise.
“My business partner is Michael Bay and I ran Paramount and DreamWorks,” Goodman said. “Years ago we bought the rights to the film franchise for Transformers, and everyone thought it was a dumb idea. They were like, ‘you can’t make a movie about a toy from the 80s, what’s next, a movie about Legos?’” The Lego movies went on to gross more than a billion dollars collectively at the box office, while the collective Transformers movies grossed a total of more than US$3 billion ($5b).
“When friends of mine first see this, they look at it and they kind of give me this look like, good luck, I hope this works for you,” said Goodman. “This is as real as any franchise that we’ve ever been involved with.”
In an age where everything in Hollywood feels like a reboot or is centred on decades-old IP, Skibidi Toilet feels fresh, online culture experts said.
“It has spread nationally in schools and on playgrounds. Kids are showing up wearing Skibidi Toilet shirts,” said Ben De Almeida, a YouTuber with more than 7.5 million subscribers. Matthew Patrick, former host of the Game Theorists YouTube channel, which analyses games and online culture, called Skibidi Toilet an “epic action movie”.
“It’s a series and a story, not just a meme or funny video people are sharing,” Sophie Browning, a 21-year-old content creator in Minnesota explained.
Goodman said this has allowed young people to feel a sense of ownership over the franchise. “They get to create their own sense of nostalgia for it,” he said. “They’re not inheriting it from their grandparents, or being told, oh, you’re going to love Twister because I saw it back in the 90s when I was in high school. They discovered [Skibidi Toilet], it’s theirs.”
Goodman said that, at the end of the day, good entertainment is good entertainment. “It’s still storytelling. It’s still character development, it’s still jokes and action and drama and intrigue. It’s just a different delivery mechanism.
“There’s so much opportunity for people in Hollywood to jump into this space.”
