If you've ever seen a film made by a popular YouTuber
like the Fred movie, F*&% the Prom, Not Cool, or the Smosh movie
Well, first of all, I'm very sorry, and I hope we can all collectively heal.
But secondly, there's a trend here.
Pretty much every time a popular YouTuber releases a feature-length movie, it's extremely bad.
Except Agents of Secret Stuff, which is a cinematic masterpiece.
Sometimes the main reason is simple. It's because it's a long-form version of a channel that's already bad.
The Fred movie is inherently terrible because Fred is inherently terrible.
But some of these YouTubers have managed in the past to make pretty good content,
and yet none of them seem capable of making a movie that's, you know ... good.
I watched a bunch of these really bad movies
and started to wonder about the common threads connecting all of them.
So in this video, I'm hoping to answer a simple question:
Why are movies made by YouTubers so universally terrible?
Well, let's take a look.
One of the main reasons that these films are so frequently awful is that during production,
they have to deal with a lot of the disadvantages associated with small indie films -
low budget, fewer people working to ensure quality, a lack of name recognition -
without the benefits of, say, people who are genuinely passionate about making a good movie.
What do I mean by this?
Well, films made by YouTubers are an interesting category.
These are pretty well known people over the Internet.
I mean, Smosh has 23 million subscribers. To their audience, they're household names
to the same extent that people like Anna Kendrick or Ryan Gosling are.
But the majority of people who watch and enjoy Shane Dawson, Fred, the Fine Bros, or Smosh,
are young teenagers who don't have the same buying power or real world influence
that an adult fanbase would.
This means that, despite how much money they're making and how many VidCon tickets they're selling,
their internet fame isn't necessarily going to translate into Hollywood social capital
in the same way that a non-Internet celebrity would.
Which means that, although you do sometimes see YouTubers cast in big Hollywood pictures,
what's almost more common is for them to just make their own.
But, by and large, these films are not made by large production companies.
The Smosh movie was made by Smosh Productions, Not Cool was made by The Chair,
and the Fred movie was made by, uh, Derf Films, which I'm not entirely convinced exists.
Isn't that the made-up number between 5 and 6 from iCarly?
"Now, the biggest news is that they've created a new number.
A new number?
Yep, between 5 and 6! It's called derf."
So unlike big film companies like Marvel or DreamWorks,
Youtubers are going to have a much smaller group of people working on their films
and thus less room for quality control.
That means that these films are unlikely to have the budget or large dedicated teams
that films made by big studios are going to have.
But that doesn't inherently mean that they have to suck, right?
There are a lot of indie films made by small creators that turn out to be excellent.
Little Miss Sunshine was an indie film, The Blair Witch Project was an indie film,
um, more recently, The Death of Stalin is an indie film.
Being made by a small group of people doesn't make something inherently bad.
So what gives? Well, Internet fame is a very finicky thing.
Internet memes can die out almost as soon as they're created,
and a lot of production companies are often rightfully afraid that a certain character or creator
is going to lose their memetic potential if you wait long enough.
Sure, the kid who pitches his voice high and screams a lot is funny now,
but is he going to be funny in two years?
As a result, YouTubers are often under a pretty intense time crunch
to get their movies out as soon as possible, regardless of their quality.
For example, the Fred film was conceived of, created, and finished in the span of ten months,
which is not normal.
"We did it fast. From my very first meeting with the production company
to the movie coming out was like 10 months. That's so fast.
It was done very quickly. They wrote the script in like a night."
It's not impossible to do something very quickly and have it be good,
but realistically speaking, if your main goal is to get a movie done as quickly as humanly possible
and everything else comes second, it's probably going to suck.
Like, if you're a screenwriter who has to write a script for one of these things in one night
with no one to quality check it, of course it's gonna come up with a ton of plot inconsistencies.
And since your bottom line is teenage fans who just want to see their idol on screen for an hour and a half,
why would you be asked to care?
Hence, why the vast majority of these movies just don't make sense. At times, they're barely coherent.
For instance, the Fred movie keeps trying to have two contradicting messages at once.
They're trying to push that the main character shouldn't care about popularity
and should just be friends with the weird kids,
and then they reward him at the end by having him date the mean, popular girl after having her finally notice him.
If it looks like no one looked over the script before filming began,
it's because no one did and no one cared to.
The combination of a small number of people working on these films and an incredibly rushed schedule
means that you get neither the level of passion that you get from a lot of indie creators
or the level of quality control that you'd expect from a big production company.
As a result, you get these awkward rushed cash grabs that are just not good.
If you look at a lot of films made by YouTubers, you'll notice that,
despite the fact that the creators are almost all in their late 20s and early 30s,
an overwhelming majority of these movies are set in high school.
This is pretty much to be expected,
given that a lot of these YouTubers' main demographics are young teenagers.
That's what's going to be most relatable to their main audience,
and thus what's going to net them the most money.
And, let's be real, as nice as it is to imagine that all of these YouTubers make movies
because they just had these passionate stories inside them that they felt just had to be told,
they want to make money. Of course, that's in no way exclusive to YouTubers.
That's the experience of the vast majority of people who make movies, and you can't fault anyone for that.
I love all the care and detail put into, say, Ratatouille, but ultimately it exists to make money for Pixar.
That is fine. But like I mentioned earlier, unlike these other films, these ones are not good.
One theme that tends to pop up in almost every single high school film made by a YouTuber
is the theme of popularity.
You've got F*&% the Prom which is about a group of unpopular students
trying to sabotage prom for the popular kids,
the Fred trilogy which deals with the recurring theme of our titular character
trying to date the most popular girl in school,
and Not Cool where a character who used to be bullied falls for a former high school popular kid.
Unfortunately, it seems like none of the people who made these movies
have the foggiest idea of what popularity is actually like at high schools
which means you get these very bizarre, out-of-touch films that seem like they were made by an alien.
F*&% the Prom is a particularly notable offender here. Their concept of what popularity entails
literally involves an entire cafeteria applauding when the popular crowd walks in
and, sure, it's exaggerating on purpose, but even what they're exaggerating makes no sense.
Similarly, the popular crowd and the student body in general
is heavily focused on smartphones and social media.
There's nothing inherently wrong with that. These things are a big part of our lives, but look at how it's handled.
"I never done that before.
Wait, you're a selfie virgin?
A surgeon?!"
Surgeon!
It's cringy and awkward and out-of-place and most importantly it's hard to connect to.
See, the problem with shitty, over-the-top teen comedies about popularity hierarchies,
especially when they're done by YouTubers in their 30s onwards with a very young skewing fanbase,
is that they're basing their representations of high school off of their own experiences 15, 25 years ago.
Or, if they were homeschooled, like the Fine Bros who made F*&% the Prom,
then they're basing it off of movies from the 80s and 90s that they might have watched in their childhoods,
which are in turn based on the high school experiences of the people who made them, and so on and so forth.
It's like "high school experience" telephone.
But, like, none of these are set in the 90s because, at the same time,
they want to appeal to the young people who watch their content and seem contemporary,
but they tend to assume that the only thing separating the generations' experiences is a technological divide,
rather than any socio-cultural shift, hence the heavy focus on smartphones.
It is, apparently, the only thing that needs updating since the 90s, and it's relied on heavily.
They're assuming that the only fundamental change in high school social structures since the 90s
is the advent of social media, so they'll reference livestreams and emojis as much as possible
while keeping everything else the same.
As a result, you'll get this jarring combination of characters snapchatting
while doing things like pantsing dweebs.
Obviously that's not to say this never happens, but it's decidedly less common than it was in the 90s,
to the point where it's definitely not a ubiquitous school experience.
So using it as a fundamental pillar of your observational comedy doesn't work,
because it's not a particularly good or accurate observation.
It's amusingly dated at best, and woefully out of touch at worst.
In my experience, a lot of people nowadays who are getting the most Instagram likes
and being elected prom queen or whatever
are not the people who go around insulting everyone in the school hallway and pouring their drinks on people.
Not to mention, nerd shit like being good at math or liking D&D or superhero movies
is becoming increasingly mainstream.
I mean, one of the main traits from one of the geek characters in F*&% the Prom
is just referencing Game of Thrones a lot, which is like the most mainstream thing you could possibly like.
Not to mention, in the increasingly competitive environment we're now living in,
there is even more of a need to be academically successful and involved in extracurriculars
to get into any kind of post-secondary program.
That's not to say every popular person is good at school. Far from it, but it's certainly not ridiculed today
to the extent that it would have been 20 years ago.
There might be exceptions, but there's definitely been an observational trend in the past few years
towards favoring people who are nice and helpful.
This isn't even a particularly new observation. 21 Jump Street satirized this cultural shift 7 years ago.
"We try to ride bikes when we can. Global crisis and whatnot.
Whatever man, I don't care about anything.
Oh, you don't care about the environment?
That's kind of fucked up."
Movies like F*&% the Prom that are set today
but try to recreate social structures from the 90s, just with smart phones,
aren't even on the new end of being outdated.
That shit was stale in 2010.
Simply adding mentions of Instagram to an outdated observation about how nerds are treated
doesn't update it.
Rather, it makes your film look silly and out-of-touch
and, as much as I dislike Parmount's Heathers for taking it too far in the opposite direction -
no, skinny cheerleaders are not largely bullied for being skinny cheerleaders -
at least it was an attempt at something new.
It failed horribly at that something, but the painful way in which characters in F*&% the Prom
deliver lines like, "You're a selfie virgin? A surgeon?"
is emblematic of a very specific kind of out-of-touchness
that's common to movies created by washed-up Internet celebrities.
But hold on, a lot of movie executives that make coming-of-age films are also decades out of high school,
and they seem to do a fine job of representing it.
What is it about aging Internet celebrities, and YouTube celebrities in particular,
that makes their film seem so out of touch?
Well, part of it is that most of the interactions that these people have are based around their online lives.
If they're not talking to people online or filming a new YouTube video or whatever,
they're going to VidCon to meet up with fans of their Internet personality,
or endorsing brands based on their Internet personality, or hanging out with other YouTubers.
That's not to say it's impossible to be a YouTube celebrity and have a healthy offline life,
but for people like Shane Dawson who document their lives so extremely,
it's pretty impossible to separate the YouTube part of their lives from the rest of it.
This means two things.
First of all, they're already a lot more divorced from most people's everyday offline experiences
than literally anyone who is not a YouTube celebrity.
That's why every Lele Pons skit set in a high school is so dizzyingly incoherent.
And secondly, as it pertains to making literally anything that is not a YouTube video,
well...
A lot of YouTubers who make movies like Shane Dawson, Smosh, and Fred are YouTube comedians -
well, "comedians" - who specialize in short comedic skits.
What this means is that these movies are made by people
who are used to creating videos that are shorter than 15 minutes,
and are usually based around one or two jokes.
And on YouTube, there's nothing wrong with that, if that's what works for them.
Unfortunately, because many of these people have years of experience with that style of video
and no experience with anything more long-form,
their attempts to make a longer video often seem disjointed,
almost as if a bunch of shorter videos were cobbled together.
This is further exacerbated by the fact that they obviously need to appeal to their fans
and, well, those shorter videos are how they got popular.
They know it's what fans like
and so it makes sense that they're gonna want to stick to a familiar format as much as possible.
But what works in one medium doesn't necessarily work in another, and this is a great example of why.
The Smosh movie is a particularly notable offender here.
The movie centers around Ian and Anthony entering the internet and cycling through a bunch of YouTube videos,
and, really, it's nothing more than a jumble of shorts tenuously connected by some semblance of a plot.
There's no real overarching theme holding the whole thing together,
and I think that's because the creators don't really know how to do that.
The individual scenes aren't actually that bad as standalones, but as a movie, it doesn't work.
Another symptom of these people's over-reliance on the YouTube format is their choice of actor in these movies.
It's another example of something that works well on YouTube, but doesn't translate well to film.
See, even when YouTubers themselves are starring in their own movies,
a lot of these films seem to rely disproportionately on the presence of other famous people,
and because of what we talked about earlier with YouTube's social capital
not necessarily translating to Hollywood social capital,
these famous people tend to be other YouTubers.
The Smosh movie is particularly bad about this.
Virtually every other character is a famous YouTuber.
Even in F*&% the Prom, which doesn't star its creators, they still got Lily Singh to make a cameo,
and, to put it as tactfully as possible, these people aren't actors.
A lot of these people, like Lily Singh, are very famous for over-the-top comedy and acting,
which is just better suited to the format of short YouTube videos where it can be enjoyed in small doses.
It's the same problem we have with Fred.
Most people can probably handle someone acting loud and obnoxious for five minutes.
But when you give an entire movie to someone acting loud and obnoxious for an hour and a half,
it's not gonna be good.
The one exception to this is John Cena who, for no reason, is in the Fred movie.
I feel like I just have to appreciate it because of how delightfully weird it is.
Not everything that's funny on YouTube is funny in a movie,
and when you have people who base their entire lives and careers on YouTube,
any attempts to do anything else are still approached from the perspective of trying to make a YouTube video,
and frankly, it rarely works.
Not everything created by any person who was ever on YouTube is going to be bad.
One exception to this, which I don't talk about too much because he's not really a YouTuber anymore,
is Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade, which, according to critics,
is shaping up to be the antithesis of all these other movies.
I would urge everyone to check it out once it hits its official release, and I know I'm going to.
Generally speaking though, movies made by famous YouTubers
tend to be a deadly combination of poorly produced, unfunny, and incoherent.
When you have people whose entire lives are steeped in internet culture and loud, over-the-top comedy,
that's unlikely to translate well to film.
As a result, you get this deeply fascinating sub-genre of movies that are not only bad, but uniquely bad.
If you're interested in something that's funny and so bad it's good,
I wouldn't bother with any of these movies.
But if you have any interest in suffering for an hour and maybe gaining some insight into YouTube culture,
Freducation, if you will, (laughs)
feel free to give any of these terrible, terrible movies a shot.
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