Danny Zappin, a failed actor and jailed drug dealer, co-founded Maker with a simple goal: to become the United Artists of the digital era. But as it became L.A.'s hottest young company and hit 4 billion views a month, Zappin lost control of the $100 million-a-year business to the moneymen he helped recruit. So he sued.
Christopher Patey
Danny Zappin
This story first appeared in the Nov. 1 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.
OUR EDITOR RECOMMENDS
They're the type of numbers that make Hollywood execs wake up in a cold sweat. While AMC congratulated itself when its Breaking Bad finale on Sept. 29 lured 10.3 million viewers, a few months earlier, Maker Studios' Epic Rap Battles of History YouTube station ended its second season withRasputin vs. Stalin, a 3½-minute spoof in which unknown actors played the Russian historical figures in a ridiculous hip-hop face-off. Unlike Breaking Bad, which cost millions of dollars to produce, this Rap Battles installment cost just $110,000 to make and nearly nothing to market. Since premiering in April, it has been viewed 28 million times, following in the footsteps of Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates (62 million views) and Mr. T vs. Mr. Rogers (49 million).
And Rasputin vs. Stalin is just one of about 10,000 videos uploaded to YouTube each day by Maker Studios from its 71,000-square-foot campus in Culver City. The videos, produced by a roster of 50,000 individual creators, are sold to advertisers and distributed via YouTube's most-subscribed channels, which together generate more than 4 billion monthly video views. A self-proclaimed digital version of United Artists, which was founded nearly a century ago by Hollywood's top talent intent on controlling their own interests, Maker today boasts a roster of online superstars including PewDiePie, Toby Turner and Shay Carl, whose not-quite household names leave anyone over the age of 35 scratching their heads and many under that age in their thrall.
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