Insert Image Caption
Media, Built is a newsletter about how modern media actually works. I break down how distribution, format, and systems shape what reaches people and what doesn’t. Drawing from operating experience across media, I focus on the gap between what gets made and what actually travels.
Barbie should have been closer to Battleship than Oppenheimer (although I am very much still rooting for Taylor Kitsch).
Because if a brand-backed movie can go from being a punchline to being one of the defining cultural events of the year, something in the system has changed. And what changed applies to every company sitting on recognizable IP right now.
The 40 movies nobody saw.
Mattel made about 40 Barbie movies before the Greta Gerwig one. You've never seen any of them. They were cheap, direct-to-video, designed to move product off shelves. Then Mattel did something different. They brought in a very real filmmaker and gave her a very real budget with true creative freedom. $1.4 billion dollars later Barbie is a cultural phenomenon (just went to a pop-up in Vegas) and Greta Gerwig is a household name.
Brittaney Kiefer published a piece in Adweek this week that caught my eye. Dick's Sporting Goods premiered a documentary at SXSW this year alongside Netflix and A24. Under Armour launched a content studio called Lab96 and put a film on Prime Video. TikTok viewers were commenting that they watched the Under Armour film without realizing it was from a brand. Superconnector Studios, which helped build LVMH's entertainment division, now has 40+ brand-backed films and TV shows in development. A Nike film is in pre-production at Apple.
A year ago this could have been a trend piece but now, now it feels like a shift in the industry itself.
I wrote a few weeks ago about Gap hiring its first Chief Entertainment Officer, and the structural forces pushing brands toward entertainment. What I keep coming back to, because we're seeing it directly in our work at Sine Wave, is the question of what actually changed.
Three things are shifting.
Audiences stopped caring where the money came from. The old skepticism around brand-funded content has largely evaporated. A decade of creator-funded, brand-funded, and platform-funded work living side by side trained people to judge on quality, not origin. The "ick factor," as Modern Arts CCO Zac Ryder put it in the Adweek piece, is gone.
Distribution opened up. You used to need a studio to get your project in front of people. Now platforms distribute based on engagement. A brand-funded documentary and a studio-funded documentary compete on the same terms once they're in the feed.
And traditional studios are under enough financial pressure that they're actively looking for brand partners to share production costs. The relationship between Hollywood and brands used to be promotional. Now it's structural. Michael Sugar's Sugar23 went from 3 brand partners to nearly 30 in a single year.
Where it still breaks.
Most of what I see from the inside is brand-funded entertainment getting pulled back into the gravity of marketing. Too many stakeholders. Too much emphasis on message control. Not enough room for something to find its shape. And then it ends up being an anodyne project deeply lacking in both soul and authenticity.
The version that works looks much closer to how studios operate. Real creative talent with real creative freedom, funded by a brand with a different tolerance for how and why money gets deployed. That's what Mattel figured out with Barbie. That's what Dick's is building with Cookie Jar & A Dream Studios. That's what Under Armour is betting on with Lab96.
The companies that figure out how to fund entertainment without suffocating it are going to build something the traditional media companies are struggling to hold onto: durable audience relationships that they actually own.
Barbie worked because Mattel let Greta Gerwig make a Greta Gerwig movie. That sounds simple. From the inside, I can tell you it's the hardest thing a brand will ever do.
Thanks for reading and if this was useful, feel free to forward it to someone who should be thinking about this. Join a growing group of operators, creators, and strategists focused on how media actually works.