YouTube Surpasses Disney as World's Largest Media Company While Veteran Producer Ted Hope Mourns a Lost System

First: YouTube surpassed Disney to become the world's largest media company.

Second: Ted Hope — the producer behind films like "The Ice Storm," "In the Bedroom," and "Martha Marcy Marlene" — published a post on what it feels like to still have the work in you but not the system to support it .

After weeks of fiscal drama and corporate gamesmanship around the proposed Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger, YouTube's milestone landed like a hold-my-beer moment. The largest media company in the world is now a platform built almost entirely on creators .

At the same time, one of the most accomplished independent producers of the last 40 years is publicly grappling with the possibility that the system that sustained his career no longer exists .

For years, people in Hollywood have been waiting for the industry to return to normal. The reality is less comforting and far more clarifying: This is the new normal. It is unsettling, confusing, and occasionally frightening, but the sooner we reckon with where we actually are, the sooner we can start building inside it .

According to research firm MoffettNathanson, YouTube generated an estimated $62 billion in total revenue during 2025 . That figure surpasses the Walt Disney Company's media business, which earned around $60.1 billion last year when excluding its Experiences segment (theme parks, resorts, and cruises) .

The numbers tell a story of seismic shift:

Advertising Dominance: YouTube's ad revenue reached $40.4 billion in 2025, exceeding the combined $37.8 billion in ad revenue from traditional giants Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount Skydance, and Warner Bros. Discovery .

Subscription Growth: Beyond advertising, YouTube generated nearly $20 billion in subscription revenue from services like YouTube TV, YouTube Premium, YouTube Music, and NFL Sunday Ticket . Paid subscribers across Google One and YouTube Premium surpassed 325 million .

Viewing Share: In January, YouTube accounted for 12.5% of U.S. television viewing, according to Nielsen—topping the combined streaming share of NBCUniversal, Disney, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery. Netflix, the closest competitor, captured 8.8% .

As MoffettNathanson analysts Michael Nathanson and Robert Fishman noted, YouTube is "one of the few media companies positioned to become even stronger in the AI era" .

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan reflected on the moment: "Leading YouTube is a privilege where I can bring both those pieces together. That human storytelling and creativity and the best of technology, that's what motivates me every morning" .

The same Monday that YouTube claimed its crown, veteran producer Ted Hope published a deeply personal essay on his Substack, "Hope For Film," later republished by IndieWire .

Hope's credentials are unimpeachable: over 70 feature films, 44 Oscar nominations, 11 wins. He built production companies, ran a film society, launched Amazon Studios' movie program, and shepherded more than 125 films into existence .

His essay, titled "Have You Been Hurt by Media Consolidation? I Have," is a raw accounting of what the industry's transformation has cost .

"For my first twenty years in the business, there were hundreds of scenarios of how a film could be financed; now there are very few," Hope writes. "There used to be hundreds of ways for a film to be distributed, but now it is very limited. There used to be multiple ways to cover overhead between films, but these too are now virtually non-existent" .

Hope traces the collapse to specific structural changes:

The Disappearance of International Sales

As global streaming platforms replaced territorial licensing with worldwide rights acquisitions, regional distributors and broadcasters lost their role in the ecosystem. Without those buyers competing for rights territory by territory, one of the primary financing engines for independent cinema disappeared .

The Death of the Mid-Budget Film

"The consolidation of the major studios and their pivot toward global franchise economics have also eliminated the mid-budget film — historically the backbone of the American film business," Hope writes. These films, typically budgeted between $15 and $50 million, sustained producers, developed directors, and provided studios with steady returns. "With the disappearance of this sector, the industry has effectively eliminated the sector where independent producers such as me built our careers" .

The Collapse of Independent Distribution

Companies like Miramax, Fine Line, October Films, Newmarket, and ThinkFilm once created a competitive marketplace for independent cinema. As media companies consolidated and streaming replaced physical media revenue, most of these distributors disappeared or were absorbed into larger conglomerates. The result: far fewer buyers and far fewer paths for films to reach audiences .

The Elimination of Backend Economics

Streaming fundamentally altered film economics by replacing long-tail revenue streams with a single license fee. In the past, producers built careers through profit participation and successive windows—theatrical, home video, cable, international sales, television licensing. Streaming collapsed these revenue streams into a single transaction, eliminating the possibility of long-term participation .

Hope's time at Amazon proved instructive. He was hired to launch Amazon's movie program, but by the time he left, the calculus had shifted. "The new head of movies explained to me that the kind of movies I did — typically called 'prestige films,' or films for grown-ups — were no longer viable there because of the high number of subscribers each film was now expected to connect with." His films, despite winning Oscars and critical acclaim, were "too niche" .

The Convergence of Two Stories

In an interview with IndieWire following his essay's publication, Hope expanded on where the industry finds itself .

"I haven't done my best work and I've had to come to the conclusion, I'm not going to do my best work," he told IndieWire's Dana Harris-Bridson. "I don't see the system being able to adapt in the next five years. I wish I had 15 more movies in me to get there, and that's not going to happen" .

What Hope describes is not nostalgia; it's infrastructure. For decades, independent film existed inside a functioning economic system. Films premiered at festivals, sold to distributors, moved through territorial sales markets, and eventually found a second life in homes. That ecosystem sustained a generation of producers, distributors, and filmmakers .

Today, much of that infrastructure has collapsed. The mid-budget film, the independent distribution layer, the backend economics—they still exist but are rapidly becoming outliers .

Hope's post concludes that the industry should fight the Paramount–Warner merger. Filmmakers, he argues, should tell their stories about consolidation and rally to stop the deal .

But after speaking with Hope for an hour, Harris-Bridson noted that the merger is not really the point. Even if it were blocked tomorrow, the system he is grieving would not come back. The merger matters at the margins, but it is not the cause of the structural collapse he describes so vividly .

The Irony: Hope Already Operates in the New System

The irony is that Hope himself is already operating inside the emerging system. His wife Vanessa Hope's documentary "Invisible Nation" did not follow the traditional path through the distribution ecosystem. Instead, the film moved through a decentralized release strategy built around targeted audiences, partnerships, and community screenings .

Hope said executing that release required hiring 32 different vendors across the campaign, an experience that exposed a major structural gap in the industry. "Other than the fact that I've been around a long time and Vanessa and I are married," he said, "it feels very replicable. The biggest barrier is the lack of service providers" .

That observation points to the real infrastructure problem independent film faces right now. Filmmakers are increasingly capable of reaching audiences directly, but the systems that help them plan and execute those releases have not yet caught up .

Hope calls it the need for "25 models of release." Instead of forcing every film into one of a handful of distribution paths—theatrical, streaming acquisition, or VOD—the industry could support a much wider range of audience-driven strategies .

Some filmmakers are already experimenting with those approaches. There are audience-activated theatrical releases, films that tour through college campuses or community networks, and creator-driven theatrical experiments. Boutique platforms like Kinema and Attend are emerging to help filmmakers activate specific audiences and design campaigns around them .

None of those models depend on the Paramount–Warner merger. When Harris-Bridson pointed that out during their conversation, Hope didn't hesitate before answering .

"Immaterial," he said .

That it is. The merger may reshape the studio landscape, but the future of independent film is not going to be determined by whether Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery remain separate companies. The structural shift is happening somewhere else entirely .

The Infrastructure That Already Exists

Which brings us back to YouTube .

The reason the YouTube story landed with modest impact is that the creator economy and the traditional film business are still treated as separate industries. That's untrue. They are the same industry viewed from two different starting points .

From one perspective, YouTube looks like a social platform where creators publish videos. From another, it looks increasingly like a global development system for storytellers—one where audiences, not studios, determine which creators gain momentum .

That shift changes the mechanics of how careers are built. Creators can develop communities around their work, test ideas, gather data, and maintain direct relationships with viewers. Those relationships can eventually support everything from merchandise to live events to feature films .

Hope believes the next generation of filmmakers will grow up inside that ecosystem. They will be form-agnostic creators who move fluidly between short-form content, features, and other formats as their audiences expand .

"Now that the first feature is generally not a transactional object," he said, "you'd be an idiot to start with one. Make five short films. Build an audience" .

That audience becomes the foundation for everything that comes next .

Grief and Strategy

None of this makes the grief Hope describes any less legitimate. He addressed that loss directly in his post, explaining that he can no longer tell smart young people from non-privileged backgrounds that the film industry is a viable place to build a life. "I can't train people for a dead end," he told IndieWire .

The loss of that ladder into the industry matters. For decades, independent film offered a path for ambitious outsiders who believed they could build a career through talent, persistence, and a series of unlikely breaks .

But grief and strategy are not the same thing. Grieving the disappearance of the old system is understandable. Building a future inside the new one requires a different kind of attention .

The independent film community can spend its energy trying to block a merger that will not restore what has already been lost. Or it can focus on building the infrastructure filmmakers will actually need: service providers for decentralized releases, new audience-driven distribution models, and economic structures designed for the ecosystem that already exists .

Because whether the industry acknowledges it or not, the new infrastructure is already here—and the platform at the center of it just became the largest media company in the world