There is a new class of filmmaker at Sundance
Everybody wants a slice of "show biz". Mileage varies.
Gymnasium founder Adam Faze screened two episodes of Girl Room at Sundance last weekend. Not in a theater, but on stage at a Brand Storytelling panel, with Amazon’s Head of Content Marketing sitting next to him. They discussed reaching Gen-Z audiences at scale. The Cannes Lions energy was intentional. So was the message: brands are thirsty for social shows, even when they barely understand why they work.
The usual suspects covered the festival. Variety, Deadline, Indiewire, Vulture. But the most telling content from the weekend wasn’t coverage of creators—it was legacy media trying to make creator-style content itself.
Take Vulture. They sent Zach Schiffman, a comedian and video producer on staff at New York mag, to film a man-on-the-street series called “Off The Slopes.” Schiffman talked to festival-goers about Sundance’s move to Colorado, their favorite Park City memories. Solid premise. Hilarious host. But his episodes averaged 19K views each—well below Vulture’s 91.7K reel average.
This isn’t a story about bad content underperforming. It’s a story about strategy. Vulture runs all their short-form through one account: actor interviews, red carpet clips, event coverage, shows. The upside is flexibility—easy to shift formats with the same host and crew. But it also means that individual series disappear into the feed.
With Off The Slopes, they chose to create a series out of events a year apart from each other. A few dedicated Zach fans recognized the format from last year, but they missed the opportunity to build cachet throughout 2025. Imagine if Kareem brought Subway Takes to the ski carts—it would be instantly recognizable, because people know the host and format. Vulture could build a repeatable format around Zach and bring it to each event. Instead, the short form shows they’re doing feel like a sequence of promising starts. Off The Slopes wasn’t a property. It was content.
Compare that to Girl Room. In three months, Faze’s series amassed 94.5K followers and averages 2.4M views per episode. It launched as a follow-up to “Boy Room,” hosted by Rachel Coster, which already had Amazon’s financial support. Brands used to buy ads against legacy media content. Now they’re going direct to the showrunners. Girl Room formalized the partnership: Prime boxes on screen, delivery driver cameos, the whole brand integration playbook executed cleanly.
Off The Slopes was sponsored by Paramount+. Girl Room is partnered with Amazon. The difference isn’t the money—it’s the sequence. Vulture built event content for a sponsor. Faze built a show first, proved it worked, then brought the brand in. One disappears after the festival. The other keeps compounding.
The weekend ended at UTA House, where the guest list told the whole story: Julian Shapiro-Barnum from Recess Therapy, Amelia Dimoldenberg from Chicken Shop Date, Rachel Coster from Boy Room. These aren’t people circling Sundance hoping to get discovered. They’re the story now.
BILT's Roomies got renewed for season 2. A credit card company built a show people actually want to watch. 138K followers in 7 months.
Fallen Media, the studio behind Street Hearts and Subway Oracle, launched a new series called Show & Tell. The host @megspectre invites guests to present screenshots or battle scars, and grades them at the end on a standard A-F scale. The show is averaging 41.6K views per episode in it’s first month.
Channing Tatum appeared on Are You Okay? to promote Magic Mike Live. To our knowledge, this is the only short form show that Tatum did on his press tour.
Nova launched Creative Confessional. The freelancer job board released a show with a rotating cast of hosts over the weekend. They collab-posted with Nova's main account (78K followers) and tagged every season 1 guest in the trailer. The results so far: 474 followers, 8.8K median views.
Amber Singletary’s Judgy live SOLD OUT. Amber Singletary took her show to a stage in NYC and made the audience the jury. If you attended, let us know what you thought!
Zohran Mamdani appeared on Subway Oracle to warn New Yorkers of the weekend’s snow storm. It came right after the Mayor’s creator summit. He's not treating short form shows as novelty press hits. He's using them the way politicians once used local TV.
Baron Ryan's Two Sleepy People is the top-grossing film in the country this week with no major studio or distributor. His marketing strategy was creating content and appearing on short-form shows: @submityourick, @gabriel.desanti, @15secondfilm, @subwaytakes. It worked.
Public Opinion just set the tone for shows looking for private funding. They raised a seven-figure investment from former Rolling Stone CEO Gus Wenner. The team behind Track Star has plans to expand operations, launch new properties, and turn it’s show into a new MTV.
Excellent breakdown of the Vulture vs Girl Room strategies. The distinction between building event content versus building a show first is kinda everything in this space. I saw similar patterns when helping brands figure out creator partnerships, where the ones that let shows establish their voice first ended up with way more authentic integrations.