Agency
Creator Theatrical Premieres Are Becoming Serious Business, and Screeny Wants to Scale It
This July, more than 100 theaters across the U.S. will screen a YouTube video. The event, built around PrestonPlayz‘s 80-plus-million-subscriber fanbase, is the largest test yet of an emerging infrastructure for creator theatrical premieres, and Elizabeth McLead, founder and CEO of Screeny, built the machinery behind it.
“Surviving 100 Hours on a Deserted Island,” organized in partnership with TBNR, PrestonPlayz’s creator media company, is Screeny’s largest rollout to date.
Launched in January 2026 in Austin, Screeny manages every operational layer of creator theatrical premieres, from theater booking and data-driven placement to ticketing, merchandise, and management of brand and licensing partnerships. The team includes Rebecca Krueger (COO), Josh Dobos (Director of Partnerships), Janet Dwoskin (Head of Licensing), and Jonathan Pelka (Licensing).
Elizabeth spent years in live entertainment, motorsports, and brand operations before founding Just Ask Liz, a growth marketing agency, in 2017. When her creator clients began hitting the same ceiling, algorithms shifting, ad revenue thinning, and content losing organic reach, she saw the pattern repeating.
“When platforms go down, or algorithms change, and creators aren’t monetizing the way they used to, there has to be another way to build community with their audience and drive more revenue,” she says. Screeny is what she built in response.
Full Theaters Over Wide Releases
The traditional cinema release model is grounded in the “wide release” method, achieving as many release screens as possible. This is where Screeny aims to be different.
“When it’s 4,000 theaters but there’s only a handful of people in the auditorium, what kind of fan connection is there?” she says. “Our goal is to make all locations full. That’s where we’re different and why we are more impactful, bringing digital fandom to IRL experiences.”
Screeny’s approach begins before a single theater is booked. The company ingests backend analytics from the creator’s YouTube channel alongside data from any ecommerce platforms they operate, then runs those signals through a proprietary mapping tool to identify what Elizabeth calls “hot zones,” the markets where fan density is highest. Theater selection, date targeting, and market configuration follow from that map. The goal isn’t to be present across as many locations as possible. It’s concentration in the ones where a full house is achievable.
The Operational Layer Most Fans Don’t See
The PrestonPlayz July event illustrates the full scope of what Screeny manages. Beyond theater booking, the company coordinates ticketing through Tixer, a partner built to handle traffic spikes when tens of thousands of fans try to purchase simultaneously. Custom merchandise is produced through Mic Drop Creative, Screeny’s in-house screen printing and fulfillment operation. Brand partnerships are also coordinated through Screeny in conjunction with the creator, controlling the pre-show window at each venue.
For the Preston event, GoGo Squeez is the brand partner, a match Elizabeth describes as deliberate for this creator audience. “We could probably sell a Budweiser to somebody given his audience size,” she says. “But they’re kids. GoGo Squeez makes more sense. We aren’t selling brand space for the sake of logos everywhere, because that kills the intention of what we’re doing. In this case, the TBNR team came forward with the GoGo Squeeze brand partnership, and we are excited to execute the on-site fan giveaway.”
Screeny also fronts the cost of each operation. Rather than requiring creators to pay upfront, the company covers theater booking, logistics, and production, then recovers through a revenue share calibrated to the experience elements the creator selects.
“We don’t ask the creator to write us a check ahead of time,” Elizabeth says. “They decide what they want it to look like, and that determines the revenue share. We are finding that Creators are mostly motivated by the opportunity to create an IRL experience for their Fans; event revenue is a bonus.”
Early events exposed the friction of building this model from scratch. Screeny’s first test premiere, the “jacknjellify,” went from concept to opening night in three weeks. The company’s initial ticketing infrastructure was not built for the scale of demand. “When 20, 30, 40,000 people come onto a ticketing site quickly to buy tickets, we can’t have it crash,” Elizabeth says. “We did have that happen a couple of times.” As with all start-ups, a pilot premiere has proven to be critical in building the current infrastructure.
What Engagement Actually Predicts
A creator with somewhere between 750,000 and one million subscribers is in Screeny’s pipeline for September. That tier would be a disqualifying size for most theatrical distributors. Screeny doesn’t use follower count as the filter.
“[The creator’s] engagement is better than some channels that have 3 to 5 million followers,” she says. “We can’t look at just follower count. We need to understand the fans.”
What Screeny needs to know is whether a creator can move their audience to take a specific action: buying a ticket and showing up. The company does not pay for marketing. Ticket sales depend on the creator communicating directly with their community. That distinction also reflects something Elizabeth sees as fundamentally different about creator fandom.
“The celebrity of this younger generation is someone you’re building an actual connection with through the screen,” she says. “It’s not them as a character, but them as themselves. Fans are connecting with people in a much different way.”
An animated channel premiere Screeny ran earlier illustrated the depth of that engagement. A post-event survey found that more than 80% of the children in attendance had never been to a movie theater before. For much of the audience, the experience was entirely new. “They created pen pals with the other kids that came,” Elizabeth recalls. “Which is so hard nowadays with everybody being so digital.”
The First-Party Data Case
When a fan buys a ticket or merchandise through a Screeny event, the creator receives something platforms have no incentive to share: a direct consumer record. Name, email address, phone number, mailing address, clothing size. Screeny returns that data to the creator after each event, a practice that distinguishes the model from traditional theatrical distribution, where ticket sales flow through the theater and contact information stays with the venue.
“That creator can turn around and use it for a lot of different purposes,” Elizabeth says. “It’s very specific. It’s not ‘400,000 people drove by your sign.'”
Post-event surveys add another layer, gathering audience intelligence that platforms typically aggregate and obscure. The contrast with traditional analytics is direct. YouTube’s signals describe a population. Screeny’s transactional records identify people.
For brands, the verification argument works the same way. “We can tell a brand partner: in person, you’re going to hit 40,000 people. That’s facts,” Elizabeth says. “There are literally 40,000 butts in seats.”
The Channel as Activation Layer
Screeny is not an argument against platforms. Elizabeth is explicit on that point. “I don’t think either works without the other,” she says. “We couldn’t be successful offline if there wasn’t online.”
The argument she is making is for diversification. Creators whose revenue depends entirely on a single platform are, in her view, exposed in ways that compound over time. “Algorithms are changing, and they’re not driving the revenue they once did,” she says. “Finding new and different ways to activate their audience and build a really long-standing relationship is at the forefront of the Creator growth strategy. to activate their audience and build a really long-standing relationship.”
Theatrical premieres are one expression of that strategy. Screeny has structured partnerships with national companies like Marcus Cinema and Cinemark, and Film Frog, representing over 4,000 independent theaters. This strategic advantage allows Screeny to work in markets that major distributors overlook. A creator premiere in those venues produces something beyond ticket revenue.
“We are putting new people in theaters who have not been there in a really long time, or ever,” Elizabeth says. “Independents are in a lot of smaller towns. They’re getting a resurgence of business, and we’re putting life back in them.”
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