Sony Pictures has named Fede Goldenberg, who spent 15 years at YouTube overseeing film and TV content partnerships, to run Screen Gems, the genre label behind “Resident Evil” and “Underworld,” as the studio expands the division to develop theatrical films from digital-native creators, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Ashley Brucks, who has led Screen Gems as president since 2023, will transition to a producing deal with the studio. Goldenberg will report to Sanford Panitch, president of Sony Pictures’ Motion Picture Group, and will work to broaden the label’s filmmaker pipeline beyond traditional genre development to include creators who have built audiences through original stories and immersive worlds online.

“Some of the most exciting new filmmakers and ideas are emerging from creators outside of traditional Hollywood development pipelines,” Panitch said in a statement. “Screen Gems has long been a home for distinctive genre storytelling, and we see tremendous potential in expanding that vision to include a new generation of digital-native creators with theatrical ambitions.”

Goldenberg, who held the title of head of film and TV content partnerships at YouTube, is credited with helping guide the careers of filmmakers including Curry Barker, Kane Parsons and Markiplier, and he managed the platform’s exclusive digital release of Markiplier’s “Iron Lung.” He was also among the executives who negotiated YouTube’s rights deal to air the Oscars, and his early tenure at the platform included managing partnerships with Maker Studios and Fullscreen. Before YouTube, he worked at Globosat, Terra Networks Brasil and FremantleMedia Latin America.

“After 15 years at YouTube, the world’s biggest digital platform, I know firsthand that the next generation of great filmmakers is already building audiences on the platform,” Goldenberg said in a statement.

The hire follows a run of box office results that made digital-native filmmakers difficult for studios to ignore. Barker’s “Obsession” and Parsons’ “Backrooms” both posted outsized theatrical returns this year against minimal production budgets, a pattern Panitch’s statement points to directly in explaining the strategic shift. According to TheWrap, an insider familiar with the hiring said Goldenberg was chosen specifically for his understanding of creators’ needs and sensitivities, since digital talent frequently functions as director, writer, producer and star on a single project, multiple roles that make them protective of both IP rights and the audience relationships they have built.

Screen Gems’ Pivot Follows a Pattern at Sony

Goldenberg’s appointment extends a strategy Sony has already been testing elsewhere in the company. 

Sony Pictures Television hired Matt Ford, a former BBC Studios and Channel 4 executive, as VP of Commercial, Digital within its International Production division last year, with a mandate to build creator partnerships across streaming, social and audio platforms in the UK. That role was centralized within the organization rather than tied to a single Sony-owned production company. Sony has also brought in Charlotte Moore from the BBC to run “The Crown” producer Left Bank while serving as creative director of international production at Sony Pictures Television, underscoring a broader pattern of recruiting executives with digital and traditional media experience across its production divisions.

The industry’s interest in creator-led film is not new, though the economics look different than they did a decade ago. A wave of YouTuber-fronted movies, including “Smosh: The Movie” and Awesomeness Films’ “Expelled,” emerged around 2015 on the premise that digital stars could carry low-budget releases to built-in fan bases without traditional marketing spend. Those films were largely confined to digital and limited theatrical distribution. The current cycle, by contrast, is producing wide theatrical results: Barker’s “Obsession” and Parsons’ “Backrooms” have both performed at a scale the 2015 slate did not approach.

The broader entertainment industry has also begun building infrastructure to formally recognize creator talent. IMDb added “Digital Creator” as a professional category this September, opening the platform for the first time to internet-native talent who have never held a traditional film or TV credit, with sub-professions including “Streamer,” “Video Creator” and “Influencer.” The category is designed to give producers, casting directors and studio executives a way to make creator talent more discoverable inside the same system used for traditional hiring.

The scope of Brucks’ new producing deal with Sony has not been disclosed. During her three-year tenure at Screen Gems, the label released “Tarot” and “Insidious: Out of the Further,” both commercial successes for the division.

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