Skibidi Toilet could be headed for the silver screen. Paramount Pictures president Adam Goodman recently told Variety about ongoing talks to bring the extremely successful YouTube and TikTok series to TV or the big screen, with Transformers director Michael Bay in the picture.
Though the two are actively pursuing the project, they are yet to get the formal greenlight to begin pre-production on any actual adaptation. In the Variety podcast Strictly Business, Goodman said: “We are absolutely in talks right now, both on the television side and the earliest conversations right now on the film side,” said Goodman. “But it’s not a be-all, end-all for us.”
On the business side of things, this attempt at expansion might make sense. At over 65 billion cumulative views, Skibidi Toilet is arguably the most successful series in the history of YouTube, a phenomenon big enough to dwarf Baby Shark, Despacito, and Gangnam Style many times over. In a time where brand recognition plays a role of extreme importance, anything Skibidi Toilet-related could prove a hit right out of the gate, but it’s not that simple.
Adapting Skibidi Toilet might prove tricky
Though Skibidi Toilet tells a mostly very straightforward tale of wacky a war between an army of human heads with toilets for bodies and one of human bodies with pieces of tech for heads, a peculiar system of moving pieces exists within.
The toilet heads from Skibidi Toilet have become so popular that they’re already an indelible part of Internet imagery. Still, unlike most popular series out there, these designs aren’t entirely original. Most of what you see in Skibidi Toilet episodes are pre-existing models from Half-Life 2 that have been made available via Garry’s Mod and brought into movie form via Source Filmmaker.
Skibidi Toilet series creator DaFuq!?Boom! gets to make these videos, and serious bucks out of them, because Valve is just really cool about letting other kids play with its toys. That, however, doesn’t necessarily translate to the company lending the rights to their intellectual property to a studio or production company that’s not even directly adapting Valve’s works.
Invisible Narratives, the independent company that Bay runs with Goodman, is already involved with Skibidi Toilet‘s toyline. On the collaboration, Goodman says: “I will say that Michael and Jeffrey Beecroft, who’s his longtime production designer and a colleague of his that’s worked with him on all of his movies, have been working very closely with Alexey to really professionalize the kind of back engine of this, to make sure, if we ever decide to go film or television, that this is kind of lifted beyond just the resources that creators have on the internet.” That seems to indicate some things are indeed moving, but we’re yet to learn of Valve’s essential thoughts regarding any sort of Skibidi Toilet adaptation.
If you don’t care about the legal implications and just want to learn more about the bizarre story of Skibidi Toilet, I’m happy to let you know that we’ve even employed the efforts of Half-Life series writer Marc Laidlaw to look into it all with us.
Published: Jul 24, 2024 12:58 pm