Skibidi Toilet is set to become a Michael Bay film
YouTube/DaFuq!?Boom!
Viral YouTube series Skibidi Toilet has gone from meme to Hollywood dream, with Transformers director Michael Bay set to direct the film adaptation of the internet phenomenon.
The film is being developed by Invisible Narratives, the company founded by the former head of Paramount Pictures, Adam Goodman, who reckons that the Skibidi Toilet franchise could rival “the Marvel universe.”
The viral series has proved wildly popular with Gen Alpha but controversial with parents—each episode features grotesque images of heads poking out of stained toilet bowls, engaged in a fierce battle with mechanical men made of media equipment, such as speakers, televisions and cameras.
The Skibidi Toilet film has attracted top talent, with three-time Academy Award-winning VFX supervisor Rob Legato (Titanic, Avatar, The Jungle Book) joining the production along with Academy Award-nominated production designer Jeffrey Beecroft (12 Monkeys, Transformers).
While other internet memes (such as Italian Brainrot) are beginning to rival the popularity of Skibidi Toilet, on YouTube, the series is still going strong, each new episode drawing tens of millions of views.
According to a press release from Invisible Narratives, the Skibidi Toilet franchise collectively boasts over 35 billion views.
What Is ‘Skibidi Toilet’?
The series was created by Georgia-based animator Alexey Gerasimov, who uploaded the first Skibidi Toilet video as an 11-second short on YouTube. Said short features a head poking out of a toilet and singing an altered version of a Biser King song that originated from a TikTok meme.
Gerasimov was originally inspired by terrible dreams of “heads coming out of toilets,” and turned his nightmare fuel into a story using Valve’s Source Filmmaker.
The series has since grown increasingly elaborate, showing the fallout of a catastrophic arms race between the Skibidi Toilets and the mechanical men.
Many episodes of the series bear more resemblance to first-person shooters than traditional action films, and characters from famous video game franchises have appeared as easter eggs for eagle-eyed fans to spot.
More recent episodes of Skibidi Toilet depict kaiju-size mechs armed with laser beams, a far cry from the initial premise of scrappy, hand-to-hand combat, which featured plungers used as lethal weapons.
Gerasimov specifically cited Michael Bay’s Transformers films as an inspiration, so the viral YouTube series has come full circle.
The Michael Bay/Skibidi Toilet News Inspired Memes
The internet largely reacted with memes and skepticism to the news.
It appears that we have entered a strange new era of cinema, where popular IP is being mercilessly mined for content, a landscape in which Barbie can outshine The New Avengers.
Superheroes are no longer a safe bet at the box office, but video game adaptations such as Sonic, Super Mario and Minecraft are drawing in huge crowds.
In some cases, such as the Minecraft Movie, memes have spilled into the theatre seats, changing the way viewers interact with their favorite blockbusters.
The viral “Backrooms” phenomenon materialized online as a collective horror concept composed by anonymous internet users, and is also set for a film adaption.
Skibidi Toilet emerged from a primordial stew of memes, YouTube culture and video game assets (largely taken from Half-Life 2), and seems well-suited to inspire a similar trend.
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