Disney rolled out the red carpet at the El Capitan Theatre last week, and for once it wasn’t for a movie star. Created in LA, a two-day event Disney hosted with creator Jon Youshaei on September 17 and 18, brought more than 350 creators to Hollywood and the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank to hear from CEO Josh D’Amaro, Dana Walden and a stage full of names like Dude Perfect, The Try Guys, Zach King, Kris Jenner and Khloé Kardashian. We read about it in Disney’s recap, like everyone else.
In Disney’s announcement of the event, Youshaei said, “Every attendee is hand-selected.” We’re going to assume our hand is still in the selection process.
What Happened at Disney’s Created in LA
Day one opened Thursday on the El Capitan red carpet with remarks from Walden, who told the room she hoped Disney would pick up a few of the creators’ tricks and that decades of Disney storytelling lessons might help them in return. Then the theater did something it had never done in its 100 years. It premiered creator films. Filmmaking duo Sticks debuted The Technoblade Movie, a tribute to the Minecraft creator Technoblade, who died in 2022. Zach King followed with his cardboard version of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, the second Star Wars film he has rebuilt out of cardboard.
Friday moved to the studio lot, where Stormtroopers escorted guests into the Main Theater and D’Amaro told them, “There’s never been a better time to be a storyteller.” From there, the day ran like a masterclass buffet. Chief Marketing and Brand Officer Asad Ayaz laid out the paths creators are already taking into Disney, from scripted series and features to brand campaigns. Walt Disney Animation’s Jared Bush brought Olaf onstage, walked through the making of Zootopia, Moana and Encanto, and showed exclusive footage from Hexed.
Dhar Mann explained how his studio turns out five TV-length videos a week. The Try Guys broke down how they reached 5 billion views. Dude Perfect talked through building one of YouTube’s biggest channels with the same group of friends. Kris Jenner and Khloé Kardashian sat down for a session on building a family brand across TV, social media and products, using Khloé’s Khloud as a case study. Singer Magnus Ferrell sent everyone home with a closing performance at Legends Plaza.
Fair Is Fair: The Creators Earned the Carpet
Here’s the part that stings a little. They deserve it. These creators figured out how people watch in 2026, on phones, in short bursts, from faces they feel like they know. Walden made the point herself, praising how closely creators know their audiences and how fast they adjust when those audiences tell them what they want. Most newsrooms, ours included, still hit publish and hope an algorithm notices.
Disney didn’t fill the El Capitan with YouTubers to be nice. It did it because that’s where the audience is. Ayaz’s session was basically a map of how a channel turns into a Disney series, film or ad campaign. For fans, that means more of your favorite creators showing up in Disney projects. For fan news sites, it means the line to talk about Disney just got a lot longer.
What Nobody on Stage Mentions: The Head Start
Every creator success story gets told the same way. Hard work, great instincts, a mountain of uploads. All true. What rarely makes the slideshow is the luck, the timing and, sometimes, the money that was already in the room.
Start with the host. Youshaei spent eight years inside YouTube and Instagram, including a run as YouTube’s head of creator product marketing, before going out on his own. That’s real expertise, and it’s also the kind of contact list most creators would sell their ring light for.
The Kardashian-Jenner session was billed as 20 years of reinventing media. Page one of that playbook, for anyone taking notes at home, was a famous last name and a reality show on E! in 2007. It took real business sense to turn that into an empire. It’s just not the same starting line as a kid filming in a bedroom.
The Try Guys built their audience as BuzzFeed employees, making videos for a media company’s audience, before they went independent in 2018. Dude Perfect’s session promised 17 years, 62 million subscribers and the same dudes. Disney’s own preview also mentioned a $100 million investment and an 80,000-square-foot headquarters. Same dudes, much bigger backyard.
To be fair, not every story fits that mold. Dhar Mann’s pitch to the room was going from filming in a studio apartment to running a 125,000-square-foot studio. Timing counts as luck too, though. Dude Perfect and Zach King got started when YouTube was young and far less crowded. For every channel on that stage, there are thousands of creators who worked just as hard and never caught the algorithm’s eye. Nobody gets invited to the El Capitan to talk about them.
Our Take: Adapt or Get Left at the Curb
If a friend asked us what we think about all this, we’d tell them the creators won this round fair and square, and it’s on us to catch up. Complaining about YouTube is like complaining about the weather in Florida. It’s coming either way. The creators leaving news sites in the dust aren’t doing anything to us. They’re just better at giving people what they want right now.
Disney still makes room for press, and we’re grateful for it. We covered all three days of D23 in Anaheim last month with a media badge around our necks, and we’ll keep showing up in person, because being in the room is something a feed can’t copy. And we’ll keep studying how the Try Guys and Dude Perfects of the internet do it, because saying they only got lucky would be just as wrong as pretending luck had nothing to do with it.
If Disney ever hosts a Created in LA for fan media, we’ll be in the back row, badge on, taking notes. We’ll even bring our own Stormtrooper. Created in LA is a clear signal that creators are now part of how Disney plans to tell its stories. You can read Disney’s full event recap on its newsroom, and keep up with where Disney is headed next at Fantasy Land News.
