The Marketing is the Message

By Aria Novosedlik

The 2026 Academy Awards were held a couple of weeks ago, capturing just 17.9 million US viewers across ABC and Hulu, a 9% decrease in viewership since last year. That’s why, much to nobody’s surprise, the Oscars will be streamed for free on YouTube, and only YouTube, starting 2029. 

That’s right: the Oscars sold exclusive global rights to YT for 2029 through to 2033. The deal will cost YT roughly $150 million annually, meaning the Academy will have 2-3x’d their investment, considering their $57.7million production cost. We’ll still get to watch stars grace the red carpet, which presenter Jimmy Kimmel revealed is the entrance to a mall that the ceremony itself is held in. 

YouTube will also offer behind-the-scenes content, like the Governors Awards and the Oscar nominees luncheon (not that anyone asked for that, or even knew it existed). Considering YT’s $400-550 billion net worth, $150mil on the Oscars every year is peanuts and illustrates just how much legacy networks like ABC are struggling. ABC only offered $100mil and happens to be owned by Disney. 

At this point, Google(YT) Disney, Paramount+, Amazon, Netflix, and Apple are the big five. Network television is all but dead. Yet even though they can handle the $150mil loss – should it be one, why would they risk the damage to their brand? The Oscars are an institution; everything YT once rebelled against. But rebellions can only last so long. Absorbing the remnants of appointment television was inevitable.

In the 90s and 2000s, Oscars could massively increase revenue; just being nominated could boost ticket sales by upwards of 30% and allow winners to continue screening in theatres for months. But nowadays, everything has become fragmented. The Oscars no longer serve as a free and guaranteed marketing tool for films. 

Times have changed. Distributors are willing to spend half their total budget on production, leaving the other half for marketing. A number of months ago, I wrote about ‘Marty Supreme’ and its innovative – if annoying – campaign. Independent distributor A24 has been at the forefront of redefining what marketing a movie looks like, and even what the content of movies themselves is. Instead of movies being made and then sold to distributors, companies like A24 green light concepts, and start marketing the vibe of said concepts before they’ve even been fully fleshed out. It’s a safe way of both testing the waters and piquing interest.

Metrics matter more than the content itself.  As a result, the marketing has unfortunately become the content. And vice-versa; there’s a synergy between the two. Hence Marty Supreme’s whole campaign concept, which, in hindsight, feels mildly toxic in terms of barraging helpless bystanders that just want to gaze at the sky without having their view obstructed by the Marty Supreme blimp. 

Another one of A24’s upcoming films, ‘The Backrooms’, has been produced after an unsuspecting YT channel ‘Kane Pixels’ visually elaborated on a decades-old 4Chan video—somewhat of a wives’ tale called ‘The Backrooms’ (see below). He developed an entire YT series and backstory, including over 70 pages of character and plot notes, before A24 was even in the picture. Kane’s success on YouTube gave A24 enough faith that a feature film based off his series would succeed and crowned him their youngest-ever director at just 19. 

They’ve embraced younger audiences’ desire to be a part of the film-making. Instead of releasing teaser trailers, they ‘aura farm’ and involve potential audiences in the initial mood board phase of any given project. Very cleverly, they’ve capitalized on their audience’s perceived contribution to the art and films themselves and have an entire online shop with both project-specific and general A24-branded merch. One thing’s for sure: they get parasocial relationships. 

By December 2025, A24 finally crossed the hundred million gross profit line with Marty. This seems to have solidified the young, independent studio’s position in mainstream culture—despite its primary demographic being fickle gen-z’ers and zilllennials, such as myself. This is a crowd whose attention span has been profoundly diminished by digital content and its desperate quest for views, no matter how short. That’s why Marty Supreme was nominated for nine Oscars and won exactly zero. 

However it’s the actors—not the studios—who stand to gain from winning. A perfect case study is Jennifer Lawrence's meteoric rise. She made $500k for the first instalment of Hunger Games. After winning ‘Best Leading Actress’ in 2013 for Silver Linings Playbook, her payday for the second Hunger Games movie 20x’d, jumping to a whopping $10m.

Timothée Chalamet's likely the one most disappointed by Marty Supreme's loss, especially as it compounds his unnecessary cancellation for a misconstrued statement he made regarding ballet and opera's cultural irrelevance. It should first be noted that Chalamet was a relatively serious dancer when much younger. His comment was borne out of concern that his career as an actor could very well be cut short should cinema suffer the same fate as the aforementioned art forms. 

It was in 1929 that the first Academy Awards were held, a couple years after the Academy was created in 1927 by MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer. At $5 a pop, tickets were cheap. It lasted just fifteen minutes. The same can be said of its future: it won’t be broadcast on TV, and its runtime will be drastically shortened. In order to maintain any relevance, new categories like ‘Best Use of AI’ and ‘Best Scene’ would be smart additions. If cultural relevance and value as a marketing tool is the goal, then when The Oscars begins streaming on YouTube, it would be wise to showcase five-minute scenes and clips from the nominated movies in order to captivate younger viewers.  

It’d also be wise for them to have links to streaming platforms to capitalize on viewers’ curiosity. It’s important to understand that these are viewers whose exposure to an over-saturated media landscape has now left them lacking in loyalty even to specific online creators, let alone the actors, directors and studios that comprise traditional media. 

Can an old dog learn new tricks? As host Bob Hope said at the first televised Oscars in 1953, “Television. It’s where movies go to die”. Were he with us today, he would probably say “YouTube. It’s where movies go to stay alive”.

 Aria Novosedlik is a Toronto-based designer, writer and researcher.