If you had 365 days to whip yourself into shape to climb Mount Everest, could you do it? That’s what French YouTuber Inoxtag set out to discover–and now Kaizen, the two-and-a-half-hour documentary following his journey, is generating a lot of buzz. By partnering with MK2, a French film group that has a dedicated “YouTube Cinema Club” where it brings YouTubers to theater screens, he sold 350,000 movie tickets in just one day, and has racked up an additional 24 million views on YouTube in just four days.
Kaizen was also highlighted by Fede Goldenberg, YouTube’s Global Head of TV & Film AVOD Partnerships, as “a major accomplishment that highlights the power of creator fandom.”
YouTube has talked quite a bit about the power of creator fandom and communities lately, and to see that power tie into the rising trend of YouTubers getting into movie theaters is pretty cool. We’ve had a number of YouTubers get scooped up by studios like A24 and Neon to make their own films, and yet more YouTubers, like Sam and Colby, Rhett and Link, and Wendigoon have done deals with individual theaters or theater chains to get their productions on the big screen.
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Inoxtag is the latest. He’s a 21-year-old variety YouTuber who says that, before this whole mountain-climbing thing, he didn’t practice any rigorous sports at all. He’s been making YouTube content since 2015, starting with good old Minecraft videos and evolving to MrBeast-esque competition content, travel vids, and vlogs. He has 8.4 million subscribers, with his videos bringing in between 10 and 40 million views a month–and, last year, he decided he was going to do what few people can: climb Everest.
Kaizen follows him as he goes through an “entire life change in order to achieve this dream,” as he puts it. He pushes his body past its limits, including completing several other, less dangerous mountain climbs as prep, and finally goes through the entire process of getting to Everest and going up to the summit.
MK2, which launched its creator-focused cinema club in partnership with YouTube earlier this year, picked up Kaizen for distribution in its 26 theaters, plus agreed to help push it out to other cinemas. Co-CEO Elisha Karmitz told Variety MK2 thought the film would be a success based on the size of Inoxtag’s online audience, and had its suspicions strengthened when he sold 200,000 in presale tickets.
But the company was shocked, it said, by how many more tickets Kaizen would sell on Sept. 13, the day the film premiered in theaters: a whopping 350,000, across 1,000 screenings in 350 different theaters.
“We thought it would be a success, and that’s why we scheduled it in 350 screens, but it was like a tidal wave and a level of enthusiasm that we hadn’t seen before,” Karmitz said. She added that Inoxtag was particularly concerned about making the film available in small towns, as he’d noticed many of his French fans were from rural locations. Karmitz said more than 40% of the screens that aired Kaizen “are arthouses in small cities throughout France.”
Inoxtag was also firm that after Kaizen‘s theater run, he wanted to make it free on YouTube. “He turned out generous offers from paid platforms to have his film play on the platform for free so that would bring together his community,” Karmitz said.
And it’s clear his community has repaid that gesture; like we said, Kaizen has racked up 24 million views to date, which is a very decent chunk of AdSense change.
For MK2, Kaizen was a clear indication that connecting with YouTubers is still a solid move: Karmitz told Variety it sees building relationships with creators as an essential element of drawing Gen Z into theaters. We think that’s true–and we think Hollywood has realized that too, considering it’s tapping TikTok and Roblox to sell tickets to its latest productions.
As for Inoxtag, who knows what his next adventure will be. But, based on Kaizen’s theatrical and digital receptions, we’d bet he’s considering turning it into a documentary.
