Unbeknown to hardly anyone outside Generation Alpha, behind the catchphrase “Skibidi” there is a YouTube universe called Skibidi Toilet. Behind that series, there is a production company that wants to make a movie, and behind the movie there is Transformers director Michael Bay.
But in a saga that shows just how much power younger consumers can wield over digital media when mobilised en masse, furious fans are threatening to derail the project in the belief it has wronged the series’ original creator.
Beginning life in 2023 as an 11-second animated YouTube short depicting a singing head emerging from a toilet bowl, Skibidi Toilet developed into an ongoing web-series about a post-apocalyptic conflict between toilets and cyborgs and a popular internet meme.
But the fate of the online sensation, which has amassed billions of YouTube views, is in the balance, with fans accusing the production company that controls Skibidi Toilet’s Intellectual Property of cutting out the series’ founder, a reclusive 27-year-old Russian-Georgian man named Alexey Gerasimov, known online as DaFuq?!Boom.
Gerasimov’s creation, which is a quintessential example of online “brainrot” content – slightly surreal short form videos optimised for virality – quickly became a sensation, and remains immensely popular.
According to data from Variety, DaFuqBoom gets more monthly YouTube traffic than big franchises like Marvel, Star Wars, the NBA and NFL. However, that traffic peaked in mid-2023, and has since fallen considerably.
It wasn’t long before Hollywood came knocking. In late 2023, Gerasimov began assigning intellectual property over his series to Invisible Narratives, a content production company founded by Adam Goodman, a tinsel town insider who served as president of Paramount Pictures. The production company assumed permanent ownership over Skibidi Toilet’s IP last year.
Goodman had major ambitions for Skibidi Toilet.
“He’s building something that could be the next ‘Transformers’ or could be a Marvel universe,” Goodman told a Variety podcast in 2024.
The man trusted to turn Skibidi Toilet into a Hollywood juggernaut was Michael Bay, the director behind the Transformers franchise and Goodman’s creative partner at Invisible Narratives who has been linked to the project for some time.
In 2025, after initially denying involvement in a Skibidi Toilet movie, Bay made an Instagram reel, telling fans he’d been working with Boom (Gerasimov) for over a year.
“We are really trying to figure out how to expand this universe,” Bay said.
Crystal Abdin, a professor of internet studies at Curtin University and author of TikTok and Youth Cultures, said that with the rise of viral short-form video, a trend that has been turbocharged by AI, Hollywood is likely to keep looking at ways to monetise content like Skibidi Toilet.
“Meme cultures are a goldmine for production companies looking for their next big hit,” she said.
But memes also come with the large and unruly fanbases who helped launch them into the stratosphere of virality, and therefore feel a sense of ownership over the product. This can lead to tension between fans and production houses trying to “sanitise and control the narrative around the meme,” Abdin said.
This is what happened with Skibidi Toilet, with influential fans of the series taking to YouTube and X to voice their disapproval with Invisible Narratives’ creative direction, and the Bay project. Gerasimov became increasingly less communicative after stepping back to become an executive producer last year.
Since releasing the trailer for a spin-off series called Emergence, which drew widespread condemnation from many fans, the Skibidi YouTube channel has not been updated for five months. Angry fans blamed Invisible Narratives Skibidi Toilet’s creator, rallying their online troops under the hashtag #BringBackBoom.
Last week, Invisible Narratives published a 2300 word statement addressing its relationship with Gerasimov, noting that the story “has grown increasingly disconnected from reality”.
“‘Bring Boom Back’ suggests he [Gerasimov] was excluded from something he built, and that is not reality. Alexey is and will always be the creator of Skibidi. That will never change,” Invisible Narratives said.
The statement also included screenshots of WhatsApp conversations in which Goodman urges Gerasimov to help repudiate claims that Invisible Narratives had “stolen” Skibidi Toilet from its founder.
“Just show up. Be a partner. Be a man,” Goodman wrote in November last year. Gerasimov has not commented.
Winning back those fans, whose support launched Skibidi Toilet’s meteoric rise, is essential to Goodman’s hopes of taking it one step further and building a Hollywood juggernaut.
And even if a film does go ahead, it’s a risky bet. The half-life of a meme is unpredictable, and internet trends can fade into obscurity just as quickly as they appear.
And so far, they have not been fertile ground for the film industry.
“It’s not new for a viral meme to develop into a Hollywood production,” Abdin said.
“The most notorious one was The Emoji Movie [in 2017]. It tanked at the box office.”
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Kishor Napier-Raman is a senior business writer for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Previously he worked as a CBD columnist and reporter in the federal parliamentary press gallery.Connect via X or email.