How Is Michael Bay’s ‘Skibidi Toilet’ Movie and TV Deal Not A ’30 Rock’ Joke?
What’s more surprising: the recent news that Michael Bay is turning the surreal and massively popular YouTube series “Skibidi Toilet” into a movie and television franchise, or the fact Tina Fey and her writers room never thought to have Tracy Jordan do something similarly insane?
When the Georgian YouTuber Alexey Gerasimov first started posting bizarro videos that he created using the popular sandbox video game Garry’s Mod in early 2023, members of the generations that made it through elementary school without making most of their formative memories in front of an iPad screen gawked at the outrageous view counts that each “Skibidi Toilet” video racked up in a startlingly short amount of time. Today, each new “Skibidi Toilet” release attracts tens of millions of clicks from kids old enough to navigate a touch screen but young enough to find a singing head twisting around in a toilet bowl to be peak content — thus, it was only a matter of time before traditional media attempted to cash in on the “Skibidi Toilet” craze with the world’s most unhinged and upsetting adaptation since the live-action Super Mario Bros. movie.
On the most recent episode of the Strictly Business podcast, former Paramount Pictures president Adam Goodman revealed that he and 59-year-old Bay, who specializes in by-the-numbers action movies that don’t delve into much more surreal content than anthropomorphic robots spouting slightly racist slang, plan to adapt Generation Alpha’s most mind-meltingly uncanny YouTube sensation into both a movie and a TV show.
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Even God Cop would be more watchable than that.
“We are absolutely in talks right now, both on the television side and the earliest conversations right now on the film side,” Goodman said of “Skibidi Toilet’s” long-form future during the conversation. “But it’s not a be-all, end-all for us.”
Through their “Tra-digital” film studio Invisible Narratives, Bay and Goodman want to be on the cutting edge of content that captures the attention of today’s tweens and teens, an age range that has long been Bay’s bread and butter. To Invisible Narratives, “Skibidi Toilet” and Gerasimov represent unlimited untapped potential to bridge the gap between the YouTube generation and old-school media like TV and movies. As such, Goodman put on his best Jack Donaghy impression as he declared of Gerasimov’s delirious YouTube series without a shred of irony, “He’s building something that could be the next Transformers or could be a Marvel universe.”
“I will say that Michael (Bay) and Jeffrey Beecroft, who’s his longtime production designer and a colleague of his that’s worked with him on all of his movies, have been working very closely with Alexey to really professionalize the kind of back engine of this, to make sure, if we ever decide to go film or television, that this is kind of lifted beyond just the resources that creators have on the internet,” Goodman explained of the media machine that seeks to outdo The Jackie Jormp-Jomp Story in terms of adaptation absurdity.
On top of the “Skibidi Toilet” TV and movie projects, Gerasimov and his new partners will also branch out into physical merchandising with a series of toys and branded products centered around the surreal series. If they need a medical spokesperson to claim that whatever plunger they peddle will “keep the bones loose,” they should think about giving Dr. Leo Spaceman a call — he’s very good.
