Sony Hands Its Horror Label to a YouTube Veteran

Sony Pictures has put a YouTube veteran in charge of its horror label. The studio announced in October 2026 that Fede Goldenberg, who spent fifteen years at YouTube rising to Head of Film and TV Partnerships, will run Screen Gems, the horror label behind genre staples like Insidious and Resident Evil. The appointment comes with a new creative strategy: the label will expand beyond traditional genre films to develop theatrical projects with digital-native creators who have built devoted audiences online.

It is the clearest sign yet that Hollywood's talent pipeline now runs through owned audiences rather than studio development offices. "The next generation of great filmmakers is already building audiences on the platform," Goldenberg said of the move, as reported by TheWrap. Sanford Panitch, president of Sony Pictures' Motion Picture Group, called Goldenberg uniquely suited to translate storytelling from digital platforms to the big screen, according to TheWrap.

A horror label built for the creator era

The Screen Gems name has been around for nearly a century, first attached to the animation arm of Columbia Pictures and later to the television unit now known as Sony Pictures Television. In its modern form the horror label is a mid-budget genre machine. The pivot keeps that identity while opening the doors to creators who arrived through YouTube rather than film school, giving the horror label a direct line to the talent reshaping the box office.

The timing is not subtle. In 2026, creator-made features crashed the theatrical market: Curry Barker's Obsession, a Focus Features release from the YouTuber-turned-filmmaker, earned over $500 million worldwide on a budget of less than a million dollars. Kane Parsons' Backrooms expanded his viral analog-horror series into a theatrical feature, and Markiplier's Iron Lung rode its built-in audience to a digital release on YouTube itself. Sony watched a sub-million-dollar internet horror outgross most studio tentpoles, and its answer is to hire someone who knows exactly how those creators work.

What creator deals look like versus the old playbook

Traditional talent deals start with an audition or a script sale. Creator deals start with an audience of millions that already trusts the filmmaker. That distinction matters because creators typically serve as the directors, writers, producers, entrepreneurs and stars of their own work, which makes them protective over intellectual property rights and the experience of their fans. Sony hired Goldenberg precisely for his fluency with those sensitivities, an insider familiar with the hire told TheWrap, which explained how the horror label plans to court them.

For Gen Z creators, the message is blunt: an owned audience is now the strongest resume in Hollywood. Instead of grinding through representation gatekeepers, a filmmaker who can prove that a million subscribers will show up on opening weekend walks into meetings with leverage no first-time director had a decade ago. The horror label is betting that this leverage produces the next franchise, not just the next viral video.

The Brucks chapter and what comes next

Ashley Brucks, who had led the horror label as president since 2023, transitions to a producing role on upcoming projects. Her record explains why Sony is keeping her close: she brought in the original Paranormal Activity, which launched a franchise worth nearly a billion dollars, relaunched Scream in 2022, and oversaw A Quiet Place and its sequel. Goldenberg will report to Panitch as he reshapes the label's slate.

His resume reads like a map of the creator economy. Goldenberg was part of the YouTube Originals era, played a key role in YouTube acquiring the Oscars, and guided creators from launch to audiences of more than fifty million subscribers, according to Tubefilter, which covered the horror label hire. He managed partnerships with early digital networks like Maker Studios and Fullscreen, and The Hollywood Reporter credited him as a guiding hand in elevating the careers of Barker, Parsons and Markiplier into the filmmakers they became this year. Before YouTube, he led content acquisition and distribution across Latin America at Globosat, Terra Networks Brasil and FremantleMedia Latin America.

The bottom line is that a major studio has stopped treating creators as marketing and started treating them as the studio system itself. Other labels are racing to sign viral talent, but Sony is the first to rebuild a genre label around the idea. If the bet pays off, the next decade of theatrical horror will be written by people who started in their bedrooms, and the horror label that signs them first wins the franchise. More on how horror keeps reinventing itself at our movies coverage, including Mike Flanagan's crime-horror reset of The Exorcist.