This feature is part of the Voices of the Now & Next series—a collaboration between VaynerSpeakers and the New York Stock Exchange, highlighting influential leaders shaping markets, culture, and business today.
Max Reisinger | CEO, Creator Camp
Max Reisinger is building an entirely new road into Hollywood, and audiences are already lining up to drive on it.
The founder of Creator Camp and Camp Studios has had a whirlwind year. His studio's debut film went from RV tours to sold-out theaters. A European distribution deal followed. And in the past few months, projects like Obsessions and Backroom have, in his words, "blown everything out of the water."
Creator Camp began with a problem Reisinger kept running into as a creator.
"I got my start on YouTube seven-ish years ago, and I really wanted to make longer-form work," he explains. One 30-minute video, three months of work, earned two million views and a few thousand dollars. "I was like, wow, I'm able to get really phenomenal reach, but I'm making almost no money off of this."
Meanwhile, a Hollywood film reaching a fraction of that audience through ticket sales was generating multiples more. The gap between reach and revenue became his obsession. "The original idea was: can I just put a YouTube video in theaters? If some of my audience would show up, I would make significantly more money."
Today, that idea has grown into a two-sided operation: Creator Camp incubates talent through events and community, while Camp Studios acts as the engine, producing films and running commercial work with brands like Canon, Anthropic, and Notion, where creators serve as recognizable faces and directors.
Community is the buzzword every brand is chasing. Reisinger built one that sells out theaters with zero marketing budget, so what is everyone else getting wrong?
"Trying to engineer community... forcing it," he says. Creator Camp worked because it was built bottom-up. "I wanted to be a part of that community. I was looking for community. These are my friends."
He describes his internet thesis with a phrase his team coined internally: energetic echolocation. "Like how bats put out their signals; if you have an idea, a message, a thing, the internet can find it an audience. The question is how you amplify and get behind what's already working."
Hollywood, he argues, often does the opposite: "Here's something manufactured in a boardroom, and we need to force marketing spend behind it to get people to care."
It might seem contradictory: a generation raised on phones, and a creator-turned-studio-head betting on movie theaters. For Reisinger, the two go hand in hand.
"The medium is the message," he says, borrowing from Marshall McLuhan. "Since the beginning of time, humans have gathered in dark spaces around light, from fires to movie theaters. That's intrinsic to the human experience."
Theaters demand intention. You put your phone away. You commit. And crucially, they carry trust. "On YouTube, anyone can post anything, so you don't necessarily trust what you're watching. That changes how you make the content, too."
It's also why Camp Studios started with theatrical releases rather than streaming. "It values the media so much higher, especially for us as a newer studio; it helps value it in the marketplace." On streaming fatigue, he's blunt: "I have decision fatigue. I sometimes don't even want to go on Netflix. I think the lost art is curation."
Perhaps the most striking part of the Camp story: it's all been built without venture capital.
That independence is deliberate. "We want to be super intentional about the money we take on," Reisinger says. "It's more about how big we want to go, and can we find a partner aligned with getting there?" He's open to outside capital down the line, but any partnership will happen on Camp's terms.
Reisinger famously shifted his framing from building a bridge to Hollywood to building an entirely new highway. What does that road look like for a young filmmaker starting today?
"You might not even need to go to Hollywood to get permission," he says. "With the movie we made, it was our money, we cultivated an audience online, we went directly to theaters, that audience showed up, and we had a profitable movie. That's an entirely new lane that did not exist before."
Interestingly, the journey has deepened his empathy for the old guard. "It's made me understand why Hollywood is the way it is, and why it's gatekept in many ways. But now people can earn it if they have an idea. There's just another path."
That philosophy extends to the Camp Film Festival, which he hopes can become a new stamp of quality. The fix, he's found, lies in the programming. "The issue with a lot of Hollywood right now is that it's detached from what audiences want, decided by people who aren't as connected to this generation. For us, it's about closing that gap and moving at the speed of culture."
He points to A24 as the model for what comes next: curation as brand. "People will watch it because it's an A24 movie. Building that curation and taste helps consumers, and it lets you push audiences toward things they didn't know they wanted. That's the job of the curator. But it's hard to do without trust."
Ask Reisinger about the legacy he wants Creator Camp to leave twenty years from now, and he'll point to one of the company's core mantras: make timeless work.
"I call it the poster-on-the-wall effect," he says. "Growing up, what movie poster did you have on your wall? Could it be our brand, or something we make? That's the effect we want to have on this next generation, to be deeply imprinted into people's lives and make them feel something timeless."
Growing up, Reisinger wanted to be an architect. In some ways, that's exactly what he became. "I like the blueprints," he says. "The infrastructure has become the art."
