The phenomenon known as Skibidi Toilet is a little hard to explain. At a glance, it’s a meme where a man’s head pops out of a toilet and spins around as he sings “skibidi dop dop dop yes yes, skibidi double-u reeh reeh.”
You can stop reading here if that’s quite enough for you. If I could have stopped there myself, believe me, I would have.
Plunge a bit deeper and you’ll discover that singing toilet man is just the beginning of a (currently) 76-part machinima series on the DaFuq!?Boom! YouTube channel. The series depicts a war between toilets with human heads—the very Skibidi Toilets themselves—and our planet’s defenders, humanoids with cameras and other electronics for heads. Animator Alexey Gerasimov, known as Boom, uses Source Filmmaker to create the series—if that singing head looks familiar, it’s the Male_07 character model from Half-Life 2 (also used in some webcomic by some guy about a million years ago). G-Man (here known as G-Toilet) and other characters from the Half-Life series make appearances, too.
The absurdist machinima series, and other Skibidi Toilet-related videos, exploded in popularity to the tune of 65 billion views in 2023, with another 15 billion or so on TikTok. Those numbers are precisely why Hollywood has come a-callin’—namely former Paramount Pictures president Adam Goodman and director Michael Bay of Transformers fame. Yep, that singing head in the toilet might just hit the big screen someday.
“Skibidi Toilet is IP. And that’s the best way to describe it, ” said Goodman on Variety’s “Strictly Business” podcast today, which I listened to as a portion of my soul slowly crumbled to dust. Though it began as a meme, Goodman says it’s grown to incorporate “lore and cliffhangers, and about 20 other channels that are making daily content in the Skibidi Toilet multiverse.”
As I mourned the loss of millions of my brain cells at the phrase “Skibidi Toilet multiverse,” Goodman went on to call its popularity on YouTube and Tiktok “unprecedented” and said he and Michael Bay partnered with Boom and encouraged him “to look at this as though he’s building something that could be the next Transformers, or could be a Marvel’s universe.” Goodman says they are “absolutely in talks right now, both on the television side and the earliest conversations right now on the film side.”
Interestingly, or perhaps chillingly, Goodman elaborated that it’s not exactly critical that Skibidi Toilet make the leap from the internet to more traditional forms of media.
“Film and television is a flex, it looks cool, it helps to fuel the consumer product business which is obviously a really important thing,” Goodman said. “It helps buyers at Walmart or Target to know there’s going to be media and ads spent against this thing. But we’re pretty successful just on YouTube as it is right now, so if we stay in this world, we’re okay, and if we move into more traditional [media], than that would just be for Michael [Bay] and I, pretty awesome, and for Boom, our creator, kind of a lifelong dream of his.”
Yeah, it’s a bit arresting to hear so bluntly that the ultimate purpose of a film or TV project could simply be to act as a tool for creating interest from buyers at Walmart. Call me naive, but I still like to at least pretend there’s a shred of artistic endeavor taking place in film and TV, even when a project is clearly 99% marketing. Maybe I was overly optimistic. I guess we’ll find out if and when the Skibidi Toilet multiverse comes to Target—I mean, comes to movie theaters everywhere.
Finally, Garry Newman of Garry’s Mod expressed his thoughts on the topic as succinctly as he always does:
