BuzzFeed is still buzzing.
The company, which was founded in 2006 and rose to prominence because of quizzes, personality tests and listicles, has gone through a number of phases (remember when it was investing in hard-charging news?) and now, with BuzzFeed Studios, has been producing a staggering amount of long- and short-form content – everything from YouTube videos to feature-length motion pictures.
It’s latest really-for-real movie is “F Marry Kill,” which is in select theaters and on demand this week, thanks to a partnership with Lionsgate. It’s a romantic horror comedy starring Lucy Hale, who recently partnered with BuzzFeed on another feature project, the dog-centered rom-com “Puppy Love.”
TheWrap spoke to Richard Alan Reid, producer of the film and president of BuzzFeed Studios, who told us how AI is informing not only the kinds of content they are investing in but also actual content, how Purina-sponsored branded content turned into a movie and how they aim to make projects that capture the zeitgeist while also remaining timeless.
What is Buzzfeed Studios in 2025?
BuzzFeed Studios is all things from distributed content right down to TikToks – short form right up to theatrical feature films. And everything in between being YouTube channels and YouTube content to documentary series to podcasts to licensing of content to license products, etc. Our aim across the whole stack is to make entertaining content, primarily for young audiences, and distribute that content to the platforms that people are choosing to watch. The way that we approach our digital series on YouTube isn’t dramatically dissimilar from the way that we’re approaching feature films.
But if I was to focus on feature films, we’ve been making them now for four years and we’ve produced about 14 or 15, movies in that time, “F Marry Kill” being the latest one to release. The mission is to make commercial movies that we believe our audience is really going to enjoy. Our audience is vast and varied, and so quite a lot can fit in. But we use our data to help inform that from development of screenplays and materials to casting decisions. We produce things at a very smart budget, and then we ensure people see the content that we make. We commit big and innovative marketing campaigns to the content that we make, to drive audiences to them.
With so many platforms, can an idea go through the process of finding a home? Do you say, “Oh this would be a great YouTube series over a movie” or vice versa? And how are you making sure the channel is fitting the content from the get-go?
It’s a little bit of both. We have different teams laser-focused on each of these categories. Our feature film group is always looking for the content that we want to make – romantic comedies, comedies, smart thrillers, action films. They’re laser focused there. I’m not having that staff also think about digital video on YouTube. But having said that, “F Marry Kill” came from a video producer. They moonlit and wrote this feature script. The feature team loved it, and we developed it a little bit more, and now it was made into a feature film. You can see exceptions to the rule.
Tell me about the data that is helping you make some of these decisions. Is it an algorithmic, machine-learning type thing? And how are you actually figuring out what to lean into and what to back away from?
We’re always looking at, effectively, a heat map of what is trending on the internet at all times. The brand of BuzzFeed is known as a curator of the bits of the internet you need to know about, or should know about, or these are the things that are trending. We have bots that are capturing what’s trending for us and telling us what’s trending. We also have humans in house, a fantastic staff, who have this sixth sense, and are deep in Reddit channels and deep in X and know what’s trending. It’s a nice blend of the two. With the premium entertainment side – across docs, TV and feature film – we’re looking at those trends, but on the digital video side, we can spot a trend and be reactionary to it within the same day and publish content and iterate off it and really latch on to the zeitgeist, or the thing that’s happening that day, or the trend that’s happening that day.
On the feature film side, it’s going to take us probably a year to get that piece of content out, if not longer. We’re not looking for flash-in-the-pan stuff. We’re looking more for longer term trends of this topic is really seeming to become a thing, or this community is really growing, or we’re spotting more and more that Gen Z are really enjoying kind of campy content, and maybe there’s an opportunity to do a bit of genre-bending and a campy thing based around some of these communities we can see forming on social media. It’s a longer term monitoring of the information.
But yeah, we have algorithms helping us with that. We have in-house tools that we’ve built, machine-led tools that are telling us some of these trends. Another way that we’re using it is our casting decisions. We’ve built in-house AI-led machines where, basically they’re taking key elements that we perceive as value with talent, and they’re stack-ranking actors based on that information. Typically you have a studio looking at, let’s say foreign value or what talent did in the last box office run or whatever. We’re obviously taking that key information, which is vital to distributors, but we’re baking in other things, like franchises they’ve been involved in that have a long staying power, or not just the size of their social following, but how engaged their audience is – would they show up if this person was in theaters in a movie, or do they really just follow them for other reasons? All that data and learning that we’ve packed in, that’s been really valuable for us.
How else is AI helping?
I mean, there’s the obvious in development and production efficiencies that we’re finding, but then we’re also embracing it from a content creation point of view. Simple things, when I say like efficiencies of automatic subbing and dubbing or quick creation of mood boards and decks or coverage on screenplays. There’s those things that will never replace the human touch but are helpful in us moving quickly, which we like to do. But now we’re moving forward and are really embracing AI for content creation again, without looking to replace human talent, instead having human talent lead the way and then let AI maximize output or provide creativity that we may be finding ourselves more limited around. An example of that, there’s a movie on our slate that we will shoot entirely on a volume stage, and that’s all through AI created assets. That’s one example. And then on the digital video side of things, we have a few shows that are in early stages of production, that are AI-created content.
For the volume stage I imagine the assets you will be creating are backdrops and things, but what about the AI-created content. And when you talk about a show that is completely created by AI – is that what’s going to air or what was developed or a combination of both?
A combination of both. And, I guess yes, the way to put it was animated characters, let’s say, but I want to be careful saying that, because we have our own in-house animation team that are all hand drawn animators who are doing incredible work for “Chikn Nuggit” and “The Land of Boggs,” our two main properties. It’s not animation in your typical way of seeing more classic animation. But an example would be, we have highly popular articles that come from buzzfeed.com that might be a list or roundups of things. How can AI generate a more immersive video experience of that list? It’s something that’s human-created but wasn’t intended for video. Can we use characters that AI creates? Or can we effectively load in stock imagery but AI created imagery that then creates an immersive video experience of that?
It seems like a lot to juggle something that is very hip and now while also creating something that is hopefully somewhat timeless and that people will revisit in 10 or 20 years. How do you juggle those two goals?
That’s our mission with our feature films. We’re doing things that for us feel very commercial but fresh and classic all at the same time, which I know I’m contradicting myself. If you take a movie like “Puppy Love,” that originally came from a bit of digital video content we made that was a fresh look at dog ownership. It was actually branded content we made for Purina on YouTube. It’s still there, still available, and, I would say, still pretty timeless. It’s a very cute video about a guy who adopts a dog, and there was a very passionate fan base for what was a piece of branded content that at its time, felt quite fresh, just because of the interactions and the tone and the way that the human was interacting with the dog.
It wasn’t a dog that’s able to speak. The dog did not speak. It acted like a dog. But it was relatable, the way that this guy chatted to his dog, just like it was a roommate or something. That became signal for us to maybe think about expanding that IP and doing more with it. And so that’s why we made the feature film of “Puppy Love.” And I think even though within “Puppy Love,” there are some modern day references, I think it’s a pretty timeless film. It’s a love story centered around dog ownership, and even though it probably feels fresh and you look at all the other romantic comedies that came out in 2023, when “Puppy Love” came out, it probably does feel more unique than the others because of that angle. It doesn’t suddenly age because it felt so sort of reactionary to an internet trend or something like that.
And I think “F Marry Kill” is the same – it’s centered around online dating, which is obviously a massive part of life these days, but it’s posing the real world question of, you don’t know who these people are, you know nothing about them. There’s potentially a threat there. And so it was us taking the common and very modern world thing of online dating, as well as this kind of surge of true crime podcasting and true crime fandom, and putting those worlds together in a bit of a campy, genre-bending vibe. Because we know our Gen Z audience particularly enjoys content that’s presented in that way. It’s all quite on-trend, but hopefully we’ve created a movie that’s quite timeless as well, one that doesn’t age quickly.
