Dhar Mann will be speaking at TheGrill 2025 on Tuesday.
What do a funeral scene, a courtroom drama and a playground fight have in common? Dhar Mann.
On any given day, 10 different production crews work simultaneously inside Mann’s 125,000-square-foot Burbank campus, creating scripted content for his 140 million fans across YouTube, Facebook and other platforms. When TheWrap visited, actors filled the pews for a funeral scene, while others gathered in a courtroom to argue a case on moral values. Outside, teachers guided a group of child actors from an on-set classroom to a playground set, as another production wrapped up for the day.
This isn’t a traditional Hollywood backlot, but a creator-built empire designed to churn out five hours of scripted content every week. Compared to traditional competitors like the Disney Channel, who release roughly 10 hours of shows like “Wizards Beyond Waverly Place” over a four-month span, Mann’s studio releases a high volume of content to meet the demands of a hungry digital audience.
Dhar Mann Studios produces five 25-minute episodes weekly and distributes them across social platforms including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, the Dhar Mann app and even on Samsung TV’s FAST channel. His family-friendly content often tells underdog stories of victims standing up to their bullies, middle schoolers learning moral lessons and even an abusive boss getting a reality check. His YouTube videos consistently earn two to three million views per video with some garnering over 45 million views to date. Each episode places new characters in high-drama scenarios that end with an uplifting takeaway.
Some of the creator’s most viewed videos have titles like “Gold Digger Outsmarts Boyfriend,” “Kid Regrets Being in Charge of the House” and “Popular Girl Rejects Skater Boy.” These tropes repeat throughout his content, often dealing with characters who are othered for socio-economic reasons.
Mann realized early on that renting space in L.A. was too costly, so he built his own three-studio production hub, complete with neighborhoods, classrooms and even a fully functional auto shop. Over the past seven years, Mann has built a new kind of production company, one that rivals traditional TV studios in output while using the speed, efficiency and real-time audience feedback found on newer platforms to disrupt the old Hollywood model.
“With us, everything is about logistical efficiency,” Mann told TheWrap. “We constantly think about how we save time by having to avoid breakdowns, crews walking long distances, so we can record more content in a shorter amount of time.”
Humble start
In the early days, Mann and his wife had to sleep on the floor because they used their own furniture to furnish his first set, which was modeled after his own studio apartment. Many of Mann’s videos tackle moral dilemmas and socio-economic discrepancies. As he told more of these stories, Mann built a low-income and high-income apartment set.
“Everything was very scrappy when we started,” Mann said. “We stayed true to our mission, trying to put out content to help people, and we were able to build a really amazing community – that’s over 140 million people strong now – that rely on our content to help them get through tough days.”
The third set Mann invested in was a school, which he said changed the game for his company. Initially, he found most of his success on Facebook with middle-aged women, but school videos expanded his reach to the children’s entertainment market.
“It opened my eyes that young people watch YouTube,” he said. “Now it sounds very obvious, but seven years ago it wasn’t as clear. This set here is what helped enable our success on the platform.”
With a full-size classroom, functional lockers and a cafeteria, Mann has utilized the school set for some of his most viral videos. His most-viewed video “Kids Make Fun of Boy With Autism, They Instantly Regret It” was set in an elementary school and has over 68 million views to date. The 8-minute video starred several child actors and led the YouTuber to lean more into that demographic with his content.
Quick expansion
Within six months in the initial Burbank studio lot, his team filled out the 50,000-square-foot space. In the following year, that doubled to 125,000 square feet, with three full studios. Mann already has plans to expand to 200,000 square feet and 20 film crews by next year, doubling his content for 2026.
In addition to the apartments and school sets, the first studio included a courtroom, a hospital and even a plane. Mann said that the plane was once functional and was scrapped from a junk lot. His second studio contained a neighborhood exterior, detailed with functional sidewalks, streets and an auto-repair shop. His company owns over 50 vehicles, including cop cars, and makes all of its props and wardrobe in-house to cut costs.
The studio’s sets easily transform from a convenience store to a funeral home or a neighborhood block party to a crime scene. Mann even built a pawn shop on site because getting L.A. shooting permits was too expensive.
With over 1,500 actors on set annually and a core team of over 200 full-time staff, Mann has committed to bringing steady production jobs to L.A.
“At a time when so many production jobs are leaving LA, we’re actually hiring more people locally,” Mann said. “The No. 1 feedback that I get from folks that come from the traditional production world is that they’re so happy to finally find consistent work.”
The third studio featured a mall, tailored for branded integrations. Though none of the storefronts were tied to specific brands, they emulated several major corporations that could tack on their name in case of a future partnership. The mall included a “bullseye” store, a juicery and a shoe store, to name a few.
“Let’s say Target wanted to work with us, not only would their brand be in videos that are getting over 25 million long-form views a day, but we could do custom, integrated branded storylines,” Mann said of his vision for the bullseye store set. “We’re seeing more and more brands that are shifting their budgets from traditional, paid advertising to branded content and storytelling.”
As opposed to the traditional entertainment model, Dhar Mann Studios has a 21-day cycle from script to screen. The ease and efficiency of his in-house production team helps him keep up with the quick pace.
“It’s a little bit of a culture shock to those that are coming from other big media companies,” Mann said of the production speed. “This feels like the future when you’re here, and I think people are pretty excited that we get to control every aspect of production from end to end.”
Mann said his green-lighting process is usually about 24 hours or so, allowing him and his team to say yes to more ideas and troubleshoot on the job. This speed allows him to implement audience feedback in real time and create the spinoffs or backstories that his fans want to see.
Looking ahead for the company, Mann has created his own podcast studio in house and is preparing for the launch of his show “What Happens Next.” As opposed to his scripted content, this show will give his audience a taste of real-world rags-to-riches stories, some of which may have inspired his scripted content.
From a scrappy studio apartment shoot using his own furniture to a three-studio campus, Mann has built a production machine fueled by creator-led innovation that is only continuing to grow.
