Michael Bay Is Taking Skibidi Toilet Very Seriously

By Dustin Rowles | Film | July 25, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | Film | July 25, 2024 |

I know our audience. We skew heavily toward Millennials/Gen X, and probably about 20 percent of you are cuspers. That is to say that unless you have kids of a certain age, you probably aren’t that familiar with Skibidi Toilet unless your Instagram feed provides translations for the olds.

Skibidi Toilet is one of Generation Alpha’s first Internet memes. Its virality probably has a lot to do with the fact that it’s a combination of nonsense and the low-fi aesthetics of Roblox and Minecraft combined with Half-Life (seriously, my kids could be playing intricately designed games with breathtaking visuals, but they still play games that look like Commodore 64s designed them). I think maybe the brains of Gen A reject logic and order.

Here’s a sample. This video has 155 million views. I don’t get it, either.

There’s a Skibidi Toilet universe and scores and scores of web videos with millions of followers and billions of views. It’s hugely popular, although if you ask my kids, it’s mostly played out, which obviously makes it ripe for adaptation.

Who better to take something popular to 13-year-olds and a film and TV franchise and sap whatever cool remains than Michael Bay? He and former Paramount Pictures president Adam Goodman are developing it, which is how we ended up with glorious paragraphs like this one from Variety:

That Goodman is even presenting migrating Skibidi IP to TV or film as an option is a testament to the audience size the property has amassed on YouTube and Roblox, where the monetization opportunity is ample. As a new Variety Intelligence Platform data analysis makes clear, the audience growth for all things Skibidi has been staggering.

The announcement has also produced this sentence via reader Ethan W.:

“I’ve always been a director that believes in taking risks,” filmmaker Michael Bay, who is working on the project with Invisible Narratives as chief creative adviser, told The Post. “Audiences yearn for fresh, new ideas. With Skibidi, it’s a new world of what the younger generation is watching, and I’m taking it very seriously.”

Aside from the euphonious quality of the word itself, I don’t get the appeal. But Skibidi Toilet is not for me, except to use Skibidi Ohio as an insult for J.D. Vance. It is for the kids, and it will be up to the kids to do the right thing and reject this because it comes from Michael Bay.

(Hat Tip: Ethan W)