How a failed horror movie director co-founded one of the most popular yoga channels on YouTube
Chris Sharpe co-founded two incredibly popular YouTube channels — Hilah Cooking and Yoga With Adriene.
Twenty years ago, Chris Sharpe thought he was on a traditional Hollywood path—well, almost traditional. He and a group of collaborators were making straight-to-DVD horror films, chasing the long-established wisdom that if you kept budgets low enough, you could turn a tidy profit selling DVDs through distributors like Best Buy. It was a system that had worked for a generation of scrappy filmmakers, from Roger Corman to the 1990s festival-circuit auteurs Sharpe idolized.
But the timing couldn’t have been worse.
“We were making stuff and had relationships with distributors that would get our movies into Best Buy,” Sharpe recalled. “I directed one, was in the process of directing a second one… and that kind of fell apart along with the DVD industry right around the same time.”
As the Great Recession hit and the DVD market collapsed, so too did Sharpe’s filmmaking momentum. “I didn’t know where else to go,” he admitted. “I felt like the independent movie thing was not panning out, and I felt like I was unemployable.”
What followed was an unexpected career pivot that would eventually lead Sharpe to launch not one but two massively influential YouTube channels—first the beloved food channel Hilah Cooking, and later the global phenomenon Yoga With Adriene, which today boasts more than 13 million subscribers and a thriving subscription streaming app.
This is the story of how a failed indie film project—starring, coincidentally, two women who would go on to become his creative partners—pushed Sharpe into the earliest days of YouTube, and how he helped turn personality-driven evergreen content into a multimillion-dollar digital media empire.
The End of DVDs and the Start of Something New
Sharpe’s last film project was a post-rapture horror comedy about a punk rock band traversing Texas after Judgment Day. But the project never made it to the finish line.
“The money got cut off while we were in the middle of production,” Sharpe said. “That was late 2008… I was completely unaware of what was going on in the world because I was out in the middle of nowhere making a movie.”