Free to Watch, Which Is Probably What It Deserves

According to IMDb’s bottom chart, Kartoffelsalat sits at number 25 among the worst films ever committed to release—somewhere between Daniel the Wizard and From Justin to Kelly, which is a sentence I didn’t expect to write. The film was a 2016 German production built entirely around a roster of YouTube celebrities, the kind of deal where everyone involved got a payday and the audience absorbed the cost in lost neurons.

The premise: a virus turns schoolchildren into ravenous, eating-obsessed zombies, and a group of YouTubers are the ones fated to stop it. Whatever you’re imagining, you’re probably right. The film made money anyway, because the people in it had combined follower counts in the tens of millions and their audiences would watch anything they appeared in. That’s not a cynical observation—it’s the entire business model, stated plainly.

It’s now free on YouTube, which feels like the correct final destination. Something produced by and for the attention economy, returned to the attention economy, where it will live alongside everything else forever. The move from cinema ticket to free stream didn’t change what it is—it just removed the last barrier that might have made you hesitate. Watch it if you want. It costs nothing except the time, and you were probably going to waste that anyway.