The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds.
French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge.
The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend.
Photo: AFP
Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema event, selling 300,000 tickets over the weekend in France.
The film was seen more than 11 million times in its first 24 hours on YouTube, a spokesperson said, adding it was “undoubtedly one of the biggest launches in the history” of the platform in France.
The 22-year-old content creator started posting video game footage in his mid-teens and his livewire energy has since catapulted him to superstardom among young French people.
He has more than 8 million subscribers on YouTube and more than 10 million followers on other platforms.
“I’ve always liked to have adventures — when I was younger, they were on video games,” he told AFP in an interview before the release.
After obsessing over Minecraft and Fortnite for years, he said he wanted those experiences to be real.
Inoxtag posts relentlessly upbeat content and challenge videos like 30 seconds to save a life or Five days to walk across Corsica, but also professes a serious concern for the environment.
His film has moments of tension and personal drama online documentaries are expected to serve up, while mixing serious issues like over-tourism and pollution.
Fans have been in raptures over the movie, but the French media has not exactly embraced it.
The newspaper Liberation accused the filmmakers of overlooking the work of the Sherpas, the Nepalese who help climbers with their ascents — though some later joined Inoxtag on stage in Paris.
Mountaineer and photographer Pascal Tournaire told L’Equipe the movie was “very egotistical” and said the YouTube star had not achieved any real feat.
On the other side of the ledger, Mathis Dumas, the climber who helped Inoxtag prepare for the ascent, told local media the young star had a “real love” for the mountain.
Fans gathered outside the cinema in Paris would not hear a word of criticism.
“I know there are plenty of people who climb the mountain and don’t film themselves,” 19-year-old student Lucie Bonin said. “But it’s wild that a YouTuber is entertaining us like this, just by setting himself such crazy goals.”
If the pitch for Kaizen sounds like it comes from a movie, that is probably because it does — at least partially.
Inoxtag said he was inspired by 2017 French comedy film The Climb, based on a true story where a young man from the Paris suburbs sets out to conquer Everest to impress his prospective girlfriend.
The online star is aware that his motivations come as much from fantasy as they do from concerns over real-world issues.
He said one of his great inspirations was legendary Japanese comic creator Eiichiro Oda whose One Piece series is the biggest-selling manga comic in history.
“If he comes across my documentary, I’d just like to say thank you for making me believe that dreams can come true,” he said of Oda.
The social media star bade an ostentatious farewell to his fans at the beginning of April, swearing off all social media for the duration of his ascent.
With his absence came tension and speculation — would he make it to the summit after all?
It is probably not too much of a spoiler to reveal that he did get to the summit.
He was keen to play down the prerelease tension.
“I don’t want everyone to focus too much on whether I succeeded or failed,” he said. “I want people to see a little bit of the journey I made to get there.”
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