Vivienne Medrano Built Hazbin Hotel on Patreon, and Now Hollywood Pays the Bills

Vivienne Medrano

Photo: John Manard / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 28, 1992 Maryland, United States
Occupation	Animator and director
Awards	Streamy · Astra TV · Ursa Major

The pilot that made Vivienne Medrano’s name had no studio or distributor behind it. It had Medrano, a crew of freelance animators and a Patreon page, and it took more than two years to draw a single half-hour episode of Hazbin Hotel, a cabaret musical about the princess of Hell trying to rehabilitate sinners in a rundown hotel. That episode has since drawn well over a hundred million views on YouTube. The question her career asks now is a different one: what happens to a do-it-yourself universe once Amazon and Warner Bros. are paying for it.

Medrano, who signs her work online as VivziePop, grew up in Maryland in a Salvadoran-American family. She traces the urge to animate to watching Bambi as a child; by third grade she was drawing in MS Paint, and her early work borrowed heavily from Invader Zim. She was raised Presbyterian and has said she remembers sitting in church questioning the stories of Adam and Eve and of Lucifer, which is close to a summary of the show she would spend a decade building.

In September 2010, weeks before her 18th birthday (she was born on October 28, 1992), she moved to New York to study at the School of Visual Arts. Before graduating she had launched the webcomic ZooPhobia and the VivziePop channel, directed a first short, The Son of 666, and finished a thesis film, Timber, named after the Pitbull and Kesha song, which won a Dusty Award for character animation. Months after taking her BFA in 2014 she posted an animated video for Kesha’s “Die Young” that went on to draw more than 50 million views.

Then came the unglamorous stretch. She freelanced for about two years and, from 2017 to 2019, animated and designed characters for Nico Colaleo’s Too Loud on DreamWorksTV, while asking fans to fund something nobody had commissioned. Patreon pledges, not YouTube’s ad algorithm, kept the Hazbin Hotel pilot alive, she told Cartoon Brew, and in 2016 she closed ZooPhobia to make room for it. Her studio, SpindleHorse, released the pilot in October 2019 and a second one a month later: Helluva Boss, about a small firm of imps who take murder contracts on the living.

The jump arrived fast. In August 2020 A24 picked up Hazbin Hotel as a series, without a distributor attached, which is why the first season was capped at eight 22-minute episodes. Helluva Boss stayed on YouTube, where its first season opened that Halloween, and a ZooPhobia short, Bad Luck Jack, won an Ursa Major Award. When Hazbin Hotel finally reached Prime Video in January 2024, co-produced with Bento Box Entertainment, it became the largest global debut for a new animated title on the service. A year later Guinness named it the most in-demand animated show in the world.

The leap had a cost, and part of it landed on the people who had paid for the beginning. The voice cast of the pilot was not asked back for the series. Critics split: Variety’s Alison Herman found the first season lost in its own chaotic, contradictory atmosphere and measured it unfavorably against The Good Place, while Rendy Jones at RogerEbert.com wrote that Medrano’s ambitious wings had been trimmed by corporate streaming demands. She did not argue. She later called fitting her story into eight short episodes “borderline-impossible” and said that season was made “in a vacuum.” In June 2026 Amazon MGM Studios had YouTube take down a fan-song video by Gabriel C. Brown, the pilot’s singing voice of Alastor, animated by one of the Helluva Boss animators. It was a small takedown, and it made plain who now holds the keys to the hotel.

The second season, released in October 2025, is the one she says the show was “meant to be,” and it briefly became the most-watched series on Prime Video worldwide. That month the cast sang it live for one night at Broadway’s Majestic Theatre. Prime Video had already taken Helluva Boss in April 2025, on terms rare for a streamer: Medrano and SpindleHorse kept full creative control and final cut, and she signed a first-look deal for new projects. Its third season, fifteen episodes split in two halves, opened on October 14, 2026, with the rest due in 2027. In August 2026 Hazbin Hotel won best animated series at the Astra TV Awards, and her Australian outpost, Spindleroo, has already made a pilot of Homestuck, the first SpindleHorse project not built on her own characters.

Medrano is bisexual and on the asexual spectrum, and the hotel’s queer cast, with a gay Angel Dust, a bisexual Charlie and an asexual Alastor, is central to why its audience is so attached. She has said Charlie and her partner Vaggie feel like two sides of herself, and after the Prime Video launch she described herself as a “queer woman on the internet who made something popular.” In 2025 she said she has ADHD.

The map ahead is unusually clear for an animator. Hazbin Hotel was planned as five seasons, Prime Video ordered the fifth and final one in April 2026, and the third is in production without a date. At Annecy in June 2026, Warner Bros. Pictures Animation announced Prehistoria, an original animated musical for cinemas that she will write and direct, her first feature and the first project of this size she has set outside the Hellaverse. For the first time, the studio money comes before the audience, which is the reverse of how she built everything else.

Tags: a24, Vivienne Medrano, Hazbin Hotel, Helluva Boss, Kesha, animators

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