Dan and Riya look beyond Beverly Valley with first feature film and two comedy series
A behind-the-scenes photograph supplied by Toronto-based Beverly Valley Productions.
Photo credit: Beverly Valley Productions
Toronto-based Beverly Valley Productions is developing its first feature film and two comedy series, with all three projects set outside the fictional world that brought YouTube creators Daniel Kipnis and Riya Malik their audience. The company is currently exploring financing and distribution partnerships for the projects, which remain in development.
The feature is a drama, while the two series are comedies. Beverly Valley Productions has not announced working titles or production dates, and the company is keeping the details under wraps while discussions with potential partners continue. Production manager Kaleb Carmichael confirmed those details to SCENE 49 in a follow-up to an email interview with Kipnis and Malik.
For the Toronto pair, creating stories for a larger screen has been a longstanding ambition. They remember finding what they thought was Disney’s head-office number online when they were children and calling to ask about auditions. The number generally connected them to customer service, although, as they recalled, the people who answered were patient with two young performers trying to find their way into entertainment.
Kipnis and Malik say they left school after having planned to become doctors, and began filming with a camera belonging to Kipnis’s mother. “We dropped out of school. We were on our way to becoming doctors, but instead we took Daniel’s mom’s camera and started a YouTube channel,” they told SCENE 49.
That channel became Dan and Riya, home to Beverly Valley, a fictional community whose teenage characters, rivalries and relationships have supplied years of stories. The channel has attracted approximately 3.5 million subscribers, giving the creators an established audience before they pursued a streaming series. They later met Ryan Chaba, now a director, writer and producer at Beverly Valley Productions, and developed the company’s first show, Frenemies Forever.
The creators say working on YouTube taught them to respond to audience feedback while stories were still being produced. “What we learned from producing specifically for online audiences is how to take immediate feedback and put it back into the story, almost live!” they said. That process, they added, encouraged them to rethink storylines and became part of how they developed their writing.
Tubi named Dan and Riya among the first creators joining its Tubi for Creators program in June 2025, bringing their Beverly Valley High videos to the streaming service. In November, Tubi announced Till Drama Do Us Part among its first exclusive series from digital-first creators. The show arrived in 2026 and follows Beverly Valley characters at a destination wedding where old relationships and secrets complicate the celebrations. Their earlier material currently appears on Tubi under the catalogue title Dan & Riya.
Canadian television viewers may also remember Kipnis and Malik from the fifth season of The Amazing Race Canada in 2017. CTV introduced them then as a team of Toronto YouTube creators, years before the formation of the production company they are now expanding.
The larger projects bring different production demands. Kipnis and Malik said a typical YouTube shoot relies on a small team in which people take on several jobs, while film and television development requires substantially more planning around financing, casting and hiring a crew. They are particularly concerned with finding collaborators who understand their material. “Finding the right team, professionals who get our vision, is difficult,” they said.
Carmichael said the company plans to develop Canadian content and work with Canadian talent and crews as it expands. For the feature drama and two comedy series, those remain intentions: no financing, distribution partners or production schedules have been announced.
Toronto remains their home base. “Canada is our home, and we wouldn't be able to do what we do without the support of our community,” Kipnis and Malik said, adding that the city’s production infrastructure has been useful as they pursue larger projects. They would like to make room for Canadian stories in the company’s future work.
The pair continue to work on their YouTube productions alongside those plans. In their October interview, they said they were writing and producing the third season of Pretty Girl Secrets for their channel. “Rather than a shift, we see it more like an expansion,” they said about their move into streaming and film. “We want our stories to reach as many people as possible, and that requires us to be open to all mediums.”
Asked where they would like the company to be in the coming years, Kipnis and Malik mentioned the Oscars, the Emmys and eventually employing 100 people. Their nearer goal is to complete a feature film they can submit to festivals, while finding the financing and distribution partners needed to make that possible.
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