Hollywood executives have spent years trying to get Gen Z moviegoers to consistently show up to theaters. It turns out a big part of the solution is a pair of Gen Z directors who are putting Hollywood on its ear and opening its mind to a potential wellspring of new talent.
The wild low-budget success of A24’s “Backrooms” and Focus Features’ “Obsession,” which have combined for $185 million and counting at the domestic box office against a combined $11 million production spend, represents a rare instance of younger audiences rallying to see these films in theaters. And while past Gen Z hits like “Five Nights at Freddy’s” and “A Minecraft Movie” were big studio affairs, these two horror films hail from 26-year-old Curry Barker and 20-year-old Kane Parsons, both of whom built their body of work through YouTube.
“No longer are film schools where these kids learn their craft,” one agent told TheWrap. “The technology of YouTube and social media means they now get to learn how to write, direct, produce and edit their stories at a remarkably younger age than previous generations.”
The success of these movies has created buzz over whether YouTube may be the next big pipeline of Hollywood talent, particularly for a generation of filmmakers that before this weekend wasn’t getting as many opportunities to leave their mark on the theatrical landscape as past generations did in their 20s. But it’s worth remembering that the path from the internet to the silver screen is older than one might think.
While this pipeline has long been established, what has changed with Gen Z directors like Parsons and Barker is that they have been fully immersed in the YouTube creator space long before they take their first step into filmmaking. While Hollywood veterans have marveled on countless panels at how feature-quality films can be made with iPhones and edited with cheap software, this generation has been raised entirely in that world and has a more intuitive knowledge of how to navigate it.
“You can hone your craft and test with reactions in real time. No longer do filmmakers have to play theory all day or wait till someone blesses them. It’s now about how the internet is curated,” a manager told TheWrap.
An old pipeline gets new attention
James Wan, who worked with Parsons as a producer on “Backrooms,” has an idea of what Parsons is experiencing right now. He was 27 when his feature debut “Saw” launched not just his career but a wave of gory horror in the 2000s, having come up among the wave of millennial directors that used digital cameras to shoot their shorts and computers loaded with Premiere Pro to edit them.
Now, with his own horror production studio Atomic Monster, Wan and company president Michael Clear worked with Parsons to bring his vision of a fluorescent light-soaked hellscape to theaters. But it is not the first time a YouTube short has captivated him to the point that he’s wanted to turn it into a feature.
“The very first movie that Atomic Monster produced was ‘Lights Out,’ and it started as a YouTube short that David Sandberg made in 2013,” Wan told TheWrap. “It had the same basic appeal as Kane’s original short ‘The Backrooms.’ It’s a cool, basic concept hook of someone turning the light on and off, and when the lights are off, there’s a demon sitting there, and when you see the lights back on, the demon’s gone. And then it just gets progressively closer when this person keeps turning the lights on and off.”
That “Lights Out” short got Atomic Monster on the map in Hollywood horror and launched Sandberg’s career, as he went on to make franchise films like “Annabelle: Creation,” two “Shazam!” movies for DC, and the video game adaptation “Until Dawn.” Other directors who gained Hollywood’s attention through YouTube include “Chronicle” director Josh Trank, “Predator: Badlands” filmmaker Dan Trachtenberg and Bo Burnham, all of whom sparked online before scoring deals to make films inside Hollywood’s studio system.
But while these millennial filmmakers leveraged their notoriety to tell different stories when they leaped into features, Parsons brought a wealth of knowledge about what his fans like based on his time on YouTube. Clear said that feedback from “Backrooms” fans influenced how Parsons crafted his feature debut, even if it wasn’t the primary factor driving his creative decisions. He said that while Parsons wanted the film to be more character-driven than his shorts, he also discussed what he had learned from his fans’ feedback about what really resonated from his work and what made the Backrooms so scary.
“He had these real guideposts of what he wanted the film to feel like and what his audience would and would not want in a feature version of these shorts,” he said. “It taps into this subconscious nostalgia, this idea that it’s almost like deja vu, where you see these empty spaces and feel like you’ve been there before, and there’s something eerie and unsettling about it.”
That rapid feedback loop is why Wan is so bullish about YouTube becoming a source of fresh new theatrical talent, and not just for horror, which lends itself more to bringing in online-grown talent with its low-budget capability.
“I think comedy is truly the next wave, because there are young filmmakers and comedians that are making really funny viral shorts on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and building a significant audience,” Wan said. “Hollywood is going to have to change its thinking, because studios often want a big star for mainstream comedy. But I really believe the next Adam Sandler or Will Ferrell is going to come from the digital space, and maybe it will even come from someone who also does horror like Curry, because he did sketch comedy on YouTube before ‘Obsession.’”
YouTube not the only factor
But while Barker built an audience on YouTube before “Obsession” put itself on the path to becoming one of the highest-grossing horror films ever made, insiders at Focus Features said that internet notoriety wasn’t a major factor in their decision to acquire “Obsession” at TIFF in a $15 million deal last fall.
While the Focus team was aware of Barker’s online roots, they made it a point, as they do at any festival, not to go in with any preconceived notions of who Barker was as a filmmaker or what he could provide for audiences. It was “Obsession” itself, along with the reactions it got at the midnight Toronto screening from its black humor, brutal moral punishment and Inde Navarrette’s showstopping lead performance that led to the deal.
When asked if his company is now looking more closely for YouTubers with filmmaking chops and aspirations of making a feature, one development executive told TheWrap that while high quality YouTube shorts is part of what they are looking for, he is wary of the idea of honing that search based on whether a creative has built a significant following like Parsons or “Iron Lung” director Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach.
“Not every YouTube following is the same. ‘Iron Lung’ worked because Markiplier got his fans invested in him as a creator, not just in a single thing he was doing like playing video games in front of a camera,” the exec said. “I think Kane has more fans of him as a filmmaker now thanks to this movie, but how many people bought a ticket because they were fans of the idea of the Backrooms, which started as a meme?”
Chris Aronson, former distribution chief at Paramount and 20th Century Fox and current board member for Rentrak, was thrilled at the success of “Backrooms” and “Obsession” after talking for years in studio meetings about how teens weren’t going to the movies like they used to. He sees Parsons and Barker’s success as an opportunity for theaters to build a new wave of frequent moviegoers that can support their businesses.
But he also warned that comparing this moment to the rise of New Hollywood, when filmmakers like Scorsese, Coppola and Lucas were shaking up a sclerotic film industry in the 1970s, may not be exact.
“Success is always being redefined, not just financially but creatively,” Aronson said. “It’s great that these directors found their way to theaters and found mainstream success, but we shouldn’t assume that everyone who is part of this online world of creators wants the big production deal where Hollywood gives them $50 million for their next movie. There’s something to be said about working independently and staying in a smaller box with your budget where you don’t have to worry about the studio looking over your shoulder.”
That’s one of the reasons why Fischbach took a different route to theaters with “Iron Lung” than Barker or Parsons, going the self-distribution route and grossing a $50 million total that, while not as large as “Obsession” or “Backrooms,” he and his team got a larger share of along with maintaining ownership.
“I know that ‘Iron Lung’ is a very exceptional case, but I do think that there’s a lot of extra baggage that comes with some of those deals that makes it so that everything becomes so high risk that it has to have high reward and success, or it’s just a meteoric failure,” Fischbach told TheWrap back in February.
“I think that there’s a world where, if independent filmmakers are able to actually get it into theaters a little bit easier, and they’re able to negotiate on a smaller basis, but with the internet, try to cultivate their own little concentrated fan bases, then they could turn a profit, because the stakes were never so high that a studio needed to have their bottom line matched,” he added.
What’s next
“Backrooms” and “Obsession,” for all their much-needed success, have captured Hollywood’s attention because they fit into the established metrics of success. But as films, filmmakers and audiences continue to become more bespoke in this post-monoculture world, so too will be the standard of success.
Take, for example, the next big screen event to jump from YouTube to theaters: Fathom’s “The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act,” a theatrical presentation of the final episode of the hit YouTube animated psychological dramedy series produced by indie studio Glitch that premieres later this month.
Because it is a series finale, the film won’t get anywhere near what “Backrooms” made, as it is projected for a $10-12 million weekend.
But the series marks Glitch’s first attempt to bring its online animated shows, which include the recently launched viral hit “Gameoverse” and the upcoming webcomic adaptation “Lackadaisy,” to theaters in the hopes of fans gathering similar to releases of TV series like “The Chosen” or the series finale of “Stranger Things.” But unlike those shows, “Digital Circus” comes entirely from YouTube, and will release its finale on the website two weeks after theaters on June 19.
If that works out for Glitch, it could become another way for independent creators to get to the big screen outside of the traditional Hollywood system. As much as YouTube could bring more filmmakers like Kane Parsons onto the legacy backlots in the future, this is a pipeline that is not funneling entirely to the old system.
Like the Backrooms, it is creating something new, and no one entirely knows yet what it is.
Umberto Gonzalez contributed reporting to this story.
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