The prevailing winds in Los Angeles are typically off the ocean, but every so often the Santa Ana winds blow hard from the mountains, and when they do, all hell can break loose.
Hollywood has just had its own metaphorical wind shift, upending conventional box office wisdom, but it’s important to understand what exactly happened, what the lessons are — and why a veteran like me is so excited about it.
In the last month, “Backrooms,” a horror movie directed by Kane Parsons, a YouTube creator who just turned 21, opened to an astounding $81.5 million in America. A second horror film, “Iron Lung,” made and self-distributed by Mark Fischbach, another online creator, has grossed over $50 million worldwide. Perhaps most significant of all, “Obsession,” a horror film directed by Curry Barker, a 26-year-old YouTube creator, crossed $200 million at the box office this weekend and surpassed the latest “Star Wars” film.
“Backrooms,” “Iron Lung” and “Obsession” each has its own unique origin story. But what they have in common is that they’re all fueled by an avid young audience — exactly the demographic that gloomy industry pundits have repeatedly declared will never return to movie theaters.
Wrong.
Is this YouTube-fueled youthquake simply a coincidental confluence of events? Or does it portend an upending of the Hollywood status quo? Actually, it’s a bit of both. Indeed, for any fear of YouTube barbarians at the gates, this is instead a great opportunity for traditional Hollywood.
It’s also not necessarily a repudiation of the way the industry currently operates. In many ways, it’s a validation.
Above all, this moment is a reminder that all of the arts go through periodic creative replenishment. These kinds of tectonic shifts — in film, music, art, theater, indeed in all forms of pop culture — happen when a new generation of artists, often working with new mediums, plugs in to a burgeoning youth culture aesthetic and expresses it with fresh authenticity. Think Impressionism — or forget Impressionism, think punk, hip-hop, rock ’n’ roll. Think the Beatles.
This type of generational shift has happened before in the film business. I can think of at least two such times in the modern era when a new cohort of talent with a new sensibility emerged to shake the foundations.
In 1970, Darryl F. Zanuck, the legendary chairman of 20th Century Fox, had his hopes pinned on a giant war epic about Pearl Harbor titled “Tora! Tora! Tora!” At the same time, in some underregarded corner of the studio, an iconoclastic director, chosen for the job only after many others had passed, was making another war film: an inexpensive dark comedy with no action that was full of sex and blood, overlapping dialogue and strange shot angles. The studio brass thought it would be unreleasable. That director was Robert Altman, and the film was “M*A*S*H.”
“M*A*S*H” was a smash hit, while “Tora! Tora! Tora!” sank like the U.S.S. Arizona. Along with “Easy Rider,” “Bonnie and Clyde” and other anti-authoritarian American films inspired by the wave of French films known as the Nouvelle Vague, “M*A*S*H” ushered in the so-called era of New Hollywood, a decade of maverick auteur directors who snapped the industry out of its funk.
Nearly 20 years later, in 1989, at the Sundance Film Festival, there was a screening held in a rundown theater with maybe 100 seats of an unknown filmmaker’s unknown film, “Sex, Lies, and Videotape.” Many film people who came of age in that era now claim to have been in that room that night — but I actually was.
When the lights came up, you felt the film world shift on its axis. Steven Soderbergh’s seminal film began the push of American indie film into the mainstream, which exploded in the ’90s and changed Hollywood permanently. Indeed, A24 and Focus Features, the excellent distributors of “Backrooms” and “Obsession,” are direct descendants of that movement.
This kind of moment is happening again. Mr. Barker, with a background in short films and YouTube sketch comedy, tells a story in “Obsession” that is so powerfully relatable to Gen Z audiences that the word of mouth has caused the box office to defy gravity.
When Mr. Parsons expanded his YouTube short films into the feature-length “Backrooms,” the aesthetic he’d honed as a teenager on the internet captured an underlying anxiety in his audience, with whom he’d already developed a direct relationship online. These filmmakers are very young, but what matters is not chronological age so much as an iconoclastic spirit, an instinct for what the audience is wanting but not getting and, of course, talent.
It is also relevant — and encouraging to folks like me — to recognize that, while “Iron Lung” was indeed self-distributed, the larger triumphs of “Obsession” and “Backrooms” come courtesy of institutional structures and support.
“Backrooms” was produced by several major Hollywood production companies and co-financed by Chernin Entertainment, run by the always prescient Peter Chernin, who was for many years my boss at Fox. The path to glory for “Obsession” followed an even more familiar road. Jason Blum of Blumhouse, the first name in Hollywood horror, became involved along with multiple producers, and the film was screened in the midnight section at the Toronto International Film Festival, setting off a pretty conventional festival bidding war, which was won, to its great credit, by Focus Features, a division of Universal Pictures.
“Backrooms” and “Obsession” are also the beneficiaries of expensive and savvy studio marketing campaigns. Reminiscent of how the New Hollywood directors made a lot of money for the old studios in the ’70s — think Francis Ford Coppola and “The Godfather” — and how the indie darlings of the ’90s did the same, these YouTube-born phenomena have ultimately prospered handsomely inside the system.
For perfect symmetry, note that the No. 1 film at the box office when it debuted two weeks ago, one spot ahead of “Obsession,” was “Disclosure Day,” made by Steven Spielberg, the greatest artistic and commercial director in history. “Disclosure Day” is his 37th film. His first was the ’70s New Hollywood anti-authoritarian film “The Sugarland Express,” which he made when he was not much older than Mr. Barker and Mr. Parsons.
The integration of independent creativity with industry influence is a good thing all around. It offers exposure for, and help to, new voices, giving them more visibility and opportunity, and it promotes the kind of originality that Hollywood desperately needs.
Equally important, both for the industry ecosystem and for the film audience, the benefits of this symbiosis run both ways. The audience’s enthusiastic response to these new creative styles leads to changes in what and how films are made inside the system.
This is an important consideration because, for all the success of these YouTube filmmakers, at the end of the year, the biggest financial hits at the global box office will still be films like “Toy Story 5,” based on existing intellectual property. But even these familiar franchises often need to embrace a new ethos in order to remain vibrant. Several current first rank Hollywood superstar directors like Greta Gerwig and Ryan Coogler began their careers well outside the major studios and subsequently brought fresh and exciting perspectives to older intellectual properties and established franchises.
I’m sure that every major studio is busy this week scouring the YouTube pipeline, looking for the next big sensation. (We certainly are.) The democratization of the means of production will allow many new voices to be heard. The trick for major studios is to find the very best new talents, assist them but also learn from them. ’Twas ever thus.
Tom Rothman is the chief executive and chairman of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, a former chairman of 20th Century Fox and the founder of Fox Searchlight Pictures.
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