Two of the biggest movies in America right now came from filmmakers in their twenties who learned their craft making videos on YouTube. These films were made with relatively small budgets and marketed online. Now that they are filling theaters with teenagers and young adults who rarely show up at movies, all of Hollywood is paying attention. Experts predict studios will copy this moviemaking model many times over.
Obsession, directed by 26 year old Curry Barker, opened in theaters on May 15th. Filmed for roughly $750,000, the darkly funny horror film has made almost $150 million to date. This represents a jaw dropping return on investment for Focus Features and Blumhouse Productions.
Then came Backrooms, directed by 20 year old Kane Parsons, who developed the project for years on his YouTube channel. Parsons had a bigger budget at about $10 million and famous actors like Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve and Mark Duplass. Yet it was still astonishing to see Backrooms dominate the box office so thoroughly in its opening weekend.
The psychological horror film took the number one spot at the weekend box office, raking in about $80 million in North America and $120 million worldwide. Ticket sales were fueled by Gen Z viewers. The studio A24, which has been trying hard to boost young directors, said Parsons now ranks as the youngest filmmaker in Hollywood history to release a film that finished number one at the weekend box office.
Obsession finished at number two for the weekend, pushing Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, which opened a week earlier, to number three. For most movies, the opening weekend is the most lucrative, with ticket sales tapering off from there. But Obsession keeps growing. Focus Features said Sunday that exclusive of Christmas, Obsession is the first film since 1982 that went up in box office over its second and third weekends.
This hot streak means young people are actually willing to buy movie theater tickets if they know and relate to YouTube era talent. It also means Hollywood studios are going to chase the success of Obsession and Backrooms by scouring online video sites for the next great auteur. Studios might even place more bets on original concepts rather than predictable franchises and sequels.
Mark Duplass, who plays a scientist in Backrooms, said in a social media video that the two films were giving the movie business a glimmer of hope. He explained that creators are woodshedding things, putting them online, and building an audience. Now people with the purse strings are going to notice because they see what these creators can do at the box office with films that are over performing.
Producers and agents have been building a YouTube to Hollywood pipeline for a while. Last winter, robust ticket sales for YouTuber Mark Fischbach, known as Markiplier, self financed film Iron Lung demonstrated the potential for success. Iron Lung had a budget of no more than $3 million and made approximately $21.7 million globally, representing roughly seven times its production costs.
This feels like a genuine cultural moment in moviegoing. Zoomers who honed their craft doing YouTube shorts are breaking into features the way MTV directors did in the 1980s and Sundance kids did in the 1990s. The Hollywood Reporter’s Steven Zeitchik wrote that the YouTuber hits are a teetering, if not the first hints of a collapse, of a legacy driven studio system.
This moment is about more than discovering fresh talent. The Alphabet owned YouTube platform makes filmmakers famous, streams their work, helps them strike brand partnerships and gives them a huge marketing megaphone. This is a phenomenon generated, driven and controlled by creators and the biggest company in the world that amplifies them.
Speaking at an industry conference on Saturday, Warner Bros. Motion Pictures co chair Michael De Luca said filmmakers like Parsons, who worked on Backrooms for five years, are in a dialogue with their audience from the word go. Their subscribers have direct input in each iteration of these things. By the time you get to the movie, they have had a billion test screenings.
