Chris Ferguson has had a busy Monday after Backrooms, the $10 million Vancouver-shot and produced adaptation by Kane Parsons of his viral YouTube short films series pulled in a $118 million opening weekend in global ticket sales.
“I have never gotten so many calls with interest in my company,” Ferguson told The Hollywood Reporter via another phone call where, as is his habit, he walks the blocks round his home while talking. “And on Saturday, which would not normally be a work day, I didn’t leave a three-block radius of my house and I walked 25,000 steps,” he added.
As he fields offers for new collaborations, Ferguson said his friends have gone beyond a betting pool on what his movies will do in opening weekend box office to taking bets on what his daily step count while Hollywood knocks on his door. “Because the phone doesn’t stop,” he insists.
But when we get round to talking about Kane Parsons, 20, who Atomic Monster first flagged to his Vancouver-based production banner Oddfellows Pictures, Ferguson has little time to talk about his youth. “The story that he is young was interesting to me for about 24 hours, until I really got to have a moment to mind-meld with him. At that point, the story really became I was dealing with somebody who is so wildly intelligent and curious and it was just unlike anybody else that I’ve worked with,” Ferguson recalled.
Chiwetel Ejiofor in ‘Backrooms.’
A24
“He’s like a wise old man and he’s just waiting for his body to age up. If you watch interviews with him, if you could put a much older face on him, it would make more sense,” he added. For his part, Ferguson isn’t some old style coach who believes rookies need to pay their dues before they meaningfully get in the game.
Believing Parsons had the total package to make his debut theatrical movie after his YouTube web series, Ferguson put the film crew he’d assembled with Longlegs director and producing partner Osgood Perkins around Parsons so he could navigate his first feature film shoot.
“I knew that the healthiest thing to do for him was to plot him directly into the extremely tight crew that we’ve been building across all the movies we’ve been doing over the last few years, exactly because I was basically looking for extension of his arms. He picked every camera angle on his YouTube series because he animates it all by hand. He picks every production design element because he is building these models in 3D. He scores the movie entirely. He does everything,” Ferguson recalled.
Finn Bennett (left), Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kane Parsons, Renate Reinsve, Lukita Maxwell and Mark Duplass attend an event for ‘Backrooms.’
LISA O’CONNOR/AFP
But a movie set is different to having cameras roll on digital web series. “It’s a different scale, it’s a different time frame, a different model. You need a whole bunch of people to go and do these things for you, and so I knew that our team could be that extension for him,” he added.
The movie about a strange doorway appearing in the basement of a furniture showroom was first announced in Jan. 2023 as a co-production between A24, Chernin Entertainment, 21 Laps Entertainment and James Wan’s production company Atomic Monster. But much as Parsons was an undiscovered talent that came out of YouTube, just like Obsession director Curry Barker, Ferguson insists it would be mistake for Hollywood to stampede over to social media sites to find the next best thing in theatrical horror pics.
“We’ve all been looking at a lot of places for a while. And I’m sure there’s going to be a bit of an over-correction when everybody goes and options every random YouTube short. They’re not all feature films,” he argued. Ferguson adds Kane and Barker on YouTube were basically doing longform video.
“I do think people are going to make the mistake of taking a bunch of TikTok videos and turning them into features. Online is a great platform for people to come out, but it is still about people who have trained themselves for a longform execution,” he adds.
The success of Backrooms as a Vancouver-shot horror pic also continues a winning streak for Ferguson and producing partner Perkins through their joint production company Phobos, which has backing from Neon. Released in July 2024, Longlegs established Perkins as a name brand horror filmmaker, with the project grossing $128 million worldwide on a budget of less than $10 million.
Neon released the first movie, with its marketing campaign cited as a blueprint for how to build anticipation for a spooky movie. Perkins is already at work on a new Longlegs movie, with star Nicolas Cage returning, but Ferguson was tightlipped about that project.
Perkins also shot The Monkey for Neon, also in Vancouver, and he directed locally The Young People, even if he and Ferguson had a rare box office stumble with Keeper. Ferguson also discussed why in recent years the biggest U.S. indie horror pics have come out of Vancouver.
“We’ve been building a thing here. There’s an excited young crew that wants to make movies, are passionate about movies. Slowly since we started the company, we’ve been putting that team together. So I attribute that to our crew and the way we do things, as much as anything,” he said.
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