Next week, VidCon will be sunny with a chance of development deals. I’m already imagining agents lurking behind every pillar at the Anaheim Convention Center. We’re still in the throes of Backsession fever and, in a time of so much not-good news, that can look like a state of grace.
But the real force behind “Backrooms” and “Obsession” isn’t YouTube-to-Hollywood. The invisible variable in every hit is compression.
Under Pressure
Every hit has a compression mechanism whether it’s the festival circuit (or, used to be), a YouTube creator’s fanbase, or a vertical drama platform’s paid media calendar.
Compression is the concentration of audience attention into a window short enough that enough people experience something at the same time to make it matter. Curry Barker and Kane Parsons built their windows over years and when “Backrooms” and “Obsession” opened, the pressure released.
That’s homegrown compression and it’s why YouTube development deals are such a strange bargain. A deal can pay for a creator’s output, but what they really want is the compression.
Compression can be a combination of organic and engineered. Issa Rae began building her audience and brand with “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl” back in 2011 and now operates a full-on media empire with Hoorae Media. In May she released the company’s first vertical drama, “Screen Time,” and after four weeks the TikTok coproduction stands at 350 million global views.
Certainly, Rae’s loyal audience was a primary driver of that success. And it stood out as a well-produced vertical without werewolves or billionaires —just a fun and pulpy story of high-tech espionage that masters the format’s beat/climax/beat pacing.
Underpinning its success was simple math. “A hit is just distribution compressed into a finite period of time,” said Hoorae cofounder Ian Schafer.
Yes, Marketing Is Nuclear Physics
To make that happen, he leaned into paid amplification, smart media buys, and promotional calendars — a deliberate concentration of audience attention into a short window. It’s marketer as physicist: create critical mass by concentrating enough fissionable material in a small-enough space to sustain a chain reaction. Spread the same material thinly and nothing happens.
Schafer assumes nothing goes viral. Compress the window artificially, generate the simultaneity, and let the organic behavior follow.
That calculus extends to the formatting. “The value that we deliver to advertisers is not in the views or streams of the show itself,” Schafer said. “It’s in the clips, the cutdowns, the vignettes — the things that we produce and distribute and have complete control over who sees it and when.”
From a business perspective, the 57 episodes of “Screen Time,” each 60-90 seconds, are long-form content. And when clips are the content, compression is the product.
Independent film used to have its own compression mechanism. Sundance created a window in which buzz concentrated and acquisitions followed. From a seller’s perspective, it manufactured the conditions of a hit with enough of the right people experiencing the same thing at the same time.
Today, that dynamic has lost much of its power. Sellers place a lot of blame on Sundance’s online platform, but a major factor is streamers became primary buyers of Sundance films — and then the streamers opted out of compression and bet on ubiquity. Why pay top dollar, or any dollar, for a festival film when data shows that their customers are even happier to watch an old TV show?
FOMO Isn’t Everything
Compression works against the streaming strategy of offering massive catalogs across an infinite timeline. A film available forever removes urgency to watch it now, which means there is no now. They’ve even largely dropped the compression play of binge watching.
According to a recent Luminate report, catalog titles accounted for most of the viewing at Disney+ and Hulu. The library also dominates Netflix, but thanks to compression it’s only 60 percent. Netflix still has the scale and infrastructure to manufacture industrial-scale FOMO with algorithms and marketing spend, but all that compression is expensive. Viewers who watch old “Southland” episodes are just as valuable.
All of which makes the Backsession moment both real and limited. It demonstrates that compression still works, but the filmmakers and companies figuring out new compression strategies are the ones worth watching.
Weekly Recommendations curated by IndieWire Managing Editor Christian Zilko
5. The Transformative Power of Post Sound by Max Cea
I doubt that there’s a bigger killer of pretty-good independent films than bad sound. It’s the ultimate sign of amateur work, and something that most people fail to invest sufficiently in. There’s only so much you can do if you don’t capture adequate sound quality on set, but post-production sound mixes are often the final step that turns movies into hits. This profile on two post-production sound mixers reveals just how much can be done to improve your viewers’ auditory experience.
4. ‘The Amazing Digital Circus’ Continues Win Streak for Digital-Native Stories at the Box Office by Samantha Masunaga
The Fathom Events release of “The Amazing Digital Circus” has been overshadowed by the more mainstream “Backrooms” and “Obsession,” but I find it to be a similarly compelling story of an online audience that had been compressed over time finally getting an opportunity to show up at movie theaters.
3. How Much of a Film Festival’s Income Comes from Entry Fees? by Stephen Follows
When I talk to filmmakers trying to launch their own festival runs, I encounter endless amounts of negativity (sometimes justified, other times in bad faith) about festival business models and how much they profit off of submissions. Anyone who wants to garner an actual understanding of how it works would be well-advised to read this data-driven study, which reveals that the economics aren’t nearly as altruistic or sinister as either side would have you believe.
2. My Further Case for Optimism in Cinema by Ted Hope
Whenever I find a compelling case for independent film optimism these days, I always feel like it’s worth sharing. Ted Hope has made no secret of his pessimism about the independent film ecosystem, sometimes within the pages of IndieWire, but I agree with his basic premise that it’s a lot easier to kill an industry than an art form. And when there’s still this much passion for an art form, someone will find a way to build something new around it.
1. The Former Drug Dealer Whose Shows Make Millions Without Hollywood by Ben Fritz
Yet another fascinating profile about the myriad ways to build audiences outside the Hollywood system. While much of the recent “Backrooms” and “Obsession” buzz has centered around online creators who eventually find their own way into the studio gates, this is a reminder that there are also plenty of artists who build their own businesses and are content to eschew gatekeepers altogether.
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