At this past weekend’s Produced By conference, an annual gathering of producers as hosted by the PGA, Jason Blum was taking a victory lap. He, along with his partner James Wan, was behind both the number one and number two movies in America, which both beat out a “Star Wars” movie that had plummeted by 69 percent in its second weekend in theaters.
What 20-year-old director Kane Parsons’ horror film “Backrooms” was doing at the box office as Blum was speaking was historic. This weekend, the film made $81.4 million domestic and $118 million worldwide, which was an all-time record for a director his age, a record for an original horror opening, and A24’s biggest opening by an enormous margin (“Civil War’s” $25.5 million was the previous record).
Blum compared what Parsons and fellow YouTuber Curry Barker, who made “Obsession,” are doing today with their YouTube followings to how filmmakers from the ’70s revolutionized the movie business. He noted that they’re both non-traditional filmmakers who don’t come from film school, but instead from a hyper-fascination at knowing and reaching their audience.
“Their hope, desire, and dream is to make cool movies, and ‘Backrooms’ and ‘Obsession’ are edgy and weird and fucking nuts,” Blum said at Produced By. “There’s almost this feeling of the ’70s of this new generation of young people who are making edgy movies that are connecting in theaters in a crazy way. So many young people who grew up in a time when you couldn’t go to the movies and they haven’t had something for them to go get out and get off their iPad and go see the movies, suddenly they had two movies. … There’s fucking hope in the movie business, and it’s exciting, and it’s great, and the generation of people, everyone’s on Instagram, and everyone’s on social media, actually the stars of the internet, they want to make movies.”
Blum is right about the audience that showed up for “Backrooms.” Over 86 percent of the audience was under 35, with two-thirds under 25. Those are higher numbers than A24 saw than for the audience of its current highest-grossing film ever, “Marty Supreme,” and in the range of another Blumhouse breakout hit, “Five Nights at Freddy’s.”
“Backrooms” is also technically IP, as Parsons’ original shorts on YouTube inspired by the creepypasta Reddit and 4chan threads had a built-in audience and fan base. But A24 reported that, while 58 percent of the crowd came to the theater because of the Backrooms lore, more than 50 percent said their primary reason for coming was because it was an A24 film.
Like “Obsession” before it, “Backrooms” was not wholly dominated by a core YouTube crowd, which signals that it’s not likely to drop off after this gangbusters first week.
The exact success story of “Backrooms” isn’t identical to “Obsession,” the other film from a YouTuber that has had unexpected breakout success, but the two are intrinsically linked. After doing the impossible and going up in its second weekend by 39 percent, “Obsession” again saw its box office rise, going up another 10 percent domestically to $26.4 million. Blum at Produced By said it’s something that hasn’t been done since “E.T.” The film has made $148 million worldwide to date and is already Focus Features’ highest grossing movie ever.
“Obsession” too was driven by a young audience that hasn’t been served by the other tentpoles. It’s not strictly a treatise against sequels and IP when films like “The Devil Wears Prada 2” are still making bank and others like “Toy Story 5,” “Supergirl,” and “Scary Movie” are still to come. But younger audiences are for whatever reason are coming back and responding to these films in ways they’re not to “The Mandalorian and Grogu.”
Smart studios are consciously trying to build this audience and don’t view it as an anomaly. They’re reaching audiences where they are with promotions on TikTok, Discord, Fortnite, YouTube, and more. And the directors like Parsons, Barker, and Markiplier with “Iron Lung” earlier this year are actively catering to their fanbases in ways that are different from the rise of ’70s New Hollywood filmmakers or Gen-X music video punks.
Even as A24 is thinking a “Backrooms” franchise and Barker has been given an offer for his next movie sight unseen, it would not be a surprise for Hollywood to take all the wrong lessons from this new crop of filmmakers as it has numerous times before. We’re likely to see a lot more horror films mined from internet IP, chances taken on other YouTubers who perhaps don’t have the talent that someone like Parsons has displayed, and more sequels to these same few ideas rather than continuously finding new ones.
But this is the type of weekend film historians will look to for a long time to come as a moment of change in the industry, when it was clear Gen-Z wanted something new and different from their movies. Now it will be up to Hollywood to respond.
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