Who’ll Be the Next YouTuber to Make a ‘Backrooms’-Level Hit?

By most conventional movie metrics — budget, marketing, overall IP recognition — this weekend’s box-office showdown was a far cry from 2023’s Barbenheimer blockbuster battle royale. But the heads-up competition between two low-budget horror flicks, Backrooms and Obsession, crystallizes what has become the year’s most fascinating film-industry development: the rise of YouTube viral video makers turned first-time feature filmmakers, whose debuts this weekend landed at No. 1 and No. 2 among new movies in wide release.

A24’s alternate-dimension dread exercise Backrooms, directed by 20-year-old YouTube phenom Kane Parsons, annihilated all prerelease “tracking” expectations by taking in $81.4 million and delivered the New York–based specialty studio’s most successful domestic opening to date. (It nearly tripled the $25.7 million debut of Alex Garland’s Civil War in 2024 and makes Parsons the youngest filmmaker ever to top the box office.) In its third week in North American theaters, meanwhile, Focus Features’ make-a-wish demonic-possession saga Obsession — directed by 26-year-old @thats_a_bad_idea YouTube channel proprietor Curry Barker — grossed $26.4 million, bringing its cumulative gross to $104.7 million.

Those are staggering returns for Obsession, which reportedly cost between $750,000 and $1 million to produce. It saw its audience share grow by 40 percent during its second weekend in multiplexes and then grow again by another 10 percent between Friday and Sunday. It’s an almost unprecedented box-office performance that defies all physics governing the way horror usually plays.

While industry financial projections had foreseen a gigantic open for Backrooms, almost no one in Hollywood predicted it fighting for market share against the similarly pedigreed Obsession this many weeks into the latter’s theatrical run. With data showing that between two-thirds and three-quarters of both films’ audience was under 25, these titles directed by non-Hollywood Gen-Z digital natives have achieved a rare feat: coaxing other young viewers who don’t really care about Hollywood — the most elusive filmgoing demographic — off their phones and back to theaters in droves. “We’re getting audiences who aren’t regular moviegoers, and we’re getting a ton of repeat business,” says Obsession executive producer Jason Blum. “Word of mouth is one thing, but it seems like something really unusual is going on.” The Blumhouse founder has “never” had one of his films make more in its third week of release than the first.

In January, ahead of the Obseshrooms supremacy, the YouTube titan Markiplier (FKA Mark Fischbach, who has a whopping 38 million streaming subscribers) self-financed, starred in, and self-released his directorial debut, the sci-fi video-game adaptation Iron Lung. Despite a total absence of marquee stars or studio-marketing oomph, as well as less-than-rapturous reviews, the movie wildly overindexed against its $3 million production budget. It earned $50 million theatrically and put Hollywood on notice about the disruptive power/viable audience draw of viral video creators making their first films.

Parsons was born in 2005 — “the same year as YouTube,” he’s fond of pointing out — and uploaded an enigmatic, nine-minute, creepypasta-inspired short titled The Backrooms (Found Footage) to the streaming site in 2022. It showcases “found footage” from a young cameraman who falls into an empty furniture store with a seemingly endless succession of rooms and heavy sense of foreboding. The clip has now been viewed more than 79 million times, spawning dozens of other videos that have combined for nearly 200 million streams. But more importantly, it served as the would-be teenage director’s calling card: Accompanied by his parents, Parsons began taking Zoom meetings with film executives from production companies including James Wan’s Atomic Monster, Chernin Entertainment, and Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps to explore feature-directing possibilities. Undaunted by his lack of feature-directing bona fides, A24 stepped in as a financier and connected Parsons with producers at Oddfellows, the Canadian production company behind the 2024 Neon horror hit Longlegs, who coached him through test shoots and gave Parsons a crash course in the nuts and bolts of professional film production. The studio green-lit Backrooms in 2023 with a $10 million budget, and filming took place in Vancouver last year.

In terms of raw, low-budget ingenuity, Obsession now stands as the least costly movie to hit big at the cineplex since 2009’s Paranormal Activity. But in terms of studio outlay for untested YouTube talent, it is Hollywood’s biggest swing.

At age 18, Alabama-native Barker moved to Los Angeles for film school, where he met fellow student Cooper Tomlinson. The two formed a sketch-comedy duo and soon dropped out to concentrate on the comedy and horror shorts they had been posting to YouTube. In 2024, they went viral with Milk & Serial, a 62-minute “found-footage horror film” written and directed by Barker co-starring him and Tomlinson that the two shot in four months for $800.

From there — inspired by a Simpsons episode where “Bart gets a monkey’s paw and causes a lot of chaos” — Barker drafted the Obsession script (its logline could be reductively summarized as “Hapless romantic wishes upon occult toy for the undying love of his co-worker; disastrous consequences ensue”) and landed financial backing from indie-production company Tea Shop Productions to shoot it. Premiering at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Obsession prompted frenzied bidding from A24 and Neon, but Focus Features walked away with worldwide distribution rights in a deal reportedly worth upward of $15 million — one of the festival’s biggest acquisition deals to date and a record sum for a horror title.

To hear it from Focus chairman Peter Kujawski, however, Barker’s background as a popular digital creator was hardly foremost in the studio’s obsessive pursuit of Obsession. Raucous audience response at its Midnight Madness premiere coupled with studio execs’ belief in the movie’s mainstream playability and overall “fit” within the Universal art-house studio division’s genre strategy — following last year’s elevated vampire romp Nosferatu, Focus’ second-highest-grossing movie ever — convinced them the investment was worth it.

“I wish I could honestly say that we were clever enough at the time to think, Curry and Cooper’s YouTube roots are really going to amplify this,” says Kujawski. “We knew who they were. We knew what they had achieved. And we knew that would be part of the marketing campaign. But I don’t think that was the driving impulse for us to go and chase the movie. It was just so intriguing and powerful and brilliantly executed. It felt very true to ourselves and successful on its own terms as a piece of entertainment.”

Will Maxfield is a partner at Hollywood’s powerhouse William Morris Endeavor talent agency specializing in independent film. At last year’s Sundance Film Festival, he brokered the sale of the supernatural body-horror movie Together to Neon for $17 million; up until then, its director, Michael Shanks, had been making viral shorts and sketch-comedy series for his YouTube channel, timtimfed. Now, according to Maxfield, all the major talent-management firms and agencies have formed digital departments in pursuit of YouTube creators to become next-gen filmmaking talent.

“For many in the independent film world, the playbook was to make a great short film that premieres at a festival, pair that with a strong feature script, and then you would have a path to go out and raise money,” says Maxfield. “That process has evolved — a short, a viral video, or a channel on YouTube can be your proof of concept. But now you have metrics, a built-in audience, and feedback from the creator’s fans before you even green-light their first feature. It’s a fantastic model that’s working. The small screen is feeding the big screen.”

The modern template for this sort of thing was set by Michael and Danny Philippou, the Australian co-director brothers behind the 2023 indie-horror hit Talk to Me (and last year’s A24 terror thriller Bring Her Back). En route to their entrenchment as Hollywood horrormeisters, the Adelaide-born twins spent their teen years shooting Jackass-esque backyard wrestling videos. They skipped film school, Danny sold his blood for experimental pharmaceutical trials, then the brothers parlayed a growing expertise with DIY visual effects into a body of award-winning videos (and nearly 7 million YouTube subscribers) under the streaming-service pseudonym RackaRacka. Talk to Me triggered a bidding war after it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. And after fielding offers from Universal, Neon, Searchlight, and Sony, the Philippous sold the movie to A24 for a deal in the “high seven figures.”

Michael Philippou recalled getting some early-career words of wisdom from Mad Max director George Miller, who encouraged the brothers to keep posting stuff online. “He was like, ‘With YouTube, you’ll be able to do whatever you want, whenever you want. You can get exposure. You don’t have to go the short-film route,’” Philippou tells Vulture. “‘There’s a different route that you can take to get funding: That’s now online.’ There was a path you’d have to climb to get on the ladder of filmmaking. We bypassed that path and did our own thing.”

Jason Blum managed to screen Obsession prior to its Toronto premiere. And he signed an agreement to fully finance Barker’s next horror-film project, Anything But Ghosts, even before the Focus deal was inked (through his merged company Blumhouse–Atomic Monster, with Focus Features again handling distribution). That project reportedly follows two con artists posing as ghost hunters who “end up in a dangerous situation when they come face-to-face with an actual dark entity.”

Despite now widely debunked online rumors that Parsons and Barker didn’t actually direct their movies — purportedly serving as figureheads while Backrooms and Obsession were “ghost directed” by more experienced Hollywood professionals — Blum feels the current crop of viral-video mavens is nothing but great for the industry.

“The YouTube creators who are now filmmakers are attacking directing in a totally different way,” Blum says. “The best equivalent I can think of is like a network president; they’re essentially running little networks. They’re making, marketing, financing, operating a channel. They have 100 percent control of what goes on the channel. They have sophisticated data about who and how many people are watching the content they put online every second. Just like a network president, they can’t get enough data about what’s working, what’s not working. Most filmmakers don’t have that kind of power. And if they’re successful enough, they don’t even want to test their movies.”

In stark contrast, the Force is not awakening for The Mandalorian and Grogu — this weekend’s presumed No. 2 film. The sci-fi western dropped by a disastrous 70 percent in its second weekend of theatrical release (audience share typically declines by 50 percent to 60 percent after debut weekend) and is increasingly looking like a flop, becoming the lowest-grossing Star Wars movie to date. That gross would seem to lend credence to a recent Screen Engine survey of teen moviegoing habits in which respondents indicated that they are burned out by franchises and reject “perceived studio corporate greed” (the kind that a $165 million movie focused around characters from a TV spinoff already based on two ’80s-era movie sequels necessarily embodies).

As a corrective to filmgoing declines in an era when theater chains are declaring bankruptcy or strategically closing underperforming locations, the new influx of films by and for the young and very online is basically saving Hollywood. “This trend is providing some much-needed optimism in the industry,” Maxfield says. “There is a new pool of talent, and their films are connecting with young audiences. It’s good for everyone that young people are showing up to theaters.”

Contrary to received Hollywood wisdom around putting out titles in the same genre too close to one another, Blum feels the proximity of Backrooms’s and Obsession’s release dates only helped their returns. “I think there is a big argument to be made that Backrooms would not be performing the way it is performing if Obsession had not come out two weeks ago,” the Blumhouse–Atomic Monster CEO says. “I think they’re doing the opposite of cannibalizing each other.”