‘Obsession’ cost $750,000 to make. ‘Backrooms’ was built from a teenager’s YouTube channel. Together, they pushed ‘Star Wars’ to third place.
Image Source: Unsplash
In the last two weeks of May 2026, Hollywood received a wake-up call it had not seen coming. The two biggest movies in America were “Backrooms” and “Obsession,” both made by twentysomething filmmakers who spent their formative years building audiences on YouTube.
“Obsession,” directed by 26-year-old Curry Barker, was filmed for roughly $750,000. It has made close to $150 million to date, a staggering return for Focus Features and Blumhouse Productions. Then came “Backrooms.” Directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, the film had a budget of around $10 million and featured established actors like Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and Mark Duplass.
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Including international showings, “Backrooms” made $118 million globally in its opening stretch. A24 confirmed that Parsons is now the youngest director to have a number one film globally. It also set a record opening for the studio, whose previous high-water mark was “Civil War,” which opened to $25.5 million in 2024.
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The same weekend, both films pushed “Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu” to third place. A franchise built over decades, backed by Disney’s full marketing machine, was outrun by two first-time directors in their twenties.
The story of “Backrooms” begins in 2019, when a grainy photograph circulated on 4chan showing what appeared to be an endless, yellow-lit labyrinth of empty office rooms. It became internet folklore.
Born in 2005, the same year YouTube launched, Kane Parsons has said that YouTube “really more than just being a cultural reference for me, has been how I know how to do any of the stuff I do.” He was 16 when he created his web series, “The Backrooms: Found Footage,” in 2022.
Parsons’ series expanded the creepypasta into an elaborate sci-fi narrative revolving around a fictional, shadowy research institute that accidentally discovers “The Complex” in the late 1980s as missing persons cases begin to escalate. His YouTube channel’s videos amassed over 190 million views.
A24 took notice. Parsons, who taught himself visual effects and 3D animation software from scratch, signed with the studio while still a teenager and became the youngest director in A24’s history.
Curry Barker followed a different path to the same destination. Barker and his collaborator Cooper Tomlinson began their careers in comedy content before pivoting to horror shorts. That includes “The Chair” in 2022 and “Milk and Serial” in 2024. Their feature “Obsession” premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, where it triggered a bidding war among distributors. Focus Features won with a record-breaking $15 million offer.
Three weekends in, “Obsession” still had not dropped below its opening weekend earnings. In its third weekend, it was actually up 10 percent with another $26.4 million, while Star Wars slipped to third.
The film’s climb is a case study in what happens when a filmmaker brings a loyal online community into a cinema.
Before Barker and Parsons, Mark Fischbach, better known online as Markiplier, ran a quieter but equally important experiment.
Fischbach wrote, directed, starred in, and self-distributed “Iron Lung,” a horror film that stunned Hollywood by surpassing $17 million domestically in its opening weekend. Studios had turned him down. One executive openly mocked the idea that the film would find an audience.
The film premiered on January 30, 2026, with initial plans for just 50 to 100 independent theaters. The response from Fischbach’s 38.2 million YouTube subscribers pushed the release into 3,015 theaters across the U.S. and Canada, with major chains including AMC, Regal, and Cinemark quickly adding it to their schedules.
Made on a $3 million budget, “Iron Lung” eventually grossed $52 million. Producers and agents had been watching. “Iron Lung” that winter demonstrated the potential for success in a way that could not be dismissed.
The current wave did not start in 2026. The RackaRacka brothers from Australia laid the groundwork years earlier.
When Danny and Michael Philippou released “Talk to Me” in 2022, few expected a supernatural thriller about teenagers summoning spirits through an embalmed hand to become a global phenomenon. Built on a budget of just $4.5 million, the film grossed $92.2 million worldwide.
The brothers have since secured a larger production for their follow-up, “Bring Her Back,” set for release in 2025 with a budget three times the size of their debut. Their arc is the one every studio executive now keeps on a whiteboard.
The financial logic behind all of this connects to a seismic shift in who is actually buying movie tickets.
According to a Fandango study, Gen Z now makes up the biggest chunk of movie theater attendees in 2026, with 87 percent of Gen Zers seeing at least one movie at the theater in the past 12 months, compared to 82 percent of millennials and just 58 percent of baby boomers.
These younger cohorts average seven visits per year and are significantly more likely to pay for IMAX, Dolby Cinema, and other premium large-format screens.
For “Backrooms” specifically, exit polls showed that 86 percent of the audience was under 35, more than half were under 25, and 44 percent were under 21. There were reports of sold-out shows, packed theaters, and repeat viewings.
According to Cinema United, a trade organization representing more than 31,000 movie screens across the United States, theater attendance among young people surged by 25 percent in 2025.
The financial upside is obvious. The cultural reason is harder for traditional Hollywood to replicate.
Studios are no longer just scouting actors online. They are scouting cinematic worlds, audience communities, editing styles, storytelling formats, and creators who already understand how modern audiences consume entertainment.
The Hollywood Reporter’s Steven Zeitchik described the YouTuber hits as early signs of a collapse of a legacy-driven studio system. This moment, he wrote, is about far more than discovering fresh talent. YouTube makes filmmakers famous, streams their work, helps them strike brand partnerships, and gives them a huge marketing megaphone.
Screenwriter Zack Stentz put it plainly on social media: watching Zoomers who honed their craft doing YouTube shorts breaking into features feels like a genuine cultural moment, the way MTV directors did in the 1980s and Sundance kids did in the 1990s.
Kori Adelson, president of North Road Films, has noted a meaningful rise in spec scripts arriving from emerging digital creators, suggesting that the pipeline is only growing. These creators have spent years constructing their own creative universes online, developing visual languages and loyal audiences in real time.
Curry Barker has already filmed his next directorial project for Focus Features. A YouTuber named Curry is also attached to write and direct A24’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Hollywood spent years worrying about YouTube stealing its audience. It turns out YouTube was training its next generation of directors all along.
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