YouTubers are setting box office records. It could change the future of moviemaking

By Brian Stelter, CNN

(CNN) — The biggest two movies in America right now, “Backrooms” and “Obsession,” come from twentysomething filmmakers who honed their craft on YouTube.

Their films were made with relatively low budgets and were marketed online. Now that they’re filling theaters with teens and young adults who rarely show up at the movies, all of Hollywood is paying attention, with experts predicting that studios will copy this moviemaking model many times over.

“Obsession,” directed by 26-year-old Curry Barker, opened in theaters May 15. Filmed for roughly $750,000, the darkly funny horror film has made almost $150 million to date, a jaw-dropping return on investment for Focus Features and Blumhouse Productions.

Then came “Backrooms,” directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, who developed the project for years on his YouTube channel.

Parsons had a bigger budget — about $10 million — and famous actors like Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve and Mark Duplass. But it was still astonishing to see “Backrooms” dominate the box office so thoroughly in its opening weekend.

The psychological horror film took the No. 1 spot at the weekend box office, raking in about $80 million in North America and $120 million worldwide, with ticket sales fueled by Gen Z.

The studio A24, which has been trying hard to boost young directors, said Parsons now ranks as the youngest filmmaker in Hollywood history to release a film that finished No. 1 at the weekend box office.

“Obsession” was No. 2 for the weekend, pushing “Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu,” which opened a week earlier, to No. 3.

For most movies, the opening weekend is the most lucrative, with ticket sales tapering off from there. But “Obsession” keeps growing: Focus Features said Sunday that “exclusive of Christmas, ‘Obsession’ is the first film since 1982 that went up in box office over its second and third weekends.”

So what does this hot streak mean? Well, it means young people are actually willing to buy movie theater tickets if they know and relate to the YouTube-era talent.

And it means Hollywood studios are going to chase the success of “Obsession” and “Backrooms” by scouring online video sites for the next great auteur.

It might even mean that some studio bosses will place a few more bets on original concepts rather than predictable franchises and sequels.

Duplass, who plays a scientist in “Backrooms,” said in a social media video that the two films were giving the movie business a “glimmer of hope.”

“We’ve got an example of creators woodshedding things, putting them online, building an audience,” he said. “And now the people with the purse strings are going to notice … because they see what they can do at the box office, you know, in the form of these two films that are over-performing.”

Producers and agents have been building a YouTube-to-Hollywood pipeline for a while now. And last winter’s robust ticket sales for YouTuber Mark Fischbach’s self-financed film “Iron Lung” demonstrated the potential for success.

Still, as screenwriter Zack Stentz wrote on X, “This feels like a genuine cultural moment in moviegoing, watching Zoomers who honed their craft doing YouTube shorts breaking into features the way the MTV directors did in the ’80s and Sundance kids did in the ’90s.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s Steven Zeitchik wrote that the YouTuber hits are “a teetering, if not the first hints of a collapse, of a legacy-driven studio system.”

This moment, Zeitchik wrote, is about a lot more than discovering fresh talent. The Alphabet-owned YouTube platform makes filmmakers famous, streams their work, helps them strike brand partnerships and gives them a huge marketing megaphone.

“This is a phenomenon generated, driven and controlled by creators and the biggest company in the world that amplifies them,” he wrote.

Speaking at an industry conference on Saturday, Warner Bros. Motion Pictures co-chair Michael De Luca said filmmakers like Parsons, who “worked on ‘Backrooms’ for five years,” are “in a dialogue with their audience from the word ‘go.’ Their subscribers have direct input in each iteration of these things.” Warner Bros. Discovery is CNN’s parent company.

And “by the time you get to the movie,” he said, “they’ve had a billion test screenings.”

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