YouTubers spank Hollywood

For a long time, YouTube was viewed with a certain condescension by part of the cultural industry.Image: watson

They have neither the budgets of Marvel, nor the teams of Disney, nor the address books of the major studios. However, YouTubers are doing better than many Hollywood productions. And to shake up some well-established certainties in an aging industry. Explanations.

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For decades, Hollywood operated by relatively simple rules. To make a film, you had to convince a studio. To convince a studio, you had to have experience. And to have experience, you had to… have directed films. Yes, like when you are asked for 10 years of experience in a field that has only existed for fifteen minutes.

Then the internet arrived, and began to dismantle with truncheons what a very closed industry had built brick by brick for decades.

Today, two young directors, from YouTube and Gen Z, are reminding the cutthroat world of cinema that a good idea, a MacBook and a lot of talent can sometimes weigh more than a nine-figure budget.

Youtubers who are directors

The first is called Curry Barker. He is 26 years old, became known thanks to his videos on YouTube and has just directed Obsessionan independent horror film that was estimated to have cost less than a million dollars.

The second is Kane Parsons. He is even younger; the American was born in 2005. As a teenager, he had already stood out on YouTube thanks to his videos inspired by the phenomenon of “Backrooms”, these endless yellowish and oppressive corridors which have haunted the corners of the web. Its cinematic adaptation, Backroomswas produced for a budget estimated at less than ten million dollars.

On paper, these numbers should not impress Hollywood. In an industry where some blockbusters easily exceed 200 million dollars before the start of their marketing campaign, a million or even ten million looks more like pocket money than a real cinema budget.

And yet. Obsession has already grossed more than a hundred times its initial investment at the worldwide box office. As for Backroomsit has also largely exceeded the expectations of its producers, without having yet been released in all cinemas. As the media points out Business Insiderthese two films beat Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogufrom Disney, at the box office this weekend.

Enough to cause a few cold sweats in certain air-conditioned offices in Los Angeles. Because the most interesting thing is perhaps not even the commercial success of these films made by YouTubers, but what these films tell about the evolution of cinema.

The backlash?

For a long time, YouTube was viewed with a certain condescension by part of the cultural industry. The platform was often seen as the realm of falling cat videos, silly challenges and lovesick influencers looking for external validation.

A sort of digital schoolyard, very far from cinema “with a capital C”, the most conservative will say. Except that obviously, some of them have forgotten that an entire generation learned to film, edit, write, tell stories and tinker with special effects.

Basically, while the studios continued to spend fortunes “because we’ve always done it like that”, teenagers spent their evenings learning on the internet. Free of charge. And a few years later, some of them find themselves behind the camera of films that attract millions of spectators.

The journey of Kane Parsons is surely the most blatant example of this evolution, of this shift from YouTube to cinema. Even before he was old enough to go to the cinema to see films prohibited for minors, he was already making videos which had tens of millions of views on the internet.

As for Curry Barker, he spent years producing short films and internet content before his name began to seriously circulate in the industry. They are not isolated cases. THE Financial Times recalls that last January, the American YouTuber Mark Fischbach also succeeded in his move behind the camera with Iron Lung, a film made for around four million dollars, to rake in several tens of millions at the box office.

Before him, Australians Danny and Michael Philippou had already made a notable transition from YouTube to the big screen. The two brothers signed Talk to Me (2023) et Bring Her Back (2025), becoming two of the hottest new names in contemporary horror cinema.

Which clearly demonstrates thatObsession et Backrooms are not accidents, but are part of a broader trend.

And Hollywood in all this?

This is where real change happens. The platform has gradually become what Hollywood perhaps didn’t see coming, a huge free film school, open 24/7, where directors can experiment, fail, progress and above all find an audience and make a name for themselves before even signing their first contract with a studio.

Obviously, for the moment, the big franchises continue to attract crowds (if we put the last Star Wars aside), and the studios remain capable of producing films that independent creators could not finance alone.

More recent successes Backrooms et Obsession show that part of the public is perhaps looking for something else. Original concepts, closeness to the public, and directors who don’t give the impression of all coming from the same mold. What can we “save” cinemas from? According to the Financial Timespour Backrooms86% of spectators are under 35 years old. It is even more obvious with Obsession: the average age falls to 18-25 years (for 75% of the public).

If these trends are anything to go by, the next big revolution in cinema probably won’t be born in a producers’ office in Hollywood. Besides, it may already be being edited on a laptop, somewhere between a teenager’s bedroom and a YouTube channel.

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source: sda/chris pizzello