BOULDER, Colo. — As summer starts, moviegoers are seeing young filmmakers turn their loyal audiences on YouTube into box office juggernauts, highlighted by independent horror movies.
Both "Backrooms" and "Obsession" have topped $200 million worldwide at the box office after less than a month in theaters, according to Box Office Mojo.
"Backrooms" is inspired by a horror internet story — known as a ‘creepypasta’ — that led to a popular web series from Kane Parsons before he directed the feature film, which is now A24’s highest-grossing movie ever. Parsons is just 20 years old.
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"Obsession," which cost less than $1 million to produce before striking a distribution deal with Focus Features, is directed by 26-year-old Curry Barker.
Both Parsons and Barker honed their filmmaking skills and built dedicated audiences on YouTube.
That trend is something being talked about at CU Boulder’s School of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts.
“We're learning that there's a new way to build that audience,” Cinema Media Manager at CU Boulder Rae Johnson said. “And if you have that loyal backing, you can kind of take your project wherever you want it to go, and studios are forced to pay attention to you at that point.”
Johnson points out that Gen Z is driving moviegoing, and the generation that grew up watching and following YouTube creators is naturally drawn to those creators’ projects on the big screen. She also said their moviegoing habits are driven by a desire to be social and discuss films with friends, rather than using the movies as form of escapism.
“Instead of always referencing, like the Oscar movies, the greats — which we're trained to do, we love doing, we pay homage to those guys all of the time — but we're growing up on content creation,” Johnson explained. “And we're seeing the shift in real time, and it's shifting a lot faster than I think Hollywood is used to.”
Johnson also said YouTube is “opening so many new avenues, that the typical route to being a filmmaker is no longer the only choice.” She sees hundreds of current CU film students taking notice.
“Typically, you have to go old school route, go out to LA, start cold calling, trying to get yourself on sets—it's real wild west over there sometimes,” Johnson said. “And so we're learning that there's a new way to build that audience, and if you have that loyal backing, you can kind of take your project wherever you want it to go, and studios are forced to pay attention to you at that point.”
Another YouTuber, known as Markiplier, crowdsourced his horror movie Iron Lung and did so without a studio distribution deal, bypassing Hollywood entirely. His fans ended up requesting the movie at local theaters. It ended up grossing more than $50 million worldwide.
“The idea that you can actually go to the people and maybe convince them to do the distribution, maybe you could distribute on YouTube, maybe you could distribute like on one of the streaming services, and you can like cut out the entire industry from that, that's exciting,” CU Boulder Cinema Studies Teaching Associate Professor Christopher Osborn said.
Osborn said independent filmmakers have had great ideas and hustled to make films on cheap budgets since the dawn of the film industry, but the difference now is that those filmmakers are getting widespread distribution.
“One of the big problems has always been that Hollywood doesn't actually give a damn about the little people,” Osborn said. “They don't actually want any input, like they have a money-making machine, they got everything they need. ’It would be better if you just stayed away and gave them your money.’ So the idea that people now can be like, ‘You know what, I don't need you, I can go out to 4,000 screens on my own, I can get my own, I have my own leverage. I have my own population. I've got my own people on YouTube that back me. I'm just gonna skip you entirely and just go make money on my own.’ That's cool.”
