Could these twenty-something YouTubers be the future of cinema?

Two of the biggest movies in the world right now were made by guys in their twenties who started their careers on YouTube. As of this writing, Backrooms has made $117 million (about R1.9 billion) in just four days since its international release. Sitting right below it at the box office is Obsession , which has taken in $151m since it came out on May 15. But the thing that’s most striking about the movies is how much they’re making relative to their budgets. Backrooms was made on a budget of $10m and Obsession $750000. That means Obsession has made more than 200 times its budget back. Its momentum is showing no signs of slowing down. All the while Obsession writer-director Curry Barker is 26 years old and Backrooms director Kane Parsons 20. Hollywood has long operated on the assumption that the path to the director’s chair runs through film school, short film festivals and years of grinding through the industry’s lower ranks. But the internet has quietly been building a parallel pipeline where a teenager with a camera, editing software and a YouTube account can amass an audience of millions and develop a filmmaking voice that rivals anything coming out of the traditional system. And now, that pipeline is starting to empty directly into the multiplex. Known online as Kane Pixels, Parsons began publishing the viral web series Backrooms to his YouTube channel in 2022, based on the creepypasta (horror-related legend) of the same name. Parsons uploaded a short animation on his YouTube channel on January 7, 2022, under the name The Backrooms (Found Footage) . The video grew in popularity and now has more than 80 million views. Before the upload, Parsons intended the short film to be a standalone work and had an unrelated story he had developed some time before. While the story’s themes were somewhat connected to that first short, he didn’t think it would be popular. However, with the newfound popularity of Found Footage , Parsons reconsidered the story idea and decided to create a series following it. He was later hired by A24 to direct a film about the same world and concepts at 19 years old, becoming the youngest director in the studio’s history. Chiwetel Ejiofor Backrooms takes place in 1990 and follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect and furniture store owner who, reeling from his divorce, has been reduced to sleeping in said furniture store. Through his sessions with his therapist, Dr Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), it quickly becomes clear that Clark is stuck in a loop of anger and resentment that destroyed his marriage. Then Clark stumbles onto a secret world through the wall of the furniture store basement that is soon revealed to be as vast as it is bizarre. These are the backrooms. When Clark tries to tell Mary about the world and she doesn’t believe him, he recruits his employee (Kat) Lukita Maxwell and her videographer boyfriend (Finn Bennett) to go into the backrooms with him to collect evidence. As with any horror movie of this kind, they soon regret their decision. The strongest thing about the film is undoubtedly the production design by Danny Vermette and cinematography by Jeremy Cox. The drab monotony and incongruous elements of the world of the backrooms is so well rendered that it’s easy to believe this is something director Parsons has been exploring for years and has much more to say about than this film does. That’s probably the biggest weakness of the film. It feels less like a complete narrative and more like a random chapter of a story that has been unfolding for a while. Despite a memorable performance from Ejiofor that reminds you he’s an Oscar-nominated actor, neither Clark nor Mary’s characters are fully fleshed out. Reinsve, who also recently became an Oscar-nominee, is woefully underused. I left the film feeling more impressed by the world and concepts it had introduced than by the story it told. With all that said, this is such an accomplished achievement for a 20-year-old filmmaker that I’m excited to see what Parsons does next. Barker is best known for the sketch comedy YouTube channel “that’s a bad idea” (stylised in lowercase) that he co-created with Cooper Tomlinson (Tomlinson has a supporting role in Obsession ). In 2023, Barker wrote and directed horror short film The Chair and uploaded it to YouTube where it has been watched nearly 10 million times. Film producer James Harris, of Tea Shop Productions, reached out to Barker to adapt it into a feature, at which point Barker instead pitched him on his horror film Obsession . Barker directed the $800 found footage horror film Milk & Serial (2024) and despite spending a year trying to get distribution for the film, he ultimately decided to release the full film on YouTube. The film went viral, gaining nearly three million views and leading to a representation deal with United Talent Agency in early 2025. Obsession is a