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Ari Aster and Alex Garland can suck it — Kane Pixels is in town.
So essentially have gone the headlines this weekend, as the A24 baton transferred from its hipster staples to 20-year-old Backrooms director Kane Parsons (aka Kane Pixels to his 3 million YouTube followers).
Parsons sat in a second-grade classroom when A24 released its first movie. No matter: in one weekend his film outgrossed every A24 movie in history but one. Yes, bigger than Civil War, bigger than Lady Bird, bigger than Midsommar, bigger than Everything Everywhere All at Once. The only A24 movie it hasn’t caught? Marty Supreme. Give it a few days.
Backrooms sets new marks for low-budget movies even as Curry Barker’s Obsession does the same — and just several months after the self-distributed low-budget horror movie Iron Lung from the creator Markiplier broke its own records (and as the movie lands exclusively for rental and purchase on YouTube Sunday; with Markiplier’s 38 million subscribers, expect a windfall).
But to see these three films as a set of fortuitous one-offs — a breath of fresh air for the business but no more lasting than a passing wind — is, I think, to seriously miss the nature of what’s happening here. In a word: a teetering, if not the first hints of a collapse, of a legacy-driven studio system. That system will give way from the kind of top-down mega-budgeted gatekeeping that began roughly a quarter-century ago with Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter (improbably, both still dragging on via subscription television in the late 2020’s) to a fresh kind of bottom-up entertainment that, given its enablement by the biggest company in the world, is both more capitalistic than the current model and yet, given its auspices, also the most unruly and democratic that entertainment has been in a half-century.
Nothing captures this new reality like the sight this weekend of Obsession and Backrooms packing in theaters while screening rooms for Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu sat empty. People who got famous on YouTube were major draws, while a corporate franchise from the world’s biggest entertainment company was a goner. Of course that franchise itself embodied rebel youth when it came out 49 years ago this week. The guard changes; what was once new is now old.
Indeed, Jason Blum on Saturday compared this moment to the ’70s. And while cinematically that evidence may not yet be persuasive, in the face of a young generation listening only to its own instincts, economically jolting a sclerotic system, the parallel feels bang-on. I’ve spent the past few days talking to people inside and outside the traditional film business to determine what this moment means and concluded that to explain the significance as one of talent discovery — YouTube as the new film school, YouTube as the new film festival, YouTube as the new music-video breeding ground — is to dramatically underplay it. Sure, believe that everything found there will just be absorbed into a system that will go on merrily churning if you like. But I think that greatly underestimates the sheer force of Google and the full business quake that awaits us.
Just listen to the intentions of YouTube executives themselves. “We say YouTube is the new Hollywood,” Angela Courtin, YouTube’s vp for marketing brand, creative, culture & media, said when I asked her on Friday what this trio represents. “It’s where people go to connect with everything they love. We’re going to keep building that.” The service already laps all its competitors in TV viewing time. It’s worth taking these pledges seriously.
First, the disclaimer. YouTube has no desire to be a theatrical distributor itself, which is why the Focus and A24s of the world still have a place. And YT is not really interested in financing movies, though they could do it with Google pocket lint.
But the qualifiers end there. And the ways this all will change the model for theatrical releasing begin. Some of this may sound a little wild. But stick with me.
First and most obviously, the company holds the key to the entire audience for these films. YouTube does a ton to get these people their following, with partner-managers brainstorming with creators every last detail on how to build their subscriber base. All of that pays off at the box office and is something no other company in the Hollywood ecosystem can come close to doing.
Second, it does help creators raise money through brand partnerships — one reason Alex Cooper and her ilk can have a slate of a half dozen slick TV shows that no one seems to be paying for. Product placement isn’t something indie filmmakers have been especially interested in doing in the past, and the three creators with theatrical movies this year haven’t done a lot of it. But don’t be surprised if we start seeing this really begin to change. You need $1 million to make your movie and Doritos is there with the cash (and free chips) with a few placements? These creators think nothing of doing that — in fact, it’s a badge of honor to get these deals. The indie-film world will be filled with sponsorships. Big shift.
Third, while YouTube does not develop in traditional ways and gives wide berth to creators to do whatever they want, the company IS a distributor in first and second windows. So if I’m Netflix or HBO or any other player that’s a big buyer for these titles, watch out. Because it’s much more appealing if you’re a creator to put these movies post-theatrically only on YouTube (either behind a paywall or free ad-supported) and collect a lot of the money yourself than take whatever measly cut you’d get from putting it through an output deal. (Just look at what Markiplier is doing with his exclusive YouTube release this weekend.) Windows thus get a lot more elastic in this new world. See it in theaters this weekend and on YouTube next week? Why not. Or in theaters for three months as a creator does a barnstorming tour and on YouTube in the fall? Sure.
And given how quickly these creators work (AI will put this on double-speed) and how little younger audiences care about years of development, expect the production timeline to shrink too. Movies will go from ideas to release in one-quarter time. Oh, and will they always be 90-minute features? Don’t be surprised if that gets sliced and diced too. Serials could be back again.
Finally and most importantly, the Oscars. We almost forgot about that, didn’t we? YouTube will start broadcasting them in just over 30 months. You’re paying that much to broadcast the show, your biggest talent is cranking out theatrical hits, you’re not going to be in the award business? Kane Pixels isn’t making Anora or The Odyssey, no. But YouTube could be making deals with Sean Baker and Christopher Nolan. Or the next Baker or Nolan. “Keep half the money your movie makes in theaters, speak to your audience directly in the run-up.” There are worse sales pitches.
Plus there’s the show itself. Sure, YouTube could just use the platform to promote MrBeast with a nice walk-on appearance. The way ABC now uses it to promote Kimmel. But that feels like a linear way of thinking. YouTube is everything to all people everywhere all at once, and broadcasting movies’ biggest night could just be a flywheel for what they do every other day of the year on every channel, talent circulating there and through every night and back to the Oscars. A-list filmmaking talent.
The most savvy prophet of this new reality may be Markiplier himself. I talked to the Iron Lung and Let’s Play creator last week to ask what he made of this 2026 YouTuber theatrical trend. He predicted a lot more movies from these established creators with millions of followers and an innate sense of what will bring those fans to plunk 20 bucks down to watch together. And he thinks this will have an effect on both quality and dollars.
“The more talent gets pushed into a smaller space,” he said, referring to theatrical slots, “the more it will either filter out the stuff that isn’t as good, or cause this space to grow, or both.
“People would love if the theatrical business grew really huge again,” he added. “But the only way that will happen is a wealth of choice of great content. And YouTube is the only place that has that.”
At the TV upfronts this year, YouTube took over legacy TV. That will be a lot harder for cinema, which requires more skill and takes more time and money. BUT I do think Mark is right: the sheer volume of creators is going to increase the chance we see talented filmmakers emerge, and increase the percentage of creator-led films. And it’s all going to happen fast. It took decades to build the current system. It’s going to take a lot less time to undo it.
I don’t want to say the traditional indie model of discovering a filmmaker, sending them to a Sundance Lab, financing their movie and then reaping the rewards when it sells at a festival or makes box office bank will be gone entirely. And I certainly don’t believe the studio model of making overall deals with filmmakers and then milking them for franchise and passion projects alike will be killed by this (the studios are killing those all on their own lol). But I do think we’re going to see a co-existence with a creator economy that this weekend only begins to hint at. Theatrical features will become the last frontier these creators conquer, having already turned themselves into the new scripted TV, the new unscripted TV, the new branded content, the new music video, the new everything. Sure, some will be absorbed into the existing system, as Barker and the $10 million deal frenzy last week suggest. But that feels to me like legacy thinking. These people don’t need the system, not really. Or, they need a new system — the YouTube grassroots self-funded share-the-windfall system, with just a theatrical kicker. That will help theaters but drastically reduce the role of distributors and even studios as gatekeepers, as producers, as financiers, of everything else they do.
Traditional Hollywood studio types have largely been ecstatic about the box office bonanza. I’m not sure their reaction should be so unqualified. “This is very good. Young audiences loving movies. Going to see THEIR movies. Not their parents’ franchises,” an executive at a large studio texted me. The problem is “their movies” are decidedly not his movies.
The smart ones will be part of it, of course; Chernin Entertainment did fund Backrooms. But part isn’t the same as leading. You can add as much Focus and A24 to these projects as you like; you can put as many Chiwetel Ejiofor and Jason Blum names as your heart desires — this is a phenomenon generated, driven and controlled by creators and the biggest company in the world that amplifies them. This is good news for theaters, who just want bankable product. Distributors and financiers and legacy studios? They’ll come in and out of this new ecosystem. Some movies will completely shut out any element of the traditional business like Iron Lung; some will let in select entities, like Obsession and Backrooms did. And other models yet to be devised. Festivals will need to re-evaluate their roles too. I’m already getting wind of at least one major gathering negotiating with YouTube to give them space at their event. You can fight this or get on board.
As Courtin said, “Exhibitors are paying attention to our creators, audiences are turning up to support them and YouTube is finding ways to connect people.” Missing from her assessment of this new waterfall — studios and distributors. That’s no accident; after all, as she said, “Creators own their IP and can take it wherever they choose.”
Parsons didn’t originate Backrooms — that happened on 4chan in 2018, four years before the content creator posted his now-seminal first found-footage take on the lore; it has been added to and iterated many times since. Not all of the five million people who saw Backrooms this weekend actually created or commented on the Backrooms phenomenon, of course, but enough did that the movie felt like it belonged to them, and they brought everyone else along with them.
Such a democratic history seems to stand in contrast to the YouTuber trend, which is all about branded personalities. But that’s exactly the kind of hybrid model this new era brings, its fierce personality-driven culture melding with an unusual level of common ownership. Hollywood has had household-name upstart directors, but not like this, and it’s had a sense of collective fan participation, but not like this. And never has it had them both in the same film. Or not under studio control.
In retrospect, Internet culture always had to end like this, a radical bottom-up creativity meeting in the middle at the movie theater, the ultimate top-down gatekeeper. Though meeting in the middle may be a little generous to the legacy folks; conquering feels more apt.
In the summer of 1999, as the Knicks and Spurs battled for the NBA title, a shoestring horror movie named The Blair Witch Project used the Internet to change movie marketing forever. One can’t imagine the biggest hits of the past quarter-century, from Borat to the MCU, without the digital contagion it inaugurated.
With the summer of 2026 nearly upon us, the Knicks and Spurs again battle for the NBA title and a trio of shoestring horror movies use the Internet to change the film business forever. Only this time it isn’t just marketing but production and distribution. And this time it isn’t some indie companies at the center but the biggest corporate giant around.
One couldn’t begin to dream of the upside-down Blair Witch would cause, and we can’t even start to conceive of the new order brought on by the likes of Barker and Parsons. Some traditional structures will not be left standing. But the idea of people flooding into common spaces to watch someone’s vision on a big screen? They just may write us a happy ending, Heather.
