The math is ridiculous. Kane Parsons, a 20-year-old director who taught himself filmmaking via YouTube tutorials, drove Backrooms to become A24’s fastest-grossing release ever. It grossed $80 million in its opening weekend. His original YouTube short for the project, which leverages a creepypasta meme born on 4chan, has 80 million views.
On The Daily, Kyle Buchanan framed this as a structural shift. Hollywood’s traditional ladder - film school, industry connections - has been kicked away. Talent now flows directly from Discord servers and YouTube comment sections to the multiplex. Parsons was 17 when A24 signed him. His visual language, drawn from games like Portal and first-person shooter perspectives, feels native to his generation.
"Gen Z is tired of 'hand-me-down' franchises like Star Wars or He-Man. These properties belong to their parents."
- Kyle Buchanan, The Daily
Buchanan argues the success is rooted in a participatory economy he calls "corn plating." Gen Z audiences treat films as raw material for their own content, filming reactions in theaters to post on TikTok and obsessively dissecting background details to fuel online discourse. This creates a recursive marketing loop studios can't buy. Watching a movie becomes entry into a week-long digital conversation, with the fear of missing out on the "lore" driving repeat viewings.
The financial contrast is stark. Backrooms and Curry Barker’s Obsession - another YouTube-native film made for $750,000 that grossed $265 million globally - are rivaling Star Wars spin-offs in revenue while costing a fraction. Buchanan notes that executives at Toy Story 5’s premiere were more interested in discussing these films than their own franchise. The lesson for Hollywood is clear: stop recycling old toys and start looking at what’s trending on Discord.
