Hollywood gatekeepers aren’t the only ones who appear to have had trouble adjusting as the pipeline from YouTube content creator to Hollywood filmmaker adds to its growing list of success stories.
A24‘s horror film Backrooms surpassed $81 million for the studio’s biggest opening frame ever, as 20-year-old filmmaker Kane Parsons became the youngest director in history to top the domestic box office. Parsons’ project adapted his YouTube series centering on an infinite maze of rooms and spurred headlines about content creators as new filmmaking voices, in light of 26-year-old director Curry Barker‘s Obsession notching historic weekend-over-weekend gains since Focus Features released the horror project May 15.
The buzz for both projects, and the fact the two filmmakers are in their 20s and got their starts with viral online videos, led some social media users to post unfounded speculation that the projects had more established Hollywood names quietly ghost-directing behind the scenes. As conspiracies mounted that Osgood Perkins or other Backrooms producers may have stepped in for Parsons, co-star Mark Duplass took to social media to assert that “Kane was 100% in control.” Even Parsons himself poked fun at such notions.
Inde Navarrette and Michael Johnston in Obsession.
Courtesy of Focus Features
“The rumors are about disparaging anyone who comes from the creator world, and that isn’t anything new,” David R. Craig, an Emmy-nominated producer and the author of Creator Culture, tells The Hollywood Reporter. “This is a classic, classist critique by people who paid their dues a different way, and they naturally look down on people who go around that system. In the 1980s, they used to disparage all the filmmakers who were getting feature films coming from the music video space — most of whom had come from advertising — until they all became hugely successful. They then went on to condemn everyone who had launched their careers in cable. Going all the way back to radio serials, you couldn’t do television if you’d done radio. This is just a chronic pattern of contempt for the next wave of cultural production.”
The two hit films follow the successful release earlier this year of YouTuber Markiplier’s horror movie Iron Lung, which collected $40 million domestically after he opted to self-distribute. At the time, Markiplier told THR that his film being spurned by studios and distributors suggested that there “still is a stigma against YouTube” among Hollywood decision-makers, although the industry seems to be rapidly changing its tune.
Craig points out that, unlike when creatives from other entertainment spheres like live theater get filmmaking opportunities, content creators come to Hollywood having cultivated an interactive relationship with an engaged fan base. “They’re doing probably the most successful, if also the least challenging, genre of content, which is horror,” he says of these recent examples. “So it’s a perfect fit for this trajectory of people who have been learning how to do this online, and their first films get made cheaply, and they get recognized as budding, fresh talent.”
YouTube has long seen the importance of promoting professionalism among its original content. Launched in 2012, YouTube Spaces were a collection of physical locations at various cities globally that offered free equipment, production facilities and training for eligible content creators before most closed down amid the pandemic. Chris Chan Roberson, a former YouTube employee who ran the New York City location in its early days, got a firsthand look at the creators’ ambitions.
“It was the idea that YouTubers are doing a great job, but [let’s] educate them to have a better understanding about the technical aspects,” says Roberson, a professor of cinematography and editing at NYU. “It’s still the same content, but maybe there’d be an increase in viewership if the sound or lighting were better. The YouTubers that we worked with had aspirations to do a variety of things.”
Roberson notes that claims of ghost-directing is not a new phenomenon. He cites speculation that Steven Spielberg and not Tobe Hooper was the primary director of 1982’s Poltergeist or that Tombstone star Kurt Russell has taken credit for helming George P. Cosmatos’ 1993 Western.
“When you watch the credits to a movie, it’s seven minutes of scrolling jobs — no one person is doing all of it,” he says. “If you’re a director with a good vision, and you’ve got a team to back you up, you could be 5 years old. With my exposure to YouTubers over the years, I’ve seen people being so resilient and willing stuff into existence.”
As the rumors of ghost-directing get dismissed and the focus turns to the respective quality of the films, the likelihood increases for more creators to get a voice on the big screen, given that Druski and other top names have Hollywood features in the works. “Just when you thought they ran out of stuff, there’s still ways to excite people,” says Roberson. “Does MrBeast deserve a movie? Sure, why not? Let’s see what this guy has to say. We’re due for another disruption.”