The YouTube-to-prestige-horror pipeline looks very strong this weekend.
Taking first place at the box office is “Backrooms,” a feature film expansion of Kane Parsons’ YouTube video series featuring shocking images that captured the image of a mysterious office space (taken from a 4chan thread) that defies physics.
Directed by Parsons, “Back Rooms” made $38 million on Friday, and is expected to bring in a total of $80 million to $90 million at the domestic box office this weekend alone. For indie studio A24, that’s its biggest opening to date — the previous record was held by “Civil War,” which made $25.7 in its first weekend of release.
The best film, “Obsession,” pulls off something arguably even more impressive. True, it only made $8 million on Friday, for a total of $28.5 million over the weekend – but the film (about a love gone wrong) already made more money in its second weekend than in its first, and now its third weekend will grow another 19 percent.
In context, most films in wide release usually fall between 50 and 70 percent in their second weekend; Last year’s “Sinners” was considered an unusual word-of-mouth success because it dropped below 5 percent. With the exception of the Christmas release (which has a lot of staying power, thanks to the holidays), growth from weekend to weekend is unheard of – according to the Hollywood Reporter, “Obsession” is the first film since 1982 to grow in both its second and third weekends.
And like “Backrooms,” “Obsession” is a horror film directed by YouTube filmmaker Curry Barker, who released the hour-long horror film “Milk & Serial” on YouTube in 2024. Barker has already shot his next film and is set to direct a new remake of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”.
These two releases follow the surprise success of “Iron Lung,” the video game adaptation released earlier this year. Directed by Mark Fischbach — better known by his YouTube account name Markiplier — “The Iron Lung” grossed nearly $41 million domestically.
In a New York Times article about the recent “YouTube-to-filmmaker boomlet,” Rutgers Cinema general manager Mark DelVecchio noted that “many YouTubers have tried to jump into mainstream movies and come up short.” What makes Parsons, Barker, and Fischbach different? DelVecchio said that despite their youth (Parsons is 20, Barker is 26), they all have “long lives.”
“Now, some of them have been making videos for a long time, and that’s how you grow a loyal audience,” he added.
However, although I have yet to see “Back Rooms” (fingers crossed for tomorrow), be see “Obsession.” So I can confirm that it’s not at all disappointing – I watched most of the second half with my fingers over my eyes, and may have screamed a few times.
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