Hollywood's Viral-to-Film Pipeline: Hits or Hype?
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- Backrooms, Obsession, and Iron Lung each scored at the spring box office — Backrooms became A24's highest-grossing film ever, Iron Lung (self-financed by gaming YouTuber Markiplier) grossed at least 10 times its budget, and Obsession (from YouTube skit-maker Curry Barker) became a word-of-mouth horror hit.
- The Mandela Catalogue, based on a YouTube horror series, triggered an 11-studio bidding war with Steven Spielberg signing on as producer; producer Aaron B. Koontz said he fielded calls from executives for three straight weeks after Backrooms' release, including from people who had never taken his calls before.
- 21 Laps' Shawn Levy, whose company produced Backrooms and is developing Seasons, called the current scramble "a predictable sort of frenzy," warning that assistants are being tasked with scouring the internet for the next Kane Parsons even though most long-shot bets don't pan out.
- Lucas Ford, now an independent producer, brought Parsons's YouTube channel to 21 Laps in early 2022; he argues Hollywood should cultivate digital creators' built-in audience relationships rather than overwrite them, because viewers familiar with the original material "can sniff that out immediately."
- Siren Head and Cartoon Cat, based on Trevor Henderson's viral imagery, are moving forward with screenwriter Brian Duffield and Weapons director Zach Cregger attached, while Seasons adapts a ghost-ranch story first published on the r/nosleep subreddit.
- Jane Schoenbrun, director of Skinamarink and Teenage Sex and Death in Camp Miasma, said pitching internet-native stories to traditional studios required "lying" — code-switching to make projects digestible to executives unfamiliar with online-fandom sensibilities.
- Kyle Edward Ball (Skinamarink) said YouTube was more useful as a training ground than a virality launchpad, warning that some creators who made the Hollywood leap ended up "bedazzling the wheel instead of reinventing it."
Why it matters: Backrooms (A24's highest-grossing film) and Iron Lung (10x its budget) have triggered an 11-studio bidding war for The Mandela Catalogue, with Steven Spielberg now producing. But Shawn Levy warned most long-shot bets don't pan out, and creators like Jane Schoenbrun say studios routinely code-switch pitches to fit executives — risking the authenticity that drove the originals.
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