A Gen Z Revolution at the Movies

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**Kane Parsons** (0:38)
Okay, Natalie, what time is it?

**Natalie Kitroeff** (0:40)
It's 8.36, I want to say, in the morning, to be clear.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (0:45)
We're going to see Obsession, which is going to be scary.

**Kane Parsons** (0:56)
So, you're somebody who's reported on like cartels.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (1:00)
Yes, yeah.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:00)
Where are you at on nervousness?

**Natalie Kitroeff** (1:03)
I'm terrified. This is different.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (1:06)
From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroeff. This is The Daily. For years, Hollywood's been trying to solve an existential problem. How to get young people to go to the movies.
And then, this summer, it happened at an unthinkable scale, thanks to two low-budget horror films made by 20-something directors, which drove Gen Z to the theaters in such high numbers that I had to go to the movies to find out what was behind it.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (1:37)
I'm going to get so much food, I'm going to stress eat everything in this theater.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (1:42)
Today, my colleague Kyle Buchanan explains what younger audiences saw in these films, and how they've energized an entire industry. It's Tuesday, June 16th.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (1:56)
I don't know. I literally don't know why I agreed to do this. We should have gotten Michael to do this. Hello.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (2:05)
Kyle, I'm really excited to have this conversation in part because I need therapy after watching both of these movies.
We are here because something crazy is happening at the box office right now. And this is your world. This is your beat. Tell me what is going on.

**Kyle Buchanan** (2:23)
Something crazy is happening and it's still happening. We have two movies, Obsession and Backrooms, that are such runaway successes that they basically shocked the industry. They were made for almost no money by young people who got their start on YouTube way, way, way outside the Hollywood studio system. And now here they are beating Hollywood at their own game.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (2:45)
And when we say runaway hits, what do you mean by that?

**Kyle Buchanan** (2:48)
What I mean by that is you have the film Obsession, which is defying gravity of the box office from week to week in ways that have never been done before. And then you also have Backrooms, which became the highest grossing movie ever released by the studio A24 in the space of just 10 days. This is the studio that released films like Everything Everywhere All at Once and Marty Supreme, and Backrooms lapped them like it was nothing.
But it's not just that these films are making money, it's also who's going to see them. These are huge, huge hits with Gen Z. And talking to people in Hollywood, executives, producers, directors, all sorts of people over the last several years, the number one anxiety I keep hearing is, how do we get young people to care about the movies?

**Natalie Kitroeff** (3:34)
Right. And for years now, it's become almost a cliche, I think, to hear that movie going is dead, that young people just don't go to the theaters. This seems to disprove that.

**Kyle Buchanan** (3:46)
It absolutely does. And these films are on track to make hundreds of millions of dollars. Like, to put that into perspective, this is all happening at the same time as the first Star Wars film in seven years, The Mandalorian and Grogu is out in theaters. And these two movies are making basically the exact same amount of money. They cost virtually nothing compared to Star Wars, obviously.
And I think what they're proving is, young audiences don't want their parents' franchise hand me downs. They want a sense of investment in these movies. And if you can make it feel like an event to them, they absolutely will go.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (4:23)
Okay, so with that as our premise, help me understand how and why this is happening, how young people are connecting with both of these films. And we should both acknowledge we are not Gen Z, I'm a millennial, I'm just living in their world. And so I do need to understand this. Let's start with the first one to come out, Obsession. Just lay out what this movie is about.