Emergency Pod: The YouTube Kids are taking over Hollywood

**Colin** (0:00)
Hey, everyone, welcome to this emergency podcast. It is one of the biggest weeks in YouTube history. We are not in our studio.

**Samir** (0:07)
We are in Montana. It is not, in fact, an emergency. We are fully safe. We are fine.

**Colin** (0:13)
Okay, but this is a episode that we felt like, or just a conversation we felt like we had to have because of the magnitude of what's happening with YouTube creators in Hollywood right now. The YouTube revolution has officially come for Hollywood.

**Markiplier** (0:26)
Backrooms, the number one movie in the world right now.

**Colin** (0:29)
It's a direct result of doing this work on YouTube.

**Samir** (0:31)
You have Cain Parsons with Backrooms. You've got Curry Barker with Obsession. And before that, you have Markiplier with his film Iron Lung. All of these films have exceeded expectations and shocked people at the box office, and they're all made by YouTubers.

**Colin** (0:47)
Now to add to this crazy week of YouTube in Hollywood, exactly one week ago, we threw the Hollywood Creator Summit on the Fox Studio slot. We had 630 creators there, all talking about the future of Hollywood. We had people on stage like comedian Tom Segura, as well as Markiplier to talk about the success of Iron Lung.

**Samir** (1:04)
We also had the UCLA band, as well as a guy from Red Bull who almost ran over Samir.

**Colin** (1:13)
Show business.

**Samir** (1:14)
This conference had everything.

**Colin** (1:16)
Now I bring that up because we are going to be releasing the stage sessions on this channel, including our conversation with Markiplier, which is about this topic exactly.

**Samir** (1:25)
Okay, so let's go through all three of these milestone films, talk about their stories and what we've learned from the success of these films. Number one, Kane Parsons and Backrooms.

**Colin** (1:35)
For people who don't know, give us a quick rundown of how Backrooms came to be.

**Samir** (1:39)
Okay, 2019, someone posts anonymously on 4chan. They post a photo of a furniture store in Wisconsin undergoing renovations. If you don't know the story of Backrooms, that's a really strange place to start. Someone leaves a comment that says, this room looks like, if you no clip. You want to explain no clip?

**Colin** (1:57)
In the video game world, when you basically go off a map, like you kind of glitch out, go through a door and end up off a map, that's no clipping.

**Samir** (2:06)
You're in no man's land. You're in the in between. So that comment sparked the community to create all of this lore. They created multiple Reddit threads going in different directions, building the story from this one photo and this one comment. So Kane Parsons was a fan of this community, and when he was 16 years old, he released an 8-minute video that he made using Blender, which is 3D animation software, to create this found footage style horror movie.

**Colin** (2:37)
So this 27-year-old assistant finds it on YouTube, shows it to their boss, and they end up signing Kane to turn this into a feature. And shortly thereafter, A24 gets involved, and they make this into the movie that just came out.

**Samir** (2:50)
He's 19 when they shoot the movie, and he's now 20 years old when it's released.

**Colin** (2:53)
And he was 5 when Weez first started on YouTube.

**Samir** (2:57)
Wow. Crazy.

**Colin** (3:00)
Isn't that crazy?

**Samir** (3:01)
That's crazy. The fact that Backrooms started from an anonymous post in 4chan and then was discovered by an assistant of someone in Hollywood early on, proves that YouTube is one of the most powerful places for filmmakers to start their career. Because even if it feels like the most obscure, niche part of the Internet, you never know who is watching and who could reach out and completely change your life.

**Colin** (3:28)
So the film was made for just about $10 million. And within the first weekend, it made over $118 million worldwide. So I think the natural question would be like, wait, how? Why? Why did this Backrooms thing take off so much?
And what we've been talking about is that it is Internet collaborative IP.

**Samir** (3:46)
Meaning, this is a story that is built by this generation. It is not IP like Star Wars or Jurassic Park or Spider-Man that is already pre-existing and that the studios are telling us we should go and see. It is IP that is for the people, by the people, essentially.

**Colin** (4:03)
It is an interactive story that was built over time that you feel a part of if you were there, which makes you want to go and see it and celebrate it, because the people made the story.