On the Billboard 200 albums chart dated Jan. 11, 1992, Nirvana’s “Nevermind” unseated Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous” at No. 1, marking a generational shift, a symbolic changing of the guard, the moment when the ’90s truly arrived and a new era dawned for not only the music biz, but for culture at large.
A similar earthquake hit the Hollywood box office over the weekend. “Backrooms,” a creepy horror movie based on a piece of internet lore, opened at No. 1 and grossed a jaw-dropping $81.5 million, while “Obsession,” an out-of-nowhere, word-of-mouth horror smash, grossed $27.4 million in its third frame, up 14% from the weekend prior, which itself was up 39% from its opening weekend.
In third place was “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” the latest “Star Wars” adventure, which tumbled 69% from its opening weekend and finished with $25 million. And yes, in this analogy “The Mandalorian and Grogu” is Michael Jackson, the monolithic megastar that represents the corporate establishment and the status quo, and together “Backrooms” and “Obsession” are Nirvana, the bratty upstarts kicking down the doors and waking everyone up to the fact that there’s a new voice, and a new sheriff, in town.
“Backrooms” and “Obsession” are both made by 20-something filmmakers — 20-year-old Kane Parsons and 26-year-old Curry Barker, respectively — who got their starts posting to YouTube. Both movies had minuscule budgets ($10 million for “Backrooms,” $750,000 for “Obsession”) compared to typical Hollywood productions. And their success flies in the face of conventional Hollywood wisdom, which is to keep pumping out More of the Same, and hope that people buy in.
There are many lessons to be learned from their joint successes, and just as many wrong lessons that should be avoided. But there’s no doubt that together they mark a revolution happening in real time, and suddenly it smells like teen spirit all over again.
From YouTube to Hollywood
Parsons and Barker join a YouTube horror wave that kicked off earlier this year when YouTuber Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach’s “Iron Lung” opened to $18.2 million at the box office, on its way to a $50 million worldwide gross. “Iron Lung’s” success shocked Hollywood, but not fans of Markiplier, who had followed his filmmaking trajectory for years and joined him on his journey from YouTube into movie theaters.
Same goes for fans of Parsons and Barker, who knew them from their YouTube work and were ready to port over into theaters when the time came. That connection forged online between creator and follower is sacred and gives fans a feeling of early investment. Yes, Parsons and Barker are Hollywood newcomers, but they come with a built-in audience.
“Obsession” doesn’t star anyone you’ve heard of, but its premise is universal. It’s about a guy (Michael Johnston) who has a crush on his friend (Inde Navarrette) but doesn’t know how to tell her, so he makes a wish that she’ll be obsessed with him. When that wish is granted, he learns the hard way the old lesson of “be careful what you wish for.”
It’s a familiar, oft-riffed-on tale, but told in a fresh way and executed extremely well. And what really works in “Obsession’s” favor is it plays well with an audience, the kind of experience that is best felt in a packed room. It’s why it’s doing gangbusters with crowds.
“Obsession’s” audience might have started with Barker’s established fans, but it has spread well beyond. Generally speaking, movies tend to lose roughly half their audience from week to week, and anything less than a 50% erosion is considered a success. It is insanely rare that a movie’s box office grows from one weekend to the next, let alone increases two weeks in a row. For a wide release comp to “Obsession’s” growth, you’d have to go all the way back to “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” in 1982.
The secret sauce here is word-of-mouth, the oldest marketing tool in existence. In a world based on pre-release hype, teaser trailers and all sorts of other attention-engineering gimmicks, few modes of marketing are more effective than word-of-mouth, someone you know telling you, “you have to see this.” It’s what fueled the success of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” back in 2002, and giant word-of-mouth hits are so rare that “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” is still used as the modern example of the form.
“Backrooms” is a harder sell, although its pre-release hype was deafening. It stars two people (Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve) whose names most people can’t pronounce, who are familiar mostly to indie crowds. (Ejiofor — “Edge-EE-oh-four” — has racked up a ton of credits over the last two decades, but might be most familiar to casual movie fans from his role in the holiday staple “Love Actually.”)
It’s about a down-and-out furniture salesman who finds a portal to a strange world of endless fluorescent-lit and oppressively yellowing rooms, which are like empty showrooms in an infinitely repeating abandoned department store. It’s a non-linear head trip which is widely open to interpretation, as opposed to the structured, straightforward and easy to digest “Obsession.”
But there’s room (no pun intended) for all types, which is what their dual success shows. And either would have been impressive success stories in their own right, but the fact that they’re happening at the same time — the two movies combined for $109 million at the box office over the weekend — make them a phenomenon at least, a movement at best.
A beginning, not an end
Change doesn’t happen overnight, and this doesn’t mean that Hollywood as we know it is dead, just as Michael Jackson getting kicked from the top of the charts didn’t mean the end of the King of Pop. (See “Michael’s” $850 million-and-growing box office gross as an example.) Summer will still be ruled by franchise titles and sequels, and the coming weeks will see the release of “Toy Story 5” and the latest “Spider-Man” movie, not to mention “Supergirl,” a new “Minions” title and an “Avengers” adventure by year’s end. Familiarity at the movies isn’t going anywhere.
But the left field success of these two movies, unknown properties to most until recently, does question the traditional thinking of bringing to life, say, “Masters of the Universe,” which opens in theaters this coming weekend, alongside a reboot of the “Scary Movie” franchise. Who, really, was asking for a “He-Man” movie in 2026? And if it underperforms — as it is very likely to — expect that question to turn into an echo.
It also doesn’t mean that horror is a quick answer to everything, or that all YouTube filmmakers should be given the keys to Hollywood’s castle. Last fall, YouTuber Chris Stuckmann made his feature debut with “Shelby Oaks,” a horror movie that was little-seen and didn’t in any way alter the business. It earned $8.1 million worldwide, fine for a movie with a reported budget of around $1 million, but it didn’t have Hollywood claiming to have found the next big thing.
“Backrooms” and “Obsession” will likely lead to copycats, just as the arrival of Quentin Tarantino in the early 1990s gave birth to a whole genre of movies about fast-talking, pop culture-riffing criminals. Some will be good, most will be bad, and a center will emerge.
But what is true about the success of “Backrooms” and “Obsession” is that it’s being led by young people, the very crowd that Hollywood has been decrying for years for supposedly not caring about the movies. Maybe it’s that they just haven’t been catered to in the right ways, and they don’t want to see the umpteenth iterations on franchises their parents and grandparents grew up with. Give them something new and exciting, and they’ll show up in droves.
Or maybe it’s just that they’re saying, “Here we are now, entertain us,” and someone is finally listening.
agraham@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Success of ‘Backrooms,’ ‘Obsession’ sends a message to Hollywood
Reporting by Adam Graham, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
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