Hollywood studios mine film schools, scour festivals and run development programs to find successful directors. YouTube found several without trying.
This spring, two YouTube creators, Curry Barker and Kane Parsons, released their debut features, Obsession and Backrooms (respectively), which have collectively grossed over $445 million worldwide and set records at Focus Features and A24.
YouTube has become a source of filmmaking talent because it gives creators direct, unfiltered feedback from a massive audience, with nobody intervening in the process.
YouTube Has Been Building Directors For A Decade
Barker and Parsons are the latest graduates of a pipeline that has been running since the early 2010s. For instance:
- David F. Sandberg spent years posting no-budget horror shorts to YouTube before his film Lights Out went viral in 2013, attracted the attention of Hollywood producers and became a $149 million theatrical hit.
- The Philippou brothers, known on YouTube as RackaRacka, built a following through action comedy before making Talk to Me for A24, which earned $92 million on a $4.5 million budget.
- Mark Fischbach, known to his 38 million subscribers as Markiplier, bypassed the studios entirely, self-financed and self-distributed Iron Lung, and made $51 million on a $3 million budget.
The audience discovered them before Hollywood did.
Why YouTube Succeeds
When Producer James Wan arranged his first meeting with Kane Parsons to discuss turning the Backrooms mythology into a feature film, he did not know he was about to meet a teenager. Parsons’ father was on the call. “We didn’t realize until we reached out that Kane was still in high school,” Wan later admitted to Variety.
Parsons was 16 at the time, had never made a feature film and had no Hollywood representation. But he had a YouTube channel and an audience that knew his work frame by frame.
Parsons started posting on YouTube at age 9, beginning with Minecraft videos before moving into short films. In early 2020, he downloaded Blender and taught himself 3D animation. His 2022 short “Backrooms (Found Footage)” accumulated tens of millions of views.
“[YouTube] gives a very strong, immediate sense of having your finger on the pulse,” Parsons told TechRadar. “You can engage with your audience in real time as soon as you’ve put something online, and it’s been a very fun place to grow my understanding of my own art and build a relationship with my community.”
Film school students make their work for faculty juries and festival submissions. YouTube makes the audience the jury, immediately, every time. And it’s a substantial audience, immediately accessible: The platform has more than 2.7 billion logged-in users monthly and serves over 500 hours of video uploaded every minute.
By the time Parsons walked into A24, he had tested every core element of his Backrooms mythology. He knew what made his audience afraid. He knew where they lingered and where they clicked away.
Barker’s path ran through comedy rather than horror, but the mechanism was similar. Barker and his collaborator Cooper Tomlinson built their sketch comedy channel “that’s a bad idea” to over a million YouTube subscribers, which they described as “our film school outside of film school.” In 2023, Barker posted a horror short called The Chair. He then made Milk & Serial, a found-footage feature shot for $800, and released the whole film on YouTube for free after he could not find a distributor. It went viral and landed him a deal with United Talent Agency.
“YouTube is a place where everyone can get instant feedback,” Barker told Phantasmag. “YouTube taught me through the comments that people are really smart. I would do The Chair or Milk & Serial and cross my fingers and hope people pick up on these small things, and you bet they’ll pick up on things you didn’t even intend. You learn that a modern horror audience is actually very smart, so let’s not treat them like they’re dumb.”
As Parsons told TechRadar, “A common trait shared by a lot of these YouTube filmmakers is having an established contract with their audience, and treating fans like they’re a little more intelligent and cognizant than the average entertainment fan.” That contract is built over years of posting work and reading the response.
YouTube’s position as a platform is what makes all of this possible. Kim Larson, YouTube’s Head of Creators, told Variety: “We are not a traditional studio. We don’t gatekeep, we don’t fund and we don’t own the IP, so they’re in the driver’s seat and that’s freeing for filmmakers who’ve been in Hollywood and felt pressure from gatekeepers.” Having no gatekeeper also keeps creators directly connected with their audiences, and a director can refine their work as much as they need.
The Netflix Example
YouTube works as a filmmaker incubator because it has no financial stake in what gets made. The moment it were to acquire one, the conditions would change. Creators would stop making films for their audiences and start making films for YouTube’s approval instead.
YouTube could do what Netflix did in 2013: start writing checks, hiring talent, and building a film division. Netflix evolved as a place where directors like Alfonso Cuarón could make Roma without studio interference and walk away with two Academy Awards. That version of Netflix attracted some of the most ambitious filmmakers in the world.
But as Netflix grew bigger, the business became restrictive.
Recently, Netflix film chief Dan Lin told the New York Times that directors who want theatrical distribution are “filmmakers that we’ve accepted we just won’t work with.” Matt Damon, during an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience to promote a Netflix film, said the streamer asks directors to restate plot points three or four times in dialogue to account for viewers watching on their phones – which executives later denied.
Still, the distance between being a safe harbor for independent artists and a platform optimized for driving viewership (and subscriptions) took Netflix about 10 years to explore.
Peter Chernin, whose production company co-financed Backrooms, is already warning the broader industry about a version of this problem.
The studio’s rush to sign YouTube creators is “no different than making sequels,” he told CNBC. “It’s jumping on an existing bandwagon. I guarantee you 80% will be failures. It involves no originality, it involves no innovation.”
Hollywood Comes Calling
Barker is already signed to direct a new Texas Chainsaw Massacre for A24. Parsons holds a contract with A24 for more Backrooms. Both are being absorbed into the studio system, which is what happens to successful directors. That absorption doesn’t stop the pipeline.
Somewhere on YouTube right now, another teenager is posting horror shorts, reading the comments and learning from an audience that has no reason to be kind.
The directors who defined American cinema in the 1970s came out of film schools that had no financial stake in their work. The directors emerging now came out of a platform with the same virtue. The pipeline keeps running so long as YouTube stays out of the business of deciding what gets made.
