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Hollywood gatekeepers aren’t the only ones who appear to have had trouble adjusting as the pipeline from YouTube content creator to Hollywood filmmaker adds to its growing list of success stories.
A24’s horror film Backrooms surpassed $81 million for the studio’s biggest opening frame ever, as 20-year-old filmmaker Kane Parsons became the youngest director in history to top the domestic box office. Parsons’ project adapted his YouTube series centering on an infinite maze of rooms and spurred headlines about content creators as new filmmaking voices, in light of 26-year-old director Curry Barker‘s Obsession notching historic weekend-over-weekend gains since Focus Features released the horror project May 15.
The buzz for both projects, and the fact the two filmmakers are in their 20s and got their starts with viral online videos, led some social media users to post unfounded speculation that the projects had more established Hollywood names quietly ghost-directing behind the scenes. As conspiracies mounted that Osgood Perkins or other Backrooms producers may have stepped in for Parsons, co-star Mark Duplass took to social media to assert that “Kane was 100% in control.” Even Parsons himself poked fun at such notions.
