After the runaway success of creator-led films this year, Hollywood is hungry for creators and is looking to gobble up more and more of their IP.But the Backrooms and A24 copyright show there could be some bumps ahead. Acquiring IP that has been planted, cultivated, and propagated online calls into question the nature of its ownership. As Hollywood spends millions on IP like the Skibidi Toilet memes and the analog horror franchise, The Mandela Catalogue, expect this question to be asked a lot in the coming years.
Backrooms, which at the time of writing has earned nearly $390 million globally, is based off a meme of the same name that was built and disseminated on the the internet. Its director, Kane Parsons, started publishing a web series based on the concept back in 2022, though its origins lie in a 2019 4chan thread from an anonymous poster – a creepypasta, or short, user-generated horror story meant to be iterated upon and shared around platforms.
Last month a Reddit user posted that his Backrooms-inspired artwork received a takedown request on online marketplace Redbubble. The request was reportedly on behalf of A24 Films LLC. Parsons replied to the post, saying it “should not be happening” and that he was looking into it. Shortly after, A24 released a statement, saying it “makes no claim of ownership over the yellow wallpaper, the original post referencing it, or any of the community works that have since been built around it.”
