35x and 537x. Those are the budget multipliers for the current worldwide box office numbers for Backrooms and Obsession, respectively. Both films are low budget (Obsession especially so at $750K to Backrooms‘ $10MM) and yet dominated the box office through early summer, pulling in $350MM and $403MM globally, breezing past behemoth major studio releases like The Mandalorian and Grogu, Masters of the Universe, Disclosure Day and Supergirl. It really can’t be overstated how much of an outlier these two movies are in terms of performance.

Obsession rose not one but two weekends in a row after its opening, a remarkably unusual trend which signifies extremely positive word-of-mouth and effective grassroots marketing. Backrooms yielded the largest ever opening weekend for indie darling studio A24, blowing past their next closest films Civil War ($25.5MM) and Marty Supreme ($17.7MM) and other beloved entries from the studio like Everything Everywhere All At Once, Moonlight, or Lady Bird. The success of these films, both in reception and box-office, signify several notable shifts in the industry.

The primary notable shift is that smaller, independent films (or at the very least, contained stories) have shown themselves to be a viable business proposition at a time when ‘safe’ tentpole corporate storytelling has never felt more dangerous. Disappointing returns for mega-budget ‘blockbusters’ have been plaguing the major studios since the return to theaters post-COVID, coming to a head this year as neither Star Wars, nor Supergirl, nor He-Man can get people into the theater. And what can? Young filmmakers delivering horror stories about the terrors of 1970s wallpaper, or having a girlfriend.

There are a great many reasons to point at to try to diagnose what exactly is happening and why the huge swings are missing and the small ones are soaring out of the park. Many would argue the quality of The Mandalorian and Grogu, Masters of the Universe, Disclosure Day, and Supergirl are playing a role, but I do think this gestures at a real shift in the movie going culture. Letterboxd and cinephilia as a hobby boomed during and after COVID, while Hollywood continued to rely on superhero films and IP to drive the box office, neglecting standalone stories at a time when audiences began to tire of the standard IP story formula. The massive success of these indies echos the indie boom of the 1990s and might signal a pendulum swing back to those kinds of stories driving audience engagement.

Aside from highlighting a shift in audience interest in stories, the Obsession / Backrooms story also cements a trend in story tellers that has been slowly revealing itself for years: the new path to indie film superstardom may run through YouTube.

Kane Parsons and Curry Barker join an already established rank of YouTube creators who have graduated to the big screen in splashy debuts. Zach Cregger (Barbarian, Weapons), Danny and Michael Philippou (Talk to Me, Bring Her Back), Markiplier (Iron Lung), and Kyle Mooney (Y2K) are just a few examples of this recent phenomenon. These creators over-index on comedy in their YouTube content and on horror on the big screen, furthering my fascination with the relationship between those two genres. I don’t think the more typical “film school -> short films -> feature debut” path is dead, nor do I think it will be going anywhere, but it’s been made abundantly clear in the last 3-4 years that honing your craft in the world of content creation online can be every bit as viable. In Parsons’ case, even more so, as much of that $81MM opening weekend for Backrooms came from fans of his YouTube short film series of the same name.

Parsons, who has been working on Backrooms as a larger project since he was 16, has talked about how he sees this film as the beginning of something larger. The mystery of ‘the backrooms’ and intrigue that they incite serve as a metaphor for the kind of internet rabbit-hole from which the IP itself was sprung. What you see at first doesn’t quite compute all the way, but you want to understand it, so you click one more link, read one more comment section, peek around one more yellow corner and before you know if you’ve fallen into a place you didn’t realize you don’t want to be. He very smartly structured the movie to give you just enough information that you’ll inevitably google it and maybe watch his shorts if you hadn’t already seen them. Then surely you’ll watch the TV show, play the video game, tune in to the TikTok Live or whatever supplemental media Parsons decides to focus on.

It’s smart, but it falls more in line with old(ish) school Hollywood tactics. If not for the narrative of the young filmmaker and YouTube/Reddit/4Chan roots of the story, you could even say it reeks of the MCU or Star Wars Disney+ over-saturation issues from the early 20s. Obsession on the other hand carries with it no such baggage. There is no pre-existing IP and no plans for sequels, prequels, a 10-episode Netflix series, or an all-black cast remake. It’s just a pretty fun idea for a movie that was executed well. That’s it!!!! God, it feels good to say that! As previously stated, Obsession is a massive outlier and will probably never happen again despite what I’m sure will be hundreds of attempts to recreate it, but still, as a movie lover, you gotta celebrate the wins. And While I’m inclined to celebrate Obsession a bit more for its achievement than Backrooms, I do think Kane Parsons could become an extremely valuable creative in Hollywood and elsewhere. Hearing the way he speaks about his vision for this project and the way he thinks about art and culture more broadly, it’s clear that he has a mind for this beyond what his age would suggest. Curry Barker on the other hand… well, he sounds like a 26 year old. Nevertheless, I am on the edge of my seat to see his Texas Chainsaw project along with whatever is next for Parsons.

As for my critical response to the movies themselves, Obsession remains my favorite movie of the year (and yes, I’m writing this after I saw The Odyssey). It’s a great concept with just enough meat on the bone for its breezy runtime. I love how the title invokes the 1981 film Possession, to which Inde Navarrette’s performance owes no small debt, and also references not only the obsession we spend the most time with (possessed Nikki’s obsession with Bear) but also the more true obsession which incites the story (Bear’s obsession with the real Nikki). I choose to believe that Barker intentionally named his main character “Bear” to invoke the ‘man or bear’ meme in the viewer’s mind. I was really transfixed by how Barker pulled from more recent horror films and was able to borrow tactics and synthesize them to work for his own purposes. He’s using dark, dark, dark lighting, simple old-school tricks like hanging clothes that look like maybe a person in the darkness, as well as some fun newer ideas that he did not invent but uses to great effect, such as using frame duplication and using reversed footage to create the eerie way in which possessed Nikki moves. I just had such a grand time watching this, it’s the first film in a while that I can’t wait to buy on physical when it it’s released. One last note – I’m calling my shot now that I think Inde Navarrette has a serious shot at an Oscar nomination in the supporting category if she plays her cards right. Horror is historically under-recognized at the Oscars and so are young actors BUT we just saw Amy Madigan win for Zach Cregger’s horror hit Weapons, and the Oscars do tend to reward a young ingenue in the actress categories, while they tend to make young men wait longer (*cough* Chalamet *cough**cough*). I would love to see it happen, I thought she was unbelievable in this.

As for Backrooms, I have substantially less to say, which itself says everything. I had a good time, I love seeing Renate Reinsve working, I was scared, I spent an hour and a half on r/backrooms afterwards. I thought the parts of the movie that tried to be a ‘real movie’ were pretty weak – I wasn’t really compelled by Chiwetel Ejiofor’s storyline and I was a bit put off by the films use of my least favorite thing in movies ever: shaky handheld camerawork (I had to leave the theater for a moment due to nausea). I’ll be there for Backrooms 2 or whatever else happens here because I’m a sucker, but I don’t think this one, as a movie on it’s face, would have been worth a blog post by itself.

Luckily, we are living through a major sea change in how movies are made, distributed, watched, and thought about, so I haven’t been short on things to write about. It’s a revolution and it’s only just beginning. What an exciting time to be a psycho loser like me! And so much more to come in 2026! Movies!!!11!!1`!!!