They learned cinema on YouTube, they have raised 300 million with their films and they have achieved something: defeating Star Wars

Three horror movies. Budgets ranging from a ridiculous million dollars for one to ten million for another. Directors of 26, 34 and 20 years old trained on YouTube, not in schools for children of. So far in 2026, those three films have grossed more than $300 million in the North American market. Franchise cinema is not dead, of course, and we are going to prove it this year with the premiere of ‘Doomsday‘ (although, for once, surprises are no longer ruled out). But there are issues that seem to be changing in another sense.

The ‘Backrooms’ explosion. Last weekend,’Backrooms‘ (directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons) collection 81.4 million dollars in North America and 118 million worldwide in its first weekend (and it does not arrive in countries like Spain until the end of June), with a budget of only ten million. It is the biggest premiere in the history of A24surpassing the previous record held by ‘Civil War‘by Alex Garland. Parsons also becomes the youngest director to top the US domestic box office, taking that record from Josh Trank, who was 27 years old when ‘Chronicle’ topped the charts in 2012.

Unstoppable obsession. At the same time, ‘Obsession’ (by Curry Barker, 26 years old) added 26.4 million in its third weekend, 54% more than the previous week, starting from a budget of one million dollars. Its domestic total already exceeds 104 million. Meanwhile, ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu‘, with a budget of 165 million, fell 69% compared to its opening week and was third on the list of box office receipts that week. We will see ‘Obsession’ this weekend in Spain.

The precedent. January had already given the first sign. ‘Iron Lung’ (written, directed, starring and self-distributed by Mark Fischbach, Markiplier on YouTube, 34 years old), debuted with 17.8 million domestic dollars and reached 52 million at the global box office from a budget of three. Fischbach didn’t even go through a study: he self-financed and distributed the film himselfpocketing half of the world gross.

Young audience. It is obvious where these collections come from: 86% of the opening audience for ‘Backrooms’ was under 35 years old, and 44% under 21. ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’, not to get away from Disney’s setback with a financially similar debut the previous week, had a share of those under 25 years of age of 27%, although on paper, it should have attracted more viewers of that age (which corroborates that at this point ‘Star Wars’ is entirely a franchise for kids over forty.) These directors who came from YouTube did not summon a new audience, but rather the one they already brought from the internet.

Warner Bros. Motion Pictures co-head Michael De Luca summed it up in a conference in which said that these directors “They are in dialogue with their audience from the first moment.” By the time movies like these hit theaters, he added, “they’ve already had a billion screenings.”

Three directors, a common pattern. In 2022, Kane Parsons uploaded a nine-minute short film to YouTube titled ‘The Backrooms (Found Footage)’shot from his bedroom with the help of the 3D graphics software Blender. Over the next few years, episodes of the series They accumulated more than 197 million views. Curry Barker, on the other hand, came from the sketch comedy channel ‘That’s a Bad Idea’ which currently has over 700 million cumulative views across platforms. In 2024 he filmed ‘Milk & Serial’, a found footage horror with $800 budget, almost all of it spent on the camera. He spent a year trying to get mainstream distribution without success. He uploaded it for free to YouTube and accumulated 1.6 million views.

Mark Fischbach, for his part, has been on YouTube since 2012. He had experimented with the film format in two of his own productions for YouTube (‘A Heist with Markiplier’ and ‘In Space with Markiplier’) before adapting ‘Iron Lung’, David Szymanski’s indie horror video game published in 2022.

Why the terror. American terror has exceeded 800 million dollars worldwide so far this year, and these three films directed by YouTube creators account for a third of that figure. But… why this devotion to the genre, which goes hand in hand with the good state of health that enjoy in recent years? Horror operates well with low budgets, and the young audience that grew up with creepypasta and found footages on YouTube has a particular relationship with that aesthetic space.

Testing ground. The video clips of the nineties were the laboratory where authors such as David Fincher or Michel Gondry developed their visual grammar before jumping into cinema. Now, YouTube serves as a testing ground for the new generation of filmmakers. That’s why studios and agents now scour YouTube for new names.

Now what. Barker has already filmed his next film, a horror comedy titled ‘Anything but Ghosts’, and A24 has hired him for a remake of ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’. Parsons wants to expand the ‘Backrooms’ universe, possibly in television format. Fischbach, for his part, has already made it clear that he would like to collaborate with a large studio on future projects, without giving up creative control. It is possibly the one with the most traditional discovery profile in the underground and jump to the big leagues.

For now, ‘Backrooms’ could end its box office career between $140 and $160 million in the United States alone, which would make the film one of the biggest hits of the year. Not bad for an idea that started as just another meme on 4chan.

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