Hollywood Is Plundering YouTube Thanks to Obsession and Backrooms, so Here Are Some Suggestions of What to Steal Next

Here’s the good news: The runaway, unprecedented success of recent films such as Curry Barker’s Obsession and Kane Parsons’ Backrooms has demonstrated, yet again, that movie audiences can indeed be compelled to go out to the theater if provided with original, intriguing premises and skillful filmmaking. You barely have to spend a cent to achieve this, in fact: Obsession is filled largely with unknowns and was shot on a budget of $750,000, while Backrooms didn’t cost much more in the grand scheme of things at $10 million. BOTH have now crossed the $300 million mark at the worldwide box office, becoming the highest-grossing films ever for each distributor (Focus Features for Obsession, A24 for Backrooms). That’s especially incredible for the likes of A24, which was only months earlier trying to carry Timothée Chalamet to an Academy Award for Marty Supreme despite his best efforts to screw it up. All outdone by inexpensive creepypasta.

Now here’s the bad news: Hollywood ain’t gonna learn any of the obvious, applicable lessons here, because they never do. The execs at our ever-consolidating major film studios aren’t going to take away a new willingness to listen to original pitches, embrace creative indie filmmakers or demonstrate a greater interest in non-IP storytelling. That would be complicated, and require said studios to fundamentally change the way they’re doing business. No, they’re just going to zero in on the most insipid possible factor to focus on and attribute the success of Obsession and Backrooms to … like the fact that the filmmakers had their genesis on YouTube!

Ah, there we go, something inane that we can boil it all down to, and pitch in a five-minute slideshow. This is clearly all about bringing the world of YouTube to the big screen! YouTube-to-film adaptations will be an endless license to print money! I want 10 more YouTube features greenlit by the end of the week! The money men have spoken!

It’s a shame this is bound to be the pointless takeaway of something as genuinely stirring and effectively unnerving as Obsession, which thrives on elements like great art direction and a career-making performance from Inde Navarrette. But seeing as Hollywood will instead be unable to focus on anything other than the YouTubeyness of it all, we might as well contribute some helpful suggestions of other forms of staple YouTube content that could be adopted into incredibly profitable feature films next.

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1. Makeup Tutorials

Oh, you thought The Substance was a devastating critique of society’s demands of female beauty standards, pharmaceutical enslavement and the fact that no woman is allowed to age in a way that is the least bit consistent with their god-given biology? Well wait till you see the protagonist of this movie agonizing for 30 minutes at a time as they compare different shades of foundation against each other to a livestream audience of 17 people, while their no-fucks-given boyfriend chills on the couch in the background and wonders aloud when dinner will be ready. You aren’t ready for horror this real. Come for the horror, stay for the surprisingly relaxing ASMR collaboration.

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2. Stream-of-Consciousness Conspiracy Rants

YouTube is certainly home to plenty of exhaustively researched, deeply supported video essays on rabbit hole topics like the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but I think we can all agree that the spirit of the site will be more thoroughly captured by making a feature film version of the type of conspiracy video in which a man breathes heavily into a microphone in his basement as he lays out his personal cosmology and how it unites the Flat Earth, Atlantean and Moon Landing Hoax communities into one. Bonus points will be awarded if the man in question is in what is clearly the home of his parents, or has a dog that won’t stop whining or getting on camera in the middle of his rant on lizard people or secret societies. The goal here is to achieve the POV of Emma Stone in Jesse Plemons’ basement in Bugonia, to surrender yourself to the overwhelming crazy that YouTube perpetually fosters.

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3. Live “Predator” Hunting

Traditional feature films are clearly missing out on Gen Z and Alpha audiences because they lack the immediacy that only live broadcasting can provide. You know, that special feeling that “anything could happen,” especially in the presence of a desperate-for-attention streamer with zero respect for concepts like “the law” or “human dignity.” Therefore, Hollywood should clearly hop on board the booming YouTube side hustle of “predator catching,” wherein posturing, macho content creators attempt to entrap or simply accuse a random, innocent person of being a pedophile and then attack them on camera with the full support of their bloodthirsty audience. The first studio to get a move on this can plan a live broadcast for the same week as A24’s upcoming Chris Hansen thriller Primetime, a film that will in no way raise the same question I myself asked about the legacy of To Catch a Predator last year: Did it nurture the sadist in all of us?

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4. Contextless, Edited Clips from Vertical Dramas and Anime

No form of content has been more successfully ported to YouTube from the likes of TikTok than jumbled, mashed-up edits of movies, TV shows and media of unknown origin, so why not then port it all one step further, onto the big screen? Imagine sitting down at your AMC or Regal and drinking in a freeform, deeply chaotic stream of random clips from One Piece, with the dialogue removed and emo music inexplicably layered over it instead. Or you could indulge in some contextless snippets of Chinese-style vertical dramas that have also proliferated on YouTube, stories with titles like Found a Homeless Billionaire Husband for Christmas, Falling For My Ex’s Mafia Dad, or Help! My Hot Boss Has My Nudes! You’re telling me people wouldn’t file into cinemas to see those titles on the big screen? C’mon.

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5. A Drama-Filled Reunion of the Iconic YouTubers of Yore

I don’t actually give enough of a shit about YouTube personalities as an archetype to genuinely know which of them are the most culturally significant, but I do know that people who have become accustomed to vast sums of money are typically pretty easy to ply with promises of additional money, in the form of “one last big score.” I also know that people love sappy, weepy and resentment-tinged reunions of faded stars reliving their glory days. So clearly, the thing to do here is to organize a Friends: The Reunion-style meeting of all the retired, iconic YouTubers of the past–you know, your PewDiePies, your Jenna Marbles, your MatPats and Tom Scotts. Please note, I do not know anything about any of those names, all of whom are ostensibly real people. I’m merely suggesting that we make vast amounts of money by putting them all in a room … and if it should also turn into a Battle Royale-esque scenario where everyone is hunted down on camera, so much the better!