As I mentioned in the previous newsletters, I went to Tribeca’s Storytelling Summit which focuses on educational panels and networking and TribecaX which focuses on where brands, marketing and filmmaking intersect and in BOTH sections of the festival nearly every panel mentioned Backrooms and Obsession, namely their Box office success and what it means for independent artists and the industry writ large.
If you aren’t aware of these films, they took the world by storm at the beginning of the summer, as two breakout-hit indie horror films by young filmmakers who were scouted from Youtube, Kane Parsons and Curry Barker. Backrooms became the highest grossing debut weekend in A24 History and Obsession made history as a film whose Box Office grosses increased for two consecutive weekends, something no wide release had done in over four decades (the last was E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in 1982). Obsession outperformed the new Mandalorian film also, making it the first indie film to out perform a Star Wars property in cinemas. The two films have combined for well over $450 million globally, a number that’s still climbing by the week, and are credited with bringing a wave of Gen Z moviegoers back to the theaters.
Many people have looked at these films’ success and they’re like “Oh, we gotta scout more talent on Youtube,” “IP is the only thing that matters, make a proof of concept, then the feature deals start pouring in,” “You gotta be a young white content creator, then Hollywood will pay attention” (maybe not untrue).
The takeaway
But the actual takeaway is something I’ve been saying for years, which is that in order to make it in Hollywood, whether you’re a big studio movie or an indie TV pilot, you have to build in public.
The Blueprint is actually....K-pop
Those who know me know I love K-pop (maybe not as much as Chase Infiniti, just a normal amount.) But what I’ve always been fascinated by is how the K-pop machine can manufacture stardom out of literally anyone and anything. Part of that strategy is building in public.
K-pop trainees have social media accounts and track their trainee journey, their dance rehearsals, training before and after school, vlogging their days away from their families. When a group is formed, they get their own Youtube Channel, we see them busking on the streets of Seoul for 5 people, asking them to watch for their future success.
It works. By the time they debut, if they’ve done their job right of working in public, they debut to a room full of stans before they’ve released a single album. The ups and downs, the challenges and the stakes around their journey hook people in and get them invested.
The American example of this would be the recent success of Katseye, who had a survival show, social presence and documentary release before their debut single. This is how the K-pop system works, and I genuinely think everyone should operate this way, from broadway to blockbusters, to curate true fans from day 1, and set your projects up for success.
What Curry and Kane Built
Similarly, Curry and Kane both did the brave, strategic thing: they grew their craft and their stories publicly online, before ever releasing a feature film.
They made the choice to put their potentially imperfect creative work out into the universe, get feedback on it, and iterate.
Curry Barker has been posting sketches and short films on his Youtube for nine years.
Nine.
Are they all good? No. Did they all “perform well” from a social media standpoint? No. But he found his voice, proved his skill as a writer-director, and built an audience for his work.
Kane has been posting short films set in “The Backrooms” universe for 4 years, all made with Blender on his own and served as the foundation for the feature's story. It began when Kane made a found-footage-style short film inspired by the internet lore of a 4chan photo of an abandoned store when he was 16. He kept posting new videos in that world, until he was approached to turn the idea into a feature. And after the feature deal, continued posting shorts in the Backrooms world to build anticipation in advance of the film's release. The original short currently sits at over 90 million views, at the time of writing this, and the wider series has racked up nearly 200 million views combined (and climbing).
Not only did he build a group of raging fans for himself, as a high school visionary making films in his bedroom, he built a fandom for the world of Backrooms.
Why this creates leverage
Curry built a personal brand/portfolio of work, and Kane built a universe. These both speak to the heart of why Hollywood is obsessed with adapting IP and franchises, it’s because IP brings a built-in audience and proof of concept. These two young filmmakers built enough leverage for themselves that not only did they get scouted to make a feature, they got to direct it, and in Curry’s case, write and direct it. Both films had competitive bidding wars for distribution (Obsession being the highest festival aquisition of all time) and that isn’t just because the film is good, it’s because distributors knew the film had an audience hungry to see it. Essentially, it was a sure-thing.
So the takeaway here isn’t that horror is the next big thing, but that building in public is a solid strategy, not just for box office revenue or viewership, but a strategy that can position screenwriters and filmmakers for a career they have agency in.
To prove that Curry and Kane aren't a fluke, this has been happening for decades, just on a slightly smaller scale. It's why Issa Rae and Rachel Bloom got to write, produce and star in series they created after being discovered through their youtube content.
And more recently, it's how a horror creature designer--Trevor Henderson, who has a social account where he posts drawings--sold a 10-year-old doodle he did on a napkin to Warner brothers for seven figures in a 5-way bidding war for a package to turn his creature, Siren Head, into a horror feature.
"Once Henderson put it on the internet, it took off in an unexpected way beyond anyone’s comprehension. Before long, there were not just YouTube animations but fan theories, fan-made shorts, fan-made video games, and a slew of fan made merch as young Gen Z-ers became fixated with it, to the bewilderment of their parents." - The Hollywood Reporter
He put his work out there, an audience grew, the industry noticed.
What building in public actually gets you
By working in public, sharing your work, your highs and your lows, not only are you putting the reps in to get better at your craft on your own, you’re getting real actionable feedback in real time from an audience. There is nothing more valuable to a writer than learning how other people will receive your work, because it allows you to calibrate how you present things on the page to get your vision and your audience’s experience as close as possible.
The other fringe benefit is your invested audience. There’s stakes to being present online because you open yourself up to public feedback. But you’re also building your biopic story, giving your artistic journey a beginning, middle, and end. Tracking the journey of production creates even higher stakes, because we see how much stress, blood, sweat, and tears went into creating it. And your audience gets to be the trendsetter who can say they were your fan before it was cool.
A famous example of this outside of the film and tv business is the rise of Doechii, who has been documenting her journey on Youtube for years, and gave new fans an entire vault of lore to dig into to further invest in her as an artist, and OGs an inside track on her 10 year overnight success.
When you include the public in your process, you grow a group of people not just invested in the work you create but invested in YOU, because they see your passion and how hard you’ve worked to get where you are.
This is partially due to the Effort Heuristic, and it’s why humans place high value on things when we believe the creator has worked hard to achieve them or create them.
This means every time you "try in public" you’re building an audience who may one day give to a crowdfunding campaign, join your Patreon, and line up first to watch a movie in theaters because they support you. They’ll be there opening night of your first film, they’ll tell everyone they know to watch your TV show, and cheer you on when you accept your first Emmy. You’ll have your own patrons of the arts, your own fandom--and with a fandom comes leverage and optionality.
So yes, sharing your work is scary. And yes, producing your own work is hard. But when you consider the R.O.I. … perhaps it’s worth the effort.
Give it a Shot
Try this: if you are typically hesitant to share what you're working on, make a point to share your work in progress with one person your trust this week. You can share in the SBA Community, send to your mom, it doesn't matter. But start sharing early and often to work through the nerves.
Did you see Backrooms or Obsession? What did you think? Reply and let me know!
