Hollywood Elites Get Their Comeuppance from YouTubeWood

Last weekend saw record-breaking box office history. Backrooms, directed by Kane Parsons, made a staggering $81 million in its first weekend in North American theaters. Meanwhile, ticket sales for Curry Barker’s breakout film Obsession jumped again in its third week, sailing past $100 million domestically. Both directors started on YouTube, and their features cost almost nothing to produce. This success embarrassed Disney, whose nostalgia-farming, generic slop content, The Mandalorian and Grogu, was knocked off the top spot by these two independents.

We are witnessing a paradigm shift in filmmaking. These two directors built their careers outside of the Hollywood ecosystem, exposing it as bland, commodified, and privileged. The industry’s inner circles are now dominated by graduates of elite private film schools and those selected through diversity-focused initiatives. The drive to elevate women and minority filmmakers has established a new cultural elite of gatekeepers, resulting in the exclusion of a generation of new male talent. At this year’s prestigious Sundance Film Festival, only one of the top 10 U.S. dramatic feature slots showcasing new independent directors went to a white American male—a sharp drop from previous years. 

This influence is especially evident at Sundance, which regularly draws filmmakers from elite academic institutions. In the same lineup, half of the directors were NYU Tisch alumni, even though its graduates represented only a small fraction of total submissions. 

In 2023, Barker, a self-described “straight C and D student,” directed the horror short film The Chair and uploaded it to YouTube, where it has been watched over 10 million times. Parsons has amassed millions of views on YouTube by making short films since he was 14. Neither came through the Ivy League pipeline; both built their foundations in public schools. Barker credits his YouTube channel as his real education, calling it a “film school outside of film school,” while Parsons taught himself to use filmmaking software in middle school. At just 20 years old, Parsons is now the youngest director ever to top the box office charts.