Emergency Pod: The YouTube Kids are taking over Hollywood

0:00Samir Chaudry:Hey everyone, welcome to this emergency podcast. It is one of the biggest weeks in YouTube history. We are not in our studio.

0:07Colin Rosenblum:We are in Montana. It is not in fact an emergency. We are fully safe. We are fine.

0:13Samir Chaudry:Okay, but this is a episode that we felt like or just a conversation we felt like we had to have because of the magnitude of what's happening with YouTube creators in Hollywood right now. The YouTube revolution has officially come for Hollywood. Backroom is the number one movie in the world right now. It's a direct result of doing this work on YouTube.

0:31Colin Rosenblum:You have Kane Parsons with Backrooms. You've got Curry Barker with Obsession. And before that, you have Markiplier with his film Iron Long. All of these films have exceeded expectations and shocked people at the box office. And they're all made by YouTubers.

0:47Samir Chaudry:Now, to add to this crazy week of YouTube and Hollywood, exactly one week ago, we threw the Hollywood Creator Summit on the Fox Studio slot. We had 630 creators there all talking about the future of Hollywood. We had people on stage like comedian Tom Segura as well as Markiplier to talk about the success of Iron Lung.

1:04Colin Rosenblum:We also had the UCLA band as well as a guy from Red Bull who almost ran over Samir.

1:13Samir Chaudry:Show business. This conference had everything. Now I bring that up because we are going to be releasing the stage sessions on this channel, including our conversation with Markiplier, which is about this topic exactly.

1:25Colin Rosenblum:Okay, so let's go through all three of these milestone films, talk about their stories and what we've learned from the success of these films. Number one, Kane Parsons and Backrooms.

1:35Samir Chaudry:For people who don't know, give us a quick rundown of how Backrooms came to be.

1:39Colin Rosenblum:Okay, 2019, someone posted anonymously on 4chan, they post a photo of a furniture store in Wisconsin undergoing renovations. If you don't know the story of backrooms, that's a really strange place to start. Someone leaves a comment that says, this room looks like you noclip.

1:55Samir Chaudry:You want to explain noclip? In the video game world, when you basically go off a map, like you kind of glitch out, go through a door and end up off a map, that's no clipping.

2:06Colin Rosenblum:You're in no man's land. You're in the in-between. So that comment sparked the community to create all of this lore. They created multiple Reddit threads going in different directions, building the story from this one photo and this one comment. So Cain Parsons was a fan of this community. And when he was 16 years old, he released an eight minute video that he made using Blender, which is 3D animation software, to create this found footage style horror movie.

2:37Samir Chaudry:so this 27 year old assistant finds it on youtube shows it to their boss and they end up signing cane to turn this into a feature and shortly thereafter 824 gets involved and they make this into the movie that just came out he's 19 when they shoot the movie and he's now 20 years old when it's released and he was five when we first started on youtube wow crazy isn't that crazy

3:01Colin Rosenblum:That's crazy. The fact that Backrooms started from an anonymous post in 4chan and then was discovered by an assistant of someone in Hollywood early on proves that YouTube is one of the most powerful places for filmmakers to start their career. Because even if it feels like the most obscure niche part of the Internet, you never know who is watching and who could reach out and completely change your life.

3:27Samir Chaudry:So the film was made for just about$10 million. And within the first weekend, it made over$118 million worldwide. So I think the natural question would be like, wait, how? Why? Why did this backrooms thing take off so much? And what we've been talking about is that it is internet collaborative IP.

3:46Colin Rosenblum:Meaning this is a story that is built by this generation. It is not IP like Star Wars or Jurassic Park or Spider-Man that is already pre-existing and that the studios are telling us we should go and see. It is IP that is for the people by the people, essentially.

4:03Samir Chaudry:It is an interactive story that was built over time that you feel a part of if you were there, which makes you want to go and see it and celebrate it because the people made the story.

4:13Colin Rosenblum:And by people, we're actually largely talking about Gen Z. Exit polls showed that a large percentage, I think like 50%. Exit polls? Who exit polls? Clearly I read exit polls. Exit polls? Yeah, there was some polling. Dude, outside of the theaters. Who? Have you guys ever been polled when you walk out of a movie theater? According to exit polling, 50 % of the film's domestic audience was under the age of 25, and 44 % was under the age of 21.

4:39Samir Chaudry:Colin went full newscaster. Exit polls are showing that Gen Z loves the movie.

4:43Colin Rosenblum:Well, all I'm saying is that when we're talking about people, we're talking about young people. And I think there was a big narrative out there that Gen Z would not go to the movies because they're just sitting at home on their phones and their computers. That's all they care about. But that is not true. I think this showed that these people actually want to get together and they want to be in person as long as it's IP that they actually care about.

5:02Samir Chaudry:All right. Obsession by Curry Barker. So Curry Barker has been a sketch comedy creator on YouTube and TikTok for some time now. him and his filmmaking partner, Cooper Tomlinson, make really funny and kind of cinematic sketch comedy across the platforms. And they were having success with it. They then decide to make a horror film in August 2024. It cost them 800 bucks to make and they upload it to their YouTube channel. So they get approached to see if they have any other scripts and they're like, yeah, we do. They raise the money, just about$750 ,000 and shoot this movie Obsession in 20 days. It can take us like a whole month to make a podcast sometimes.

5:40Samir Chaudry:That's frustrating. The movie gets picked up by Focus Features for$15 million. Blumhouse Productions, a classic horror house, gets involved in distributing it just days before it goes out. It gets widely distributed in movie theaters and quickly makes$148 million. A movie that costs just about a million dollars has so far in under one month made$148 million.

6:07Colin Rosenblum:And didn't it beat out Star Wars Mandalorian by a ton, which had a much higher budget, obviously?

6:14Samir Chaudry:So the new Mandalorian cost$265 million. We're good. We're safe. We're all good. We're just podcasting. So the Mandalorian all in cost around$265 million between marketing and production. And so far, it's made$247 million worldwide. Doesn't that seem insane? It's an impressive amount of money to make, but like it costs so much money to make.

6:39Colin Rosenblum:But doesn't that seem insane to spend that much money on a movie?

6:42Samir Chaudry:Yes. So let's talk about the lesson with obsession. Everyone's amazed about the small budget. But the thing that really amazed me was something that he said in an interview. And someone asked him, what did years of making for YouTube and TikTok teach you about filmmaking? And he said something along the lines of, when you're making for the internet, the audience is begging to leave. And you have to convince them to stay. But that, the internet filmmaker understands that point extremely well, that you are not entitled to anyone's attention. You have to earn their attention every few seconds of your story.

7:20Samir Chaudry:Classically in Hollywood, they're like, if George Clooney's in the movie and Ryan Glossin's in the movie and we spend all this money, you will come and you will buy a ticket and you will watch it. But that's not true. It's just, is the story good? Is it compelling? Does it capture my attention or not? and the young crop of filmmakers who grew up on YouTube, they've had no choice but to learn how to capture your attention.

7:42Colin Rosenblum:They may not have experience making movies with massive crews and big budgets, but they have a ton of experience making things, putting them out, and immediately getting feedback from an audience. Okay, and now Markiplier with Iron Lung. Markiplier has almost 40 million subscribers. He's been making YouTube videos for, what, 20 years?

8:00Samir Chaudry:Also just like a really nice guy. First time we met him was last week.

8:03Colin Rosenblum:Very kind.

8:03Samir Chaudry:Just a really sweet dude.

8:05Colin Rosenblum:So he plays this video game on his channel, Iron Lung. It is an indie horror video game about a guy trapped in a submarine in a sea of blood. He falls in love with the story, ends up getting the rights by reaching out to the creator of the game, and decides that he wants to turn it into a movie and that he's going to self-finance it himself. He's going to write it, he's going to direct it, he's going to act in it. And so he embarks on that journey and he brings his audience along with the project.

8:30Samir Chaudry:So Mark ends up spending just around$5 million all in to make the movie, and the movie ends up making$52 million when he releases it. What's amazing, though, is he did it fully independently, and he got it into theaters by himself. He made a partnership with a distribution company that wanted to put it in, what, like 30-some-odd theaters? I think 50. 50 theaters originally, and he was like, my audience isn't going to be happy. They're going to want to go see it. He had the audience call theaters to actually get the movie in their local theater. And then eventually it was distributed in over 4 ,000 theaters across the U.S.

9:04Samir Chaudry:and made$52 million.

9:06Colin Rosenblum:And was just released actually for purchase on YouTube as part of YouTube movies. So when we were speaking with Markiplier on stage at the Hollywood Creator Summit, I asked a question and I implied that he made the movie like a YouTube video. He wrote it, he acted in it, he directed it, he did everything himself. And he sort of said, I'm going to stop you right there. and he made sure to acknowledge everyone that helped him.

9:28Samir Chaudry:I will never be as good as them. They're departments, I'll never be able to make those kind of practical effects, the costume choices, the set design. But I know enough about all those processes so that I can communicate effectively with the rest of the crew. And that's the biggest lesson that YouTubers can have when they're interfacing with other crews. It's like, you may be really good at what you do. They've been doing that one thing for as long as you have been doing it sometimes longer. and that can give you an incredible advantage if you can then conversate with them enough that you can get them on the same page with the imagination in your head.

10:04Colin Rosenblum:And I think that's one of the most important takeaways right now for me at this moment when YouTube is colliding and collaborating with Hollywood. The people in Hollywood who are looking for jobs, they are the linchpin of this entire movement. these people who have dedicated their lives to learning very specific crafts within this industry that I do not understand and that a lot of us as YouTube graders do not understand they are one of the biggest reasons why YouTubers can have the success that they're having right now so for all of the conversation about how Hollywood is dying sure Hollywood is not the same that it was but I don't think it's dying I think it's just going through an evolution it's looking different it is collaborating with these people who are finding audience first and who have a vision and who are really good storytellers like who have really learned how to tell a great story

10:59Samir Chaudry:i think that's really exciting the internet storyteller getting to work within the hollywood infrastructure is now producing things like backrooms and kane parsons had a ton of really

11:09Colin Rosenblum:talented people around him curry barker had a ton of super talented people around him he said that He had never really made a film with a budget, period. Yeah. And even Markiplier, who did so much himself, had really talented people around him who don't make YouTube videos for a living.

11:25Samir Chaudry:And that's super, super valuable. I love that this is happening. I just feel so energized by all of it. And it also just re-energizes me about YouTube. Something that Colin and I talk about all the time is that YouTube is the ticket to the extraordinary. Like when you upload a YouTube video, you just don't know who's watching. you don't know what could happen you could end up in Montana you could end up anywhere you could end up making a movie so I just feel like incredibly energized by this moment and I hope you guys do too because this is a really really special time