YouTuber box office boom: ‘Backrooms’ and ‘Obsession’ draw Gen Z to theaters

Young audiences turned out in droves to movie theaters around the country this weekend.

Young audiences turned out in droves to movie theaters around the country this weekend. It wasn’t for the big-budget “Star Wars” movie “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” which fell sharply in its second weekend, however, but for a small-budget horror from a 20-year-old first-time filmmaker that began on the internet.

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“Backrooms,” released by A24 in 3,442 locations in the U.S. and Canada, made an astonishing $81.5 million in its first three days in theaters, according to studio estimates on Sunday. That’s just a few hundred thousand dollars shy of what “The Mandalorian and Grogu” earned in its first three days last weekend, and “Backrooms,” which was directed and co-written by YouTube creator Kane Parsons, cost only $10 million to produce.

The wild success of “Backrooms” didn’t even hurt “Obsession,” which is also the directorial debut of a YouTuber, Curry Barker, who is only 26. Three weekends in, “Obsession,” a movie that cost less than $1 million to make, still hasn’t dropped below its opening weekend earnings. This weekend, it was up 10% with another $26.4 million for a second-place finish, leaving “Star Wars,” the legacy franchise movie from the veteran filmmaker and the Walt Disney Studios, in third with $25 million.