A hosts' hangout with Andy and Jo, prompted by a conversation that has been running hot across LinkedIn all week: creator-made films are pulling audiences into cinemas in a way that Hollywood studios haven't managed for years. Backrooms — made by 20-year-old Kane Parsons who taught himself Blender during Covid — and Obsession, made by Cory Barker for under a million dollars, are both seeing successive weeks of audience growth in theatres. The last film to do that was E.T.

The conversation goes beyond the hot takes to ask what's actually driving it. Andy and Jo's argument is that this isn't really about filmmaking — it's about trust, built slowly, over years of showing up for an audience before it ever made commercial sense to do so. The parasocial relationships these creators have with their fans are something no studio can manufacture, and the co-created lore around something like Backrooms means audiences don't just watch the film — they feel they made it. Mr. Beast is the useful counterexample: so big he's effectively become the kind of corporate entity his audience was rooting against.

The episode then pivots to what all of this might mean for kids and teens media specifically — from the structural problem of COPPA preventing younger audiences from participating in the kind of creative sandpits that made Backrooms possible, to whether Roblox game adaptations like 99 Nights in the Forest could replicate the Minecraft movie moment, to the genuinely exciting question of what happens when this generation of creators starts having kids of their own.

The Kids Media Club Podcast is open for sponsorship and we're changing things up a little bit where we're going to be offering feature episodes ahead of major industry events like Licensing Expo, Annecy ble, mipcom, Toy Fair and more.

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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Kids Media Club Podcast.

I am Andy Williams.

Hi, Joe.

How are we doing?

Yeah, good.

We're, we're without Emily for the second week running.

I think she'll be back next week, so.

She will be.

She will be.

And I think, yes, a mixture of work half term things are all, yes, kind of out of sync.

But normal service resumes next week and I've just finished eating Marmite on toast, so forgive me whilst I just finished my last Love it or hate, I'm.

Gonna save my snack till after the.

After the podcast.

Are you, are you a Marmite lover or hater?

I think I was.

I'm on the kind of no Marmite side of that divide, but I haven't tried Marmite for a while, so maybe, maybe a bit like mushrooms or olives.

I'll find out that I matured enough to like Marmite.

It was nearly the end of a beautiful friendship.

There haven't.

Anyway, we couldn't really have our second host hangout in as many weeks without touching on the creator movie discussion that is rife all over LinkedIn and which I think is pertinent to discuss with regards to kids media, certainly kids and teens media, because we, I mean, let's face it, the headline very much has been all about backrooms and obsession.

Is it a tipping point for Hollywood?

Is this that, is this the moment that the creators seize the Hollywood crown?

Wow.

I mean, oh, what a great.

It's a great thing to noodle on, isn't it?

Because we, we also had a few weeks ago Markiplier and his Iron Lung movie which succeeded in film theaters.

So that's three in probably, I mean in a matter of months that have really bucked the trend and basically creators proving that they can mobilize their fans into theaters perhaps in a way that studios haven't been so successful at of late.

Yeah, I think it's two things, isn't it?

It's a one that both of both Backrooms and Obsession were made for a fraction of what Hollywood Budget would normally be so Obsession, I think was made for under a million dollars, which is amazing and will be the first film since E.T.

That have is increased its audience in its second and third week from its first.

And I think he's on track to make something like 100 million or.

Yeah, I think people probably cross cross that this, this weekend and I mean three successive weeks of growth theatrically, not to be sniffed at and I mean that's on that kind of budget.

Yeah, it, it's, I mean it's, it's, it's.

I think it, it's probably justified the amount of rhetoric and you know, kind of hot takes that I've seen this week on social media because I think really you get these kind of almost GPT driven statements of fact all over the place these days.

Creator fandom is becoming distribution, all of that.

But actually when you unpack says a lot about how for a long time we've been used to influencers, haven't we?

We've been used to influencers on social media for a good few years.

And it used to be the assumption and I think tv certainly in my career TV and maybe the studio and Hollywood system just assumed that influencers were promotion.

They were just the reach, they were the marketing channel.

But the sales were still driven kind of elsewhere.

And we've spoken for a long time on this podcast about how creators in a TV sense disintermediated the relationship with the audience.

They went direct and now we've seen it happen again.

Because rather than them being influencers, I think there's this been this evolution now and I would rather say creators rather than influencers when we're talking about these, these movies is that these creators are able to, they are the reason that people are buying tickets.

They're not just the promotion.

People are buying tickets because they are invested on that creator's creative journey or their ambition or because they've been watching them for a heck of a long time and they've got a relationship with them that they feel quite passionate about.

Yeah, yeah, there's definitely a kind of that parasocial relationship that creators have that studios aren't able to replicate.

I mean, I'd Write Something on LinkedIn recently where people are talking about this as a new wave of indie filmmakers.

And it's interesting to contrast it with, with previous, with past waves of indie filmmakers.

So in the 70s and the 90s where those were, that was a big explosion of indie filmmakers.

The, the Hollywood, Hollywood gravitated to those creators because they thought they spoke the language of the audience that they were in tune with the zeitgeist.

But those creators never owned, or they never owned the relationship with the audience in the way that this wave of creators do.

Because this wave of creators have poured over their YouTube channels every day and seeing what audiences have liked and responded to and.

And it means that they owned that kind of, that audience relationship in a way that, that is different really.

So it's interesting to see how there's a kind of power shift there.

I don't know whether, whether it will be sustained, but it is definitely an extra, an extra kind of power that those creators have that previous indie creators wouldn't have had.

I agree completely.

And I mean, just thinking as you were saying it there, these creators, they have been doing their thing for a long time when they had one, ten, hundred, a thousand followers, but they were still getting out of bed, they were still creating at a time when most people would have given up.

Absolutely.

I think we forget that.

I think we tend to think that these are overnight successes, but they're not.

They have been doing this thing day in, day out, week in week out for a long time.

What that brings with it is trust.

And one of the things that I think about a lot, particularly with regards to young people and their relationship with media and brands and who brings them stories, is this trust.

We used to trust the BBC would bring us the best kids shows.

We used to trust that Sky Sports or TNT would bring us the best sports.

Now we've got creators who fans trust more than they trust those traditional ways of delivering stories, sports or whatever.

Trust is the thing, isn't it?

Trust really is super powerful.

It's the reason that mega brands spend a lot of time marketing, is to try and gain the trust of their potential consumers.

But creators have built trust and they've built trust over years of showing up, even when it seemed like a thankless task.

And what that is rewarding them now, and the people like Kane, Parsons and Markiplier, what that is rewarding them with now is that trust means that those fans are willing to follow them into a new medium.

And this is where I wanted to bring up Mr.

Beast, because we've seen Mr.

Beast do his deal for Beast Games with Amazon.

And if you read a lot of the commentary and entertainment strategy guy, he's done a couple of posts on this.

Beast Games was very expensive.

Yep.

The Beast has been spending increasing amounts on his content in recent years in an effort to grow and maintain his spot at the top of the tree in terms of YouTube subscribers.

But they didn't follow him to Amazon.

And by all accounts, season two wasn't a massive success either.

Part of Me wonders if MrBeast is actually so big he's lost that trust.

He is pretty corporate.

He employs a lot of people and actually a lot of his.

Whatever.

He's on 400 million subscribers now.

A big chunk of those have grown up and moved on.

So I don't think we can think of Mr.

Beast as a typical example of creator.

And therefore, oh, he failed.

He didn't mobilize his audience over to Amazon.

Therefore creators can't make TV shows and movies.

Well, we've just had that disproved in the last few weeks with these movies, so.

Absolutely.

Maybe there's a point where a YouTuber gets so big that they become synonymous with the corporations that people think that they're competing against.

I mean, I was looking at.

So Curry Baker is the 26 year old YouTuber turned filmmaker that made Obsession and Barker.

Curry Barker, sorry.

And he has, he has something like, I think between 1 to 2 million subscribers.

I think just over 1 million subscribers now.

That's, there's lots of YouTubers that have much bigger audiences than that.

But I wonder whether you're able to sustain a relationship with your audience if they're around 1 million in a way that you're not able to meaningfully sustain a relationship with an audience of 500 million.

It's a great point.

And I wonder whether that also factors into it.

I mean, the, yeah, it's a, it's an interesting thing with Mr. B.

So maybe, maybe you just grow to the point where you are just kind of out of touch with that audience and this.

Because how can you meaningfully really engage with an audience of 500 million and sort of understand who your audience is?

Yeah, it's not.

When you're at that scale, it becomes a numbers game.

And even though I, I've read some data that shows that MrBeast videos on YouTube are not doing the numbers that they used to, he, you know, he's gonna be fine.

He's got his, he's got his job.

Everyone can put away their violins just for the moment for Mr.

Beast.

But I do think you've got a point.

I think he's almost outgrown YouTube in the sense that he's no longer seen as a creator that is one of us, you know, yes, he's been doing this thing for 15 years on the platform, but he's almost closer to traditional media in terms of scale now than Those creators that do have a million subscribers.

Yeah, absolutely.

He's grown so big.

Yeah.

And I mean one of the things we've also talks about a lot is the dynamic relationship between a creator and the, and the fan base, the fandom.

And I think both with obsession and certainly with back rooms.

I mean back rooms started as, as a kind of Internet myth really that was then shared between people and everyone adding to the story and an almost is almost a kind of example of fan fiction or crowd.

Yeah.

Sort of stories on before we came on, before we hit record, you were kind of comparing it to, to brain rot in that sort of, in that way that everyone kind of passes that baton from one person to another and everyone adds, adds their layer to it.

And so.

Yeah, so kind of the.

Yeah.

And it's.

And that's an element where, with kind of, with YouTube and a lot of that content is not just the creators that have that opportunity to be creative, it's also everyone else involved in it.

It's the participation.

Even if it's, even if it's a comment you make in the comment thread, that's an element of creativity and it's, and it's sort of.

It channels that energy and it's ended up being able to tap into that in the cinemas in a really big way.

Yeah.

It's investment, isn't it?

In an age of infinite content.

And when we've got a generation of media consumers who have that inbuilt spam filter, they're so media literate and finely attuned to screening out what's not relevant to them or is too corporate or too polished, which very often reads as fake.

They.

The fact that they've even invested time in making a comment is an indicator of their investment in this thing.

So back to Markiplier and Iron Long.

You know, they felt invested in his creative ambition because he was very open in talking about how he loved this game, he was creating content around it.

He really would love to turn it into a movie.

Every single one that went along that journey with him and maybe encouraged him or dropped a comment saying, yes, oh, I'd love to see this or I would do this or anything.

Every single one of those comments is an investment from a follower.

So yeah, and that's really important because then that investment pays back at a time when you're saying to them, okay, I've got this movie financed, I'm gonna shoot it.

They come along with you and then at some point you say, okay, now it's being released in cinemas.

And if the rumors are to be believed to get wider distribution, why don't you ring your local cinema and ask them to screen Iron Lung?

I mean it was all of these fans of his and followers were along for the journey.

And it's the same with backrooms and I was having this discussion with my own focus group at home who have followed the whole backrooms mythology and Kane Parsons is like 20 and he started teaching himself Blender in Covid and then started making this content that was all kind of grainy.

But the law was then co created to your point.

You put it out there, people add and go oh, what about this and what about again, it's a creative sandpit.

That everyone's invited to join into and.

Every single edition, much like comments on Markiplier's creative ambitions for iron long.

Every single thing that people took and made their own little spin on it was an investment from them.

So when you feel like you've been even just the tiniest part in co creating that lore, well, when it turns up in cinemas, guess what, you're gonna go and see it.

I just love it.

I find it so exciting.

It will not work for everyone.

I think again, I think cue the gold rush now for these indie kind of films that are gonna be.

There's gonna be investment pouring into that sector and I don't think every single one will succeed.

Oh but I mean, you know, when Star wars came out there was a whole slew of pretty average sci fi movies that followed that.

So that's kind of.

That sort of goes with the territory a bit, I think.

Yes, yeah, exactly.

It's, it's inevitable.

It's the same with everything, isn't it?

It's.

It was the same with NFTs and Web3 and it was.

Yeah everybody, the gold rush happens.

One of the things that it does make me think a little bit.

And it's.

And it's the kind of the, the evergreen conundrum that is KISS Media and, and how kids media can really operate to the, how kids media can really thrive within that kind of social context.

Yes, the, the, all of the stuff that we talk about, leaving aside the horror stuff that is obviously kind of not for kids, but just the creativity of having fans being able to play in the same sandbox and, and also contribute and create and flex their imaginative muscles and all of that stuff that's all aspects of this kind of content that really isn't available to kids media because on YouTube you're not allowed to have comments and, and there's there's definitely kind of quite a high wall built around, around the content which sort of shuts out younger audiences from being able to participate to the same level.

And I mean, I'd love there to be some solution that protected that audience from any kind of risk and harm, while at the same time allowing that audience to be able to participate creatively in content in a way that it's not so easy to do at the moment.

Yeah.

And we have Zigazoo on the podcast and I think that's Zigazoo is a great solve for that because the genie is out of the bottle, then kids are not going to then go back and say, oh, it's okay, we don't want this two way participatory relationship with IP anymore.

It's okay, we got it wrong.

Of course they won't.

So now it's beholden on solutions to be found either at platform level, like YouTube.

And we've discussed also how regulatory pressure is piling on the platforms to take more responsibility for the safety of the users and younger users in particular, or you've got separate solutions like Zigzoo who are.

It's hard.

It's hard to get those young people to use something which isn't the prevailing platform of choice and where all of the grownups are.

We know that young people will always want to age up and go and play on the grown up version of the platform, but if you can get them there in a way that Zigzoo seems to be having some success with, then actually, yes, there's no reason that you can't then indulge those emergent behaviors and encourage them in a safe way.

But they're not going to change.

I think we just got to figure out now how we indulge them and how we facilitate them, but in a way that it regards their safety, what it does do.

And when we were prepping for this podcast, because we do, you know, we do often prep, I was thinking about the Roblox.

That wasn't a laugh.

Yeah, I was thinking about the Roblox games that have been optioned for adaptation into movies of late, and whether we could take a clue from what's been happening with backrooms and obsession for those.

Because Grow a Garden, which was huge at the end of last year, which has fallen away quite a lot in the intervening period, but Grow a Garden.

But More recently, through 20th Century Fox, they acquired the rights to 99 Nights in the Forest, which is a super popular and still super popular Roblox experience.

Now, again, you've got hundreds of millions, if not billions of visits to those games and each one is an investment in time with that ip.

The question for me is can, well, particularly some, a studio like 20th Century Fox, can they develop a movie and get it out there quick enough to capitalize?

Because the risk with something like Grow a Garden, which is already way down on what it was, is, you know, there won't be a Grow A Garden movie for at least another 12 months.

So there's that inevitable lag.

But the creators of 99 Nights in the Forest, the developers, they, a lot of users on Roblox really love them in the same way that they love Kane Parsons and Markiplier and Cory Barker.

So it could be that we're going to be watching a Roblox movie in theaters in 12 months and going, oh my goodness.

Now Roblox creators have been able to mobilize all of these young audiences into the theaters, which I'm hoping happens.

Yeah, absolutely.

Do you think for, do you think there's some genres that kind of suit cinemas more than others?

So do you think for Roblox, are, are there kind of horror games for Roblox that would that be able to move into the space that Back rooms and obsession are kind of are kind of playing within?

I kind of wonder whether some of those kind of social IPs, whether they might just operate kind of more successfully within that cinema space than others.

Yeah.

Do you know what, it's a great point.

I mean, you go onto Roblox and there are plenty of backrooms, esque experiences on there, these liminal spaces where it's a little bit creepy, it feels on the edge of reality, you're a little bit disturbed.

I mean, hundreds of thousands of similar games on Roblox, this kind of creepypasta.

But what's interesting is the best Roblox games have got a very shallow game loop.

It is that kind of, you know, quick dopamine, do something level up, buy something else that was Grow a garden or survival.

99 Nights in the Forest.

You got to survive, you know, as long as you can in the forest.

So they're fairly easy but very fairly shallow game loops.

I think to a lot of people that does not equate to good storytelling.

But then I think back to the Minecraft movie.

Now, obviously Minecraft is, that's, that's a level above in terms of what Minecraft has meant to a whole generation of gamers.

But Minecraft hasn't got a game loop other than against survival and building.

But they managed to Make a really successful story out of Minecraft and again mobilize those young gamers into theaters.

And now they've announced the sequel.

And that's a really good example actually because I think so when I was posting about backrooms and obsession, one of the comments talks about how powerful horror is as a genre and how one, it allows you to do low budget filmmaking, can still tap into a big commercial audience.

And the discussion was then around are there any other, is it particular to horror?

But I think Minecraft is a good example of how that managed to leverage that huge existing audience on Minecraft and bring them to the cinemas.

So it's, it's similar to the backrooms thing of having all of those people participate in effectively creating a crowd, a crowd sourced form of storytelling and then be able to give them a, give them a movie that really kind of represented that on the screen for them.

Yeah, and we've, we've, we've not had many horror movies.

I mean it feels like it's a cycle.

You had horror movies in the 80s and 90s, you had a Nightmare on Elm street, you had Halloween, you had Friday the 13th.

And then we seem to, I mean I'm sure they existed.

I'm no horror movie buff so I'm sure I will get disproved.

But it feels like you're very going to get everyone steaming on the comments now.

But it feels like this, this is kind of a cycle.

And again I think it comes down to you.

You've got teenagers who inevitably will rail against what their parents liked.

You know, it's happened for generations.

Rock music, dance music.

No, and, and horror is something that I think teenagers have discovered particularly with this kind of creepypasta Internet law type stuff that their parents didn't necessarily get.

And, and as we've said before, a lot of times you.

One of the greatest barometers of success I've always argued is if a parent looks at what a kid is watching or listening to or playing and says what the heck is that?

Tick.

See.

See Brain rot.

See creepypasta.

So yeah, I mean I think there.

Is something to that.

But I also think with horror movies it's one of the genres that the audience has.

The audience will go out to see a horror movie that they might not know that much about in a way that they probably don't for other genres.

And I think it's also this, that you're able to make a horror movie that could attract a mass audience for under a million dollars.

There aren't, there just aren't there aren't that many genres that people could do that with.

Yeah, great point.

Because, you know, romantic comedies, you tend to need bigger stars, maybe more lavish locations.

Yeah, yeah, I do, yeah.

What.

But you know, while we're talking about this, isn't it nice that now we can look at those people who said, oh, young people don't go to theater, they don't go to cinemas anymore.

I go, oh, sorry, you're wrong there.

Absolutely.

I was reading the, I think amc, who are the big cinema chain in, in the States, they, they said it's biggest audience figures that they've had since.

2019 And, and they're all, I mean majority under 30 and even younger than that.

So, you know, to have a whole cinema full of 19, 20, 25 year olds, that must be so, I mean, hopeful for the big, for the big cinemas, knowing that young people are going to come back and watch.

And very often I was reading about in a similar vein to Barb and Heimer, where people were watching both films back to back now.

Yeah.

Obsession and Backrooms, double bill.

So they're seeing both of them.

Amazing.

Yeah, it's great.

A great story of hope.

But yeah, one for the purposes of our listeners, one that I think does give us clues as to how you can, you can engage and, and mobilize and it comes down to fandom.

Again, we've spoke about it a lot.

We should, we should perhaps cease talking about audiences and maybe start talking more about fans and fandom, but because that forces us to work a little bit harder for them, I think.

Also I think fandoms sound more active, audiences sound quite passive and I think it, the, the key differentiator is that it's quite an active relationship.

So this is a, this is an audience that have engaged with content online, made comments, done their own versions of it, added to, added to the story, either in the margins or kind of coming up with their own, their own take on it.

So that's a very, you know, that's a very powerful dynamic, I think, that relationship.

Yeah.

So one last thing that happened this week, but actually it's kind of related.

We.

So KSI is departed.

The Sidemen, the UK's biggest creator group, as far as I'm aware, they're not making a movie, but they have made a few TV shows, notably they've got one with Netflix.

But it got me thinking in this similar vein, they're all, the Sidemen are getting older now, they're in relationships, they're beginning to have kids.

When we've got a generation of creators of the sidemen's scale.

And, you know, think about Markiplier again and Cory Barker.

They may be a little bit young when they all start having kids and they start thinking about kids content and kids media and kids stories.

Their take on, I mean, I mentioned to you on WhatsApp yesterday, you know, could one of these be the future Keith Chapman?

What Keith Chapman was to obviously Bob the Builder and Paw Patrol.

I wonder if a creator that maybe has come out one out of one of these creator groups or has been on a platform like YouTube for a long time when they become parents, I think we're going to see a whole new raft of creative kids content coming through.

That'd be great.

How exciting would that be?

Yeah, I mean, they're, they're, this is their world, they're growing up in it.

So their take on what, what works in terms of kids media is going to be vastly different to, to what ours would be.

And I think.

Yeah, and it's also a great example of how, I mean, going back to that power of social relationship with the audience is that they're following their lives, really.

They've got a relationship with those people.

And so, yeah, when that, when the new chapter opens and it's more about kids and family, I think it's inevitable that that will kind of feed into, into that content.

Yeah, I'm excited.

Who knows?

Who knows?

Yeah.

Great stuff.

Okay, well, you're, you're jetting off to New York for the rest of the week, so.

I am.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I'm off tomorrow and then back on Saturday and you're off to Italy.

And I'm off to Lake Como.

Yes.

To say hello.

Say hello to George from me.

I will.

Yes.

We're having a girls weekend away.

Walking, gossip, wine and food.

Oh, perfect.

Sounds like the perfect ingredients.

Okay, I'll let you do the sign off.

Great.

Okay, so thanks very much for listening, everyone.

We'd love to hear your thoughts and comments on backrooms and obsession and, and the creator and fandom relationship and please like and subscribe wherever you get your podcast and we'll see you guys next week.