Two of the three biggest movies in America right now were made by people who learned to direct on YouTube. A 20-year-old named Kane Parsons just handed A24 the biggest opening weekend in its history with Backrooms, a film grown out of a horror series he built in Blender as a teenager. Down the multiplex, Curry Barker's Obsession, shot for $750,000, is still selling more tickets in its third week than it did on opening day. Hollywood spent a century manufacturing stars. The pipeline now starts on a channel.

Also in this week's issue: an eight-minute geography video from 2023 that our own model wrote off and that just sailed past 5 million views, why Coach is suddenly the brand Gen Z trusts, and a calendar so loaded it hurts, with the NBA Finals, Summer Game Fest, Roland-Garros, and Apple's WWDC all landing inside seven days. Let's get into it.

This week's deep dive

Hollywood's Biggest Horror Hits Came From YouTube

Backrooms opened on June 2 and immediately rewrote A24's record book. The film took $81 million domestically and $118 million worldwide in its first weekend, more than tripling the studio's previous best opening (Alex Garland's Civil War, at $25.5 million in 2024), and it became the first A24 release ever to clear $100 million at the domestic box office, hitting that mark in six days. It was made for roughly $10 million with Chernin Entertainment, stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, and was directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, now the youngest filmmaker in history to land a number-one movie.

Parsons did not come from film school. He built the Backrooms as a series of unsettling shorts in Blender on his "Kane Pixels" YouTube channel as a teenager, and those videos pulled close to 200 million views before any studio called. A24 did not buy a script. It bought a world and the audience that already lived inside it.

The reason this is a pattern and not a fluke is sitting two screens over. Curry Barker's Obsession, a darkly funny horror film the 26-year-old made for about $750,000 in 20 days, opened on May 15 and has now cleared roughly $150 million worldwide. It pulled off the rarest trick in modern distribution: it made more money in its second weekend than its first, a sign that word of mouth, not a marketing budget, is carrying it. Barker spent years building an audience on his sketch channel "That's a Bad Idea" and his found-footage feature Milk & Serial. Add Markiplier's Iron Lung, which opened to $21.7 million on a $3 million budget, and you have three YouTube-native horror films turning into outsized theatrical hits inside a single year.

What changed is who shows up. A Fandango study this year found Gen Z is now the largest single group of theatergoers, with 87% saying they saw at least one film in a theater over the past year, against 58% of boomers. The thing that gets them off the couch is talent they already follow. Studios understand this now: A24, Focus, and Blumhouse are openly scouting YouTube for the next director, and Barker has already signed to write and direct a Texas Chainsaw Massacre for A24 plus a second horror-comedy for Focus and Blumhouse. The YouTube channel is the hottest Hollywood calling card right now.

Zooming Out

Every one of these directors arrived with an audience they spent years assembling in public, for free. Kane Pixels' Backrooms shorts pulled nearly 200 million views before a studio existed in the picture. That audience was always the valuable thing, and for most of its life it was available at the price of a small-creator sponsorship. This is the repricing happening across creator-owned IP right now: the channels worth backing are the ones building worlds and communities, not the ones renting impressions one video at a time. The cheapest version of a breakout audience is always the version that hasn't broken out yet, which is a useful thing to keep in mind when you read the next section.

The story behind the numbers

From Our Data

The Geography Video That Refuses to Die

Here is the least glamorous viral hit you will see this week. In January 2023, a channel called Geography By Geoff posted an eight-minute explainer titled "Why So Few Americans Live In This Huge Area In The Middle Of The Country." Our model looked at it and predicted about 1,200 views. Three and a half years later, it is sitting at 5.3 million, and it is still being recommended today.

One video, three and a half years later

Channel

Geography By Geoff (1.02M subscribers)

Published

January 9, 2023 · 8 min 31 sec

Views today — 5,301,899

What the model forecast

~1,200 views (it beat that by roughly 4,000x)

Where it ranks

Top of Geoff's 264-video catalogue, ~14x his median upload

Engagement

85K likes · 5.4K comments

There was no news spike, no celebrity re-share, no gimmick. It is a map and a calm voice explaining the empty belt running down the middle of the country, the kind of question YouTube's recommendation engine can keep serving to new people forever. It did not go viral. It just never stopped.

Why it matters

Evergreen explainer creators are the most under-priced asset in sponsorship. A normal integration decays in a week; a sponsored segment inside a video like this keeps collecting impressions for years, so the effective CPM only gets cheaper the longer it runs. The audience is brand-safe and curious, a natural fit for finance, software, education, and travel. When you are pricing a deal, the question is not just how the video does on day one. It is whether it is still working three years later, and some of them very much are.

Links Roundup

Quick hits from across the web

→ Michelle Khare's "Challenge Accepted" is gunning for a Primetime Emmy, which puts an independently produced YouTube series on the same ballot as Stanley Tucci and David Letterman. The line between "creator content" and "television" is now being settled by the awards categories themselves.

→ VidCon Anaheim returns June 25 to 27 for its 15th anniversary, with Markiplier, Philip DeFranco and Anthpo among the first names announced.

→ Take-Two confirmed that GTA VI's marketing blitz won't begin until the end of June, meaning Rockstar is sitting out this week's summer showcases entirely and setting up its own months-long hype cycle on its own terms.

→ IKEA turned what everyone assumed was an April Fools gag into a real product: a meatball-flavoured lollipop with Chupa Chups is rolling out in hundreds of stores worldwide this month for the meatball's 40th birthday. A reminder that the best owned-asset campaigns start as a joke nobody is brave enough to ship.

→ YouTube says it has now paid creators more than $100 billion over the past four years, with an exec pushing back hard on the "YouTube versus Netflix" framing. Their argument: the comparison misses the point, because nobody else is cutting cheques to three million creators.

Add to your watch list

Creator on the Rise

StEvEn & Parker

Animation / Family Comedy • ~30M unique weekly viewers • US

If the deep dive is about creators walking into Hollywood, StEvEn & Parker is the opposite trade: an original animated IP, built on YouTube, that is being licensed out into everything else. The weekly series, created by Dallas-based Parker James and produced with the AI animation studio Toonstar, follows a dino-obsessed little brother and his long-suffering older one. It pulls roughly 30 million unique viewers a week across its English, Spanish and Portuguese channels (the dubbing is AI-generated), and the character has racked up over 7 billion lifetime views and 17 million aggregate followers. Crucially, this is not borrowed IP. It is creator-owned, which is why Random House's Crown Books for Young Readers was able to turn it into a middle-grade graphic novel series, "StEvEn and Parker: Dinos Are Forever!", which arrived this spring. For any brand in kids, family or education, this is what a creator-native franchise looks like before the licensing deals get expensive.

Watch the channel →

Advertiser Spotlight

Brand Strategies Worth Stealing

Coach × "Explore Your Story"

Coach's spring campaign started from a genuine cultural observation rather than a product brief: Gen Z lives in a short-form, fast-moving feed and is, in reaction to exactly that, falling back in love with books and long-form storytelling. So Coach built "Explore Your Story" around that tension, anchored it to its Tabby bag and a new line of readable book charms, co-created the campaign with Gen Z communities from the US to China, and ran it through creators (Haley Pham among them) instead of glossy brand films. It then put the thing in the physical world with the Coach Tabby Tour, a travelling campus hub where students swap stories. In a single quarter the brand saw a 60% jump in Gen Z awareness, a six-fold lift in consideration, and a sustained acceleration in Gen Z acquisition.

The lesson is the order of operations. Coach did not start with "how do we sell more bags to young people." It started with a true thing those young people were already feeling, found the product inside its own catalogue that fit (the book charm), and then handed the storytelling to creators and the community rather than authoring it top-down. A heritage brand co-created with a generation instead of marketing at it.

Trending on YouTube

What's going viral right now

The Knicks Are Back in the Finals

The 2026 NBA Finals tipped off on June 3 with the New York Knicks in the championship round for the first time since 1999, facing Victor Wembanyama and the San Antonio Spurs. A big-market drought-breaker against the league's most-hyped young star is exactly the matchup the NBA's YouTube channel wants, and the nightly highlight cuts are climbing fast. Watch the highlights.

Summer Game Fest Takes Over Friday

Geoff Keighley's Summer Game Fest streams live from the Dolby Theatre on June 5, two hours of world premieres that anchor the entire June gaming calendar (Marvel's Wolverine, Gears of War: E-Day and Fable are all in the mix). Trailer drops from this show routinely become some of the most-viewed gaming videos of the year within 48 hours. Watch the showcase.

Roland-Garros Hits Its Finals Weekend

The French Open finals land on June 6 (women) and June 7 (men) on Court Philippe-Chatrier, and the women's draw blew wide open when world number one Aryna Sabalenka was knocked out in the quarterfinals. Roland-Garros now treats its own YouTube channel as a primary highlights destination, and the upset clips are compounding views by the day. Watch the highlights.

Apple's WWDC Keynote Lands Monday

Apple opens WWDC on June 8 at 10am Pacific with a keynote that streams live on YouTube, where it reliably becomes one of the platform's most-watched livestreams of the year. The headline this time is a rebuilt, AI-powered Siri and the iOS 27 redesign, and the reaction-and-recap economy around it will run all week. Watch the keynote.

K-pop's June Comeback Wave Is Here

June is one of the most stacked K-pop release months of the year. MAMAMOO's "4WARD" dropped on June 4, Stray Kids have a full-length album landing mid-month, and ATEEZ, RIIZE and STAYC are all queued behind them. Comeback music videos from acts this size routinely pull tens of millions of views in their first days and dominate the global music charts on release weekend. Watch the drops.