The great Gen Z genre land grab is in full swing.
Mere months after Obsession and Backrooms stormed the summer box office, Hollywood studios have been throwing millions at Internet-fluent horror filmmakers and online-native IP in a battle for the dollars, eyeballs and hearts (in that order) of Gen Z viewers.
The most urgent example today is Backrooms director Kane Parsons, whose $10 million film stands a A24’s top-grossing movie ever with $374 million globally. He is in the midst of a full-court press from multiple power players who want to secure the 21-year-old auteur’s future work.
As first reported by Puck, sources confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that in recent weeks, Warner Bros. bosses Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy flew to Parsons’ home in the Bay Area, where he lives with his mother, to court the filmmaker. On Thursday, he partook in a Zoom with HBO boss Casey Bloys and head of drama and HBO films Francesca Orsi, as the proposed deal with Warners would encompass film and TV.
Universal chief Donna Langley has also met with Parsons, after successfully wooing Obsession filmmaker Curry Barker for his next movie. A24, meanwhile, very much does not want to lose him, and per Puck is courting him for a Backrooms sequel as well as another original project.
It’s unclear why A24 hadn’t inked a deal with Parsons prior to the release of Backrooms, though it is known that Parsons fully owns the IP, which began life as a series of YouTube shorts.
A24 has long been known for breaking new directing talent, like Robert Eggers (The Witch), Ari Aster (Hereditary) and Celine Song (Past Lives). And while some directors, like Aster and Song, have stayed loyal to the studio, other filmmakers like Eggers and Everything Everywhere All At Once filmmakers Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert have signed deals with larger, more moneyed operations. Eggers’s home is now the Universal specialty label Focus, while the Daniels signed a pre-best picture, five-year deal with Universal.
Splashy deals for online creators have intensified this year, but kicked off in earnest in at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, when A24 beat out Universal and other studios with a seven-figure deal to land Talk to Me, the Australian horror movie from first-time feature filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou. Sources have said other studios, including Uni and Warners, attempted to court the YouTubers-turned-horror filmmakers for their follow-up film, but A24 was ultimately able to land the directors’ next film, 2025’s Bring Her Back, and put a Talk to Me sequel into development. Of course, studios would still like to work with them to this day, with Warners said to be in particular high on the duo.
Possibly in order to stave off filmmaker attrition, sources tell THR that in the past few years, A24 has asked that a first-look at a filmmaker’s second project be baked into the deal for their first. This appears not to have been the case with Parsons and Backrooms.
The feeding frenzy for Parsons follows the similar hunt to land Obsession director Barker’s next original project. His Obsession follow-up Anything But Ghosts is already shot and is at Focus, with the studio landing that project after acquiring Obsession out of last year’s Toronto Film Festival. But, in the middle of Obsession’s epic, $400 million box office run, a rival studio offered Barker an astounding $10 million deal for his next original project, sight unseen. Ultimately, Barker stayed in the Universal family for his third film, with the project landing at Universal Film Group and Blumhouse Atomic Monster in what was described as a rich eight-figure deal.
Parsons and Barker are not the only directors cashing in. There have been a myriad of creatives drafting off studios’ fervor for Gen Z-tinged horror talent.
Earlier this month, Warner Bros won a five-studio bidding war with a multi-million-dollar deal for the underlying rights to Siren Head, a viral horror meme that is behind billions of views across TikTok, YouTube and Roblox. Weapons filmmaker Zach Cregger is attached to write and produce the project, along with Whalefall‘s Brian Duffield, who could direct. Amazon MGM ended up the victor in a massive bidding war for the film rights to the YouTube-released horror franchise The Mandela Catalogue from Alex Kister, who will direct for producers United Artists and Amblin.
If these numbers seem wild, there’s a real long-term business reasoning behind them. In success, landing a creator early could mean hundreds of millions in profits (or even north of $1 billion) for a company over a person’s career. Think what Christopher Nolan’s decades at Warner Bros. have netted the company, or the absurd amount of money South Park creators Trey Stone and Matt Parker have generated for Paramount. Of course, few people will ever reach those heights, but these riches are in part driving the early bets studios are taking.
—Tony Maglio contributed to this story.
