Obsession and Backrooms are moving the needle

David Chen: 'Obsession' and 'Backrooms' Are Destroying Our Assumptions About the Box Office

But both films are also directed by filmmakers who found viral fame on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, and neither film is based on legacy IP (e.g. Marvel, Star Wars, etc.). Their audiences are skewing young. The majority of ticket buyers for both films are under the age of 34, with Gen Z and younger millennials driving a ton of business. It turns out the kids will show up if you give them an experience that they can't get anywhere else.

There are a few themes I keep coming back to on this blog, and one of them is that everything is a reaction to what came before. When I was a young adult, Marvel movies were starting to begin their run, and they were a breath of fresh air from what we had previously. I know cinematic universes and superhero movies are old hat now, but they were not a thing when I was a kid, and it was extremely novel to get to experience these things in a way we never had before. However, the MCU kicked off almost 20 years ago, and they flooded the zone with huge amounts of movies and TV shows, and all of it was connected, and it eventually became exhausting.

Today's young adults grew up in that world, so it's not novel to them. It's just the way things have always been. And you know what? They're tired of it as well. Marvel can't just keep escalating the stakes of each movie they release to draw in audiences, and Hollywood is slowly figuring that out.

I don't think the lesson of Obsession and Backrooms is that low-budget horror movies are the way forward, but I do think they represent a desire from people to have original stories told in interesting ways, and if we get those, people will go to the theaters for them.

Not to bring everything back to video games, but this is part of the reason why I think that Xbox's strategy around ditching everything that's not an enormous blockbuster and leaning into just the biggest stuff is a mistake there as well. They're trying to do the Marvel thing where bigger is always better, and I don't think that's necessarily what people are looking for. Whether it's games or movies, I think studios should be investing in more smaller bets because some of them will absolutely blow up and get people excited about the mediums.