Hollywood’s New Inflection Point Isn’t What It Seems - The Atlantic

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Almost 14 years ago, the producer Scott Glassgold stumbled on a short film on Vimeo about a woman who believes she’s encountered an alien. The project, by a pair of filmmakers named Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell, was “a wonderful, lo-fi science-fiction story” that conveyed a distinct storytelling voice, Glassgold told me. He immediately set out to work with them, hoping to introduce the pair to Hollywood as fresh directing talent. “That was an early moment for me on the internet,” he explained. “I just saw it as an incredibly viable path to meeting artists, finding ideas, frankly, in a place where, at the time, really no one else was looking.”<br>He learned from that period, however, that Hollywood wasn’t universally enthusiastic about turning such material into feature-length movies—at least, not with unknown, internet-bred creators involved. Even though Earl and Caldwell’s work attracted potential studio buyers, Glassgold sought independent financing to help the pair avoid what’s known in the industry as development hell. “The first call I would get from a studio head would be like, We’re so excited. When can we fire the director?” Glassgold recalled. “I would just put my hands on my face, because it was entirely antithetical to what we were trying to achieve.”<br>That was, as Glassgold put it, “the 1.0” of Hollywood’s dalliance with the internet—a far cry from the industry’s upgraded view of digital-native talent these days. Works by filmmakers who first found success online consistently scored at the box office this spring: Backrooms, directed by Kane Parsons, who went viral as a teenager with a web series set in the same world of liminal spaces, is now the studio A24’s highest-grossing movie ever. Obsession, a horror-comedy made by Curry Barker, who first built an audience on YouTube through sketch-comedy videos, became a word-of-mouth hit. And Iron Lung, a video-game adaptation self-financed, directed, and released by the gaming YouTuber known as Markiplier, grossed at least 10 times its budget worldwide with the help of his nearly 40 million subscribers.<br>Read: A no-name director to everyone but his 38 million fans<br>Hollywood, inspired by these triumphs, is doing what it does best: working overtime to capture the same magic again. Several projects with online roots have recently entered into development to become feature-length films, including Siren Head and Cartoon Cat, each inspired by the disturbing viral imagery of the artist Trevor Henderson; Seasons, an adaptation of a short story first published on the Subreddit r/nosleep, a forum for grassroots horror writing, about a couple whose dream ranch turns out to be haunted; and The Mandela Catalogue, a script based, much like Backrooms, on a popular horror series on YouTube.<br>Mandela, set in a fictional county in Wisconsin that’s invaded by shape-shifting creatures, led to an 11-studio bidding war, with Steven Spielberg signing on as a producer along the way. Aaron B. Koontz, an indie filmmaker and a producer for Mandela, told me that Hollywood’s new fascination with digital creators has been vindicating—and overwhelming. “It’s the opposite of what I’m used to in my entire career,” he said, adding that after Backrooms’ release, he was on the phone every day for three weeks with executives interested in picking up Mandela. “People in Hollywood that never took my call,” he said, “are now calling me.”<br>To the filmmaker Shawn Levy, whose production company 21 Laps worked on Backrooms and Seasons, these green-lighted projects merely underline “a predictable sort of frenzy” based on the latest Hollywood success story; they’re not a sure sign that the industry is shifting significantly. “Even though right now there’s a mad gold rush of assistants being tasked with scouring the internet for the next Kane Parsons or the next Curry,” he told me, “most long-shot bets don’t pan out.” Hollywood has clearly grasped that the next auteurs and franchises can be found on the web. “Nothing teaches Hollywood a faster lesson than a hit,” Levy said. But whether Hollywood’s intensive focus on all things internet leads to anything resembling this year’s box-office successes will depend on the industry seeing the internet as more than just a place from which to mine ideas.<br>Hollywood once seemed baffled by the internet. Throughout the 2010s, almost every time the industry attempted to translate trendy web culture into conventional entertainment, the results were largely forgettable: The Grumpy Cat meme inexplicably starred in a Lifetime holiday movie, a thread about one writer’s father’s curmudgeonly sayings became a quickly canceled sitcom, and a major studio’s adaptation of Slender Man, a character that originated on an internet forum, bombed with critics.<br>Yet over the years, the language of digital natives began to influence popular culture anyway as the internet became intertwined...