47:54Think Media Podcast · Interview
What YouTube Actually Wants in 2026
YouTube's Creator Liaison explains at NAB Vegas what the algorithm actually rewards, what's changing in 2026, and what creators keep getting wrong.
May 22ndThe argument in one line.
Internet filmmakers are winning at the box office because years of making for an audience begging to leave trained them to earn attention every few seconds — a discipline no Hollywood budget could install.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You make video content and want evidence that YouTube experience is now a real Hollywood credential.
- You are curious how a 4chan photo becomes the number one movie in the world without a studio development deal.
- You want the concrete budget-to-box-office ratios — three films, three data points, one clear pattern.
- You follow Colin and Samir and want context for their Hollywood Creator Summit coverage.
SKIP IF…
- You want a technical deep-dive into filmmaking craft — this is a 13-minute car conversation, not a masterclass.
- You already know the Backrooms, Obsession, and Iron Lung origin stories in detail.
The full version, fast.
Three YouTube-native films — Backrooms, Obsession, and Iron Lung — outperformed big-budget Hollywood releases in the same week, with ROI ratios that make The Mandalorian look reckless by comparison. The hosts argue the common thread is not budget or brand IP, but a specific discipline internet creators develop by necessity: you cannot assume anyone will watch, so you earn attention at every beat. Hollywood filmmakers who grew up on prestige names and marketing spend never had to develop that muscle. The secondary lesson, from Markiplier directly, is that creators who collaborate rather than solo-produce — surrounding themselves with craft specialists — compound their storytelling instinct into something theaters will actually fill.
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00:00cohostColin
00:00cohostSamir
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 01:33
01 · Cold open and framing
Emergency pod from Montana. Three YouTuber films just dominated the box office. Hollywood Creator Summit happened the week before — 630 creators, Fox Studio lot, Markiplier on stage.
01:33 – 04:13
02 · Kane Parsons and Backrooms
2019 4chan photo to Reddit lore community to 16-year-old's Blender found-footage video to Hollywood assistant discovery to A24 signing Kane at 17 to film made for $10M to $118M opening weekend. Internet collaborative IP thesis introduced.
04:13 – 05:00
03 · Gen Z will go to theaters
Exit polls: 50% of domestic audience under 25, 44% under 21. Disproves the narrative that Gen Z is screen-locked and will not buy movie tickets.
05:00 – 06:47
04 · Curry Barker and Obsession
$800 horror short on YouTube to $750K raise to shot in 20 days to Focus Features acquisition for $15M to Blumhouse distribution to $148M box office. Beat the Mandalorian's all-in ROI.
06:47 – 08:00
05 · The attention-capture lesson
Curry Barker's key insight: the audience is begging to leave, and you have to convince them to stay. Internet creators earn attention every few seconds by necessity. Hollywood assumed star power would do it.
08:00 – 10:31
06 · Markiplier and Iron Lung
40M subscribers. Self-financed $5M. Had audience call theaters to expand from 50 to 4,000 screens. Made $52M. At the Hollywood Creator Summit, corrected the solo-creator myth — credited craft specialists as the real reason it worked.
10:31 – 12:37
07 · Hollywood is evolving, not dying
Internet storytellers who find audience first, plus Hollywood craft specialists who execute the vision — that combination produced all three films. YouTube is the ticket to the extraordinary.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- A 16-year-old's 8-minute Blender video uploaded to YouTube was discovered by a Hollywood assistant and became an A24 feature — the audience for anything on YouTube is genuinely unknowable.
- Backrooms earned $118M its opening weekend on a $10M production budget because the audience built the lore themselves — they went to celebrate something they co-owned.
- 50% of Backrooms' domestic audience was under 25 and 44% was under 21 — Gen Z will go to theaters for IP they actually care about.
- Obsession cost $800 to make as a YouTube proof-of-concept, was acquired for $15M, and made $148M — the $800 film had a better ROI than anything with a nine-figure budget that week.
- The Mandalorian spent $265M all-in and made $247M. Obsession spent $750K and made $148M. Budget is not the competitive moat studios think it is.
- Internet creators are trained by default to earn attention every few seconds because the audience is always one tap away — this is not a mindset, it is a reflex built by years of feedback loops.
- Hollywood assumed star power and budget guaranteed an audience. The internet proved the only question is whether the story holds someone who is free to leave at any moment.
- Markiplier expanded Iron Lung from 50 theaters to 4,000 by having his audience call their local theaters directly — distribution is now a community action, not a studio negotiation.
- Markiplier credited the craft specialists around him, not his own versatility, as the reason Iron Lung worked — knowing enough about every department to communicate clearly beats mastering any single one.
- Internet collaborative IP like Backrooms outperforms licensed IP like Star Wars because the audience feels ownership — they built the story, so they show up to celebrate it.
- Hollywood is not dying — it is evolving into a formula: internet storytellers who find audience first, plus craft specialists who execute the vision at a level no solo creator can match alone.
The attention debt internet creators never owed Hollywood.
WHAT TO LEARN
Every creator who has ever watched a video get ignored learned the same lesson Hollywood is only now being forced to confront: nobody owes you their attention.
- Internet creators develop attention-capture instincts by necessity — when the audience can leave in one tap, you learn to earn every few seconds or you stop getting views.
- IP that an audience builds together carries social proof no studio can manufacture — Backrooms fans went to the theater to celebrate something they co-authored, not just to consume it.
- Budget is not a competitive moat: Obsession spent $750K and made $148M the same week The Mandalorian spent $265M and made $247M.
- Expanding distribution is no longer a studio function — Markiplier had his audience call local theaters to get Iron Lung from 50 screens to 4,000, treating distribution as a community action.
- Knowing enough about every craft department to communicate clearly is more valuable than mastering any single one — Markiplier credited the specialists around him as the reason the film worked.
- Anonymous internet posts can become the number one movie in the world when the right person is watching — the audience for anything uploaded online is genuinely unknowable.
Terms worth knowing.
- No-clip
- A video game exploit where a player glitches through a map boundary and ends up in undefined empty geometry. The Backrooms mythology borrowed the term to describe slipping out of normal reality into the liminal spaces behind it.
- Internet collaborative IP
- Intellectual property built collectively by an online community through fan fiction, lore threads, and user-generated content, rather than created top-down by a single studio. Backrooms originated from a single anonymous 4chan image and grew into a full mythology through Reddit communities before any studio was involved.
- Found footage
- A filmmaking style where the story is presented as documentary or amateur video discovered after the fact. Kane Parsons used this format in his original Backrooms YouTube video to create the sensation that the footage was real evidence of the fictional world.
- Blender
- Free, open-source 3D modeling and animation software. Kane Parsons used it to create the Backrooms found footage video at age 16, showing that professional-grade visual effects are no longer gated behind expensive studio software.
Things they pointed at.
01:33productBackrooms — A24 film directed by Kane Parsons
05:00productObsession — Focus Features / Blumhouse film by Curry Barker
08:00productIron Lung — self-financed film by Markiplier
00:43productHollywood Creator Summit (Fox Studio lot)
Lines you could clip.
06:57
“When you're making for the internet, the audience is begging to leave, and you have to convince them to stay.”
03:22
“You'd never know who is watching and who could reach out and completely change your life.”
11:35
“YouTube is the ticket to the extraordinary.”
09:26
“I know enough about all those processes so that I can communicate effectively with the rest of the crew.”
07:10
“You are not entitled to anyone's attention. You have to earn their attention every few seconds of your story.”
Where the conversation goes.
01:33 – 05:00denseBackrooms origin and box office
05:00 – 08:00denseObsession budget-to-ROI story
06:47 – 08:00denseInternet filmmakers and attention capture
08:00 – 10:31denseMarkiplier and Iron Lung
10:31 – 12:37steadyHollywood evolution thesis
Word for word.
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metaphoranalogystory
00:00Hey, everyone. Welcome to this emergency podcast. It is one of the biggest weeks in YouTube history.
00:05We are not in our studio. We are in Montana. It is not in fact an emergency.
00:11We are fully safe. We are fine. Okay.
00:13But this is a episode that we felt like or just a conversation we felt like we had to have because of the magnitude of what's happening with YouTube creators in Hollywood right now. The YouTube revolution has officially come for Hollywood.
00:26Backrooms, the number one movie in the world right now. That it's a direct result of doing this work on YouTube. You have Kane Parsons with Backrooms.
00:34You've got Curry Barker with Obsession. And before that, you have Markiplier with his film Iron Lung. All of these films have exceeded expectations and shocked people at the box office, and they're all made by YouTubers.
00:47Now to add to this crazy week of YouTube in Hollywood, exactly one week ago, we threw the Hollywood Creator Summit on the Fox Studio slot. We had 630 creators there all talking about the future of Hollywood.
00:58We had people on stage like comedian Tom Segura as well as Markiplier
01:02to talk about the success of Iron Lung. We also had the UCLA band as well as a guy from Red Bull who almost ran over Sameer.
01:13Show business. This conference had everything. Now I bring that up because we are gonna be releasing the stage sessions on this channel, including our conversation with Markiplier, which is about this topic exactly.
01:25Okay. So let's go through all three of these milestone films, talk about their stories, and what we've learned from the success of these films.
01:33Number one, Kane Parsons and Backrooms. For people who don't know, give us a quick rundown of how Backrooms came to be. Okay.
01:402019,
01:41someone posts anonymously on 4chan. They post a photo of a furniture store in Wisconsin undergoing renovations. If you don't know the story of Backrooms, that's a really strange place to start.
01:51Someone leaves a comment that says, this room looks like if you no clip.
01:55You wanna explain no clip? In the video game world, uh, when you basically go off a map, like you kinda glitch out, go through a door, and end up off a map, that's no clipping. You're in no man's land.
02:07You're in the in between. So that comment sparked
02:10the community to create all of this lore. They created multiple Reddit threads going in different directions, building the story from this one photo and this one comment.
02:20So Kane Parsons was a fan of this community. And when he was 16 years old, he released an eight minute video that he made using Blender, which is three d animation software to create this found footage style horror movie.
02:37So this 27 year old assistant finds it on YouTube, shows it to their boss, and they end up signing Kane to turn this into a feature. And shortly thereafter, a 24 gets involved, they make this into the movie that just came out. He's 19 when they shoot the movie, and he's now 20 years old when it's released.
02:53And he was five when Weiss first started on YouTube. Wow. Crazy.
03:00Isn't that crazy? That's crazy. The fact that Backrooms started from an anonymous post in 4chan and then was discovered by an assistant of someone in Hollywood early on proves that YouTube is one of the most powerful places for filmmakers to start their career.
03:17Because even if it feels like the most obscure niche part of the internet, you'd never know who is watching and who could reach out and completely change your life.
03:28So the film was made for just about $10,000,000.
03:30And within the first weekend, it made over a 118,000,000 worldwide. So I think the natural question would be like, wait.
03:37How? Why? Why did this Backrooms thing take off so much?
03:41And what we've been talking about is that it is Internet collaborative IP.
03:46Meaning, this is a story that is built by this generation. It is not IP like Star Wars or Jurassic Park or Spider Man that is already preexisting and that the studios are telling us we should go and see. It is IP that is for the people by the people, essentially.
04:03It is an interactive story that was built over time that you feel a part of if you were there, which makes you wanna go and see it and celebrate it because the people made the story. And by people, we're actually largely talking about Gen Z. Exit polls showed that a large percentage, I think, like, 50%.
04:20Exit polls? Yeah. Similar to Who exit polls?
04:24Clearly, I read exit polls. Exit polls? Yeah.
04:26There was some polling. Dude, outside of the theaters. Who?
04:28Have you guys ever been polled when you walk out of a movie theater? According to exit polling, 50% of the film's domestic audience was under the 25,
04:36and 44% was under the 21. Colin went full newscaster. Exit polls are showing that Gen z loves the movie.
04:43Well well, all I'm saying is that when we're talking about people, we're talking about young people. And I think there was a big narrative there that Gen z would not go to the movies because they're just sitting at home on their phones and their computers. That's all they care about.
04:53But that is not true. I think this showed that these people actually
04:57want to get together and they want to be in person as long as it's IP that they actually care about. Alright. Obsession by Curry Barker.
05:04So Curry Barker has been a sketch comedy creator on YouTube and TikTok for some time now. Him and his filmmaking partner, Cooper Tomlinson, make really funny and kind of cinematic sketch comedy across the platforms.
05:16And they were having success with it. They then decide to make a horror film in August 2024. It cost them $800 to make, and they upload it to their YouTube channel.
05:25So they get approached to see if they have any other scripts, and they're like, yeah. We do. They raise the money just about $750,000 and shoot this movie obsession in twenty days.
05:37It can take us, like, a whole month to make a podcast sometimes. That's that's, like, frustrating. The movie gets picked up by Focus Features for $15,000,000.
05:45Blumhouse Productions, a classic horror house, gets involved in distributing it just days before it goes out. It gets widely distributed in movie theaters and quickly makes a $148,000,000.
05:59A movie that cost just about a million dollars has so far, in under one month, made a $148,000,000.
06:07And didn't it beat out Star Wars Mandalorian by a ton and which had, like, a much higher budget, obviously? So the new Mandalorian cost $265,000,000.
06:19We're good. We're safe. Yeah.
06:20We're all good. We're safe. We're just podcasting.
06:22So the new so The Mandalorian all in cost around $265,000,000 between marketing and production.
06:31And so far, it's made $247,000,000 worldwide. So an impressive amount of seem insane.
06:36It's an impressive amount of money to make, but, like, it costs so much money to make. Insane to spend that much money on a movie? Yes.
06:43So let's talk about the lesson with obsession. Everyone's amazed about the small budget. But the thing that really amazed me was something that he said in an interview.
06:50When someone asked him, what did years of making for YouTube and TikTok teach you about filmmaking? And he said something along the lines of when you're making for the Internet, , and you have to convince them to stay.
07:07That the Internet filmmaker understands that point extremely well, that you are not entitled to anyone's attention.
07:15You have to earn their attention every few seconds of your story. Classically, in Hollywood, they're like, if George Clooney's in the movie and Ryan Glassing's in the movie and we spend all this money, you will come and you will buy a ticket and you will watch it.
07:28But that's not true. It's just, is the story good? Is it compelling?
07:33Does it capture my attention or not? And the young crop of filmmakers who grew up on YouTube,
07:38they've had no choice but to learn how to capture your attention. They may not have experience making movies with massive crews and big budgets, but they have a ton of experience making things, putting them out, and immediately getting feedback from Okay.
07:51And now, Markiplier with Iron Lung. Markiplier has almost 40,000,000 subscribers. He's been making YouTube videos for, what, twenty years?
08:00Also, like a really nice guy. First time we met him was last week. Very kind.
08:03Just a really sweet dude. So he plays this video game on his channel, Iron Lung. It is an indie horror video game about a guy trapped in a submarine in a sea of blood.
08:14He falls in love with the story, ends up getting the rights by reaching out to the creator of the game, and decides that he wants to turn it into a movie and that he's gonna self finance it himself. He's gonna write it. He's gonna direct it.
08:24He's gonna act in it. And so he embarks on that journey, and he brings his audience along with the project. So Mark ends up spending just around $5,000,000
08:33all in to make the movie, and the movie ends up making $52,000,000 when he releases it. What's amazing, though, is he did it fully independently, and he got it into theaters by himself.
08:44He made a partnership with a distribution company that wanted to put it in, what, like, 30 some odd theaters? Think 50. 50 theaters originally.
08:51And he was like, my audience isn't gonna be happy. They're gonna wanna go see it. He had the audience call theaters to actually get the movie in their local theater.
09:01And then eventually, it was distributed in over 4,000 theaters across The US and made $52,000,000.
09:06And was just released actually for purchase on YouTube as part of YouTube movies. So when we were speaking with Markiplier on stage at the Hollywood Creator Summit, I asked a question and I implied that he made the movie like a YouTube video. Mhmm.
09:19He wrote it. He acted in it. He directed it.
09:21He did everything himself. And he sort of said, I'm gonna stop you right there. And he made sure
09:26to acknowledge everyone that helped him. I will never be as good as them. At their departments.
09:31I'll never be able to make those kind of practical effects, the costume choices, the set design. But I know enough about all those processes so that I can communicate effectively with the rest of the crew.
09:41And that's the biggest lesson that YouTubers can have when they're interfacing with other cruises. Like, you may be really good at what you do. They've been doing that one thing for as long as you have been doing it, sometimes longer.
09:54And that can give you an incredible advantage if you can then
09:58conversate with them enough that you can get them on the same page with the imagination in your head. And I think that's one of the most important takeaways right now for me at this moment when YouTube is colliding and collaborating with Hollywood.
10:13The people in Hollywood who are looking for jobs, they are the .
10:20These people who have dedicated their lives to learning very specific crafts within this industry that I do not understand and that a lot of us as YouTube creators do not understand. They are one of the biggest reasons why YouTubers can have the success that they're having right now.
10:37So for all of the conversation about how Hollywood is dying, sure, Hollywood is not the same that it was, but I don't think it's dying. I think it's just going through an evolution.
10:46It's looking different. It is collaborating with these people who are finding audience first and who have a vision.
10:54And who are really good storytellers, like, who have really learned how to tell a great story. I think that's really exciting.
11:00The Internet storyteller
11:02getting to work within the Hollywood infrastructure is now producing things like Backrooms. Mhmm. And Kane Parsons had a ton of really talented people around him.
11:11Curry Barker had a ton of super talented people around him. He said that he had never really made a film with a budget. Period.
11:16Yeah. And even Markiplier, who did so much himself, had really talented people around him who don't make YouTube videos for a living, and that's super, super valuable.
11:27I love that this is happening. I just feel so energized by all of it. And it also just reenergizes me about YouTube.
11:35Something that Colin and I talk about all the time is that YouTube is the ticket to the extraordinary. Like, when you upload a YouTube video, you just don't know who's watching. You don't know what could happen.
11:45You could end up in Montana.
11:48You could end up anywhere. You could end up making a movie. So I just feel, like, incredibly energized by this moment, uh, and I hope you guys do too because this is a really, really special time.
11:58And if you're making things and you feel like no one is watching, we've been in those periods of time. That's happened to us. It's happened to all of these filmmakers who are having all this success.
12:06It just means that you're learning. You're getting better. And, again, you never know who's watching.
12:13Alright. If you guys have seen the movies, let us know. We're gonna watch obsession tonight, actually.
12:17Yes. We got a screener. Can I say that?
12:19I don't know if you can I can say that? Can you it's not like it's, like, illegal. Also, is it too scary to watch it, like, in out in the woods?
12:25Probably.
12:25Yeah. Okay. But we gotta do it.
12:29Okay. Alright. Let us know, uh, what you guys think about the movies that came out.
12:32Uh, let us know what you think about this moment in Hollywood. We'll see you. Thanks for watching this emergency pod.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
They called it an emergency pod, but they were smiling. Colin and Samir were parked in Montana, holding neon green mics in a car, trying to make sense of a week when three YouTubers simultaneously made Hollywood look slow, expensive, and out of touch.
How they asked for the click.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
