Two YouTuber-led horrors top box office weekend

YouTuber-led horror – “Backrooms” led the weekend box office with $38 million Friday and $80 million to $90 million expected domestically, while “Obsession” earned $8 million Friday, then grew through its second and third weekends. Together, the results underscore how two horror di

For a genre built on creeping dread and found-footage panic, this weekend’s box office has one unusually modern signature: both top films were directed by filmmakers who first built audiences on YouTube.

“Backrooms,” directed by Kane Parsons, landed in the No. 1 spot with $38 million on Friday. The feature film is an expansion of Parsons’ series of YouTube videos about eerie found footage of a mysterious office space drawn from a 4chan thread that “defies physics.” Over the weekend. it’s expected to land between $80 million and $90 million at the domestic box office.

For indie studio A24, the numbers are a breakthrough of scale. “Backrooms” is its biggest opening by far. The previous record-holder was “Civil War,” which made $25.7 million in its first weekend of release.

Then there’s “Obsession,” the No. 2 film that looks even stranger on paper. It made $8 million on Friday and an estimated $28.5 million for the weekend. but it has the kind of momentum that turns skeptics into believers: it already made more money in its second weekend than its first. and its third weekend is set to grow another 19 percent.

In recent mainstream history, that pattern is rare. Most wide release films typically fall between 50 to 70 percent in their second weekend; last year’s “Sinners” was treated as an outlier for word-of-mouth strength because it fell less than 5 percent. Outside of Christmas releases—where holidays help keep films on screens—“Obsession” is the first film since 1982 to grow on both its second and third weekends.

“Obsession” is also a horror film, with a romantic setup that curdles into something nightmarish. It’s directed by Curry Barker, who released the hourlong found footage horror film “Milk & Serial” on YouTube in 2024. Barker has already shot his next film. and he’s set to direct a new remake of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”.

The weekend’s two hits follow another YouTube-to-film win earlier this year: “Iron Lung,” a video game adaptation directed by Mark Fischbach, better known as Markiplier. “Iron Lung” grossed nearly $41 million domestically.

The numbers sit uneasily beside an older expectation that many YouTubers can’t bridge the gap to mainstream movies. In a New York Times article about the recent “YouTube-to-filmmaker boomlet. ” Rutgers Cinema general manager Mark DelVecchio said “lots of YouTubers have tried to make the leap to mainstream movies and come up short.”.

What sets Parsons, Barker, and Fischbach apart, DelVecchio argued, is “longevity.” He pointed out that even with their youth—Parsons is 20 and Barker is 26—they’ve had time to “develop a loyal audience that will follow you.”

The weekend outcome makes the industry version of that claim hard to ignore: one director, Parsons, turns a viral found-footage premise into an A24-scale opening, while another, Barker, shows that a movie can quietly underperform early and then expand as viewers return.

By the time people choose what to watch next, the headline may be that two YouTuber-led horrors topped the charts. The more startling part is how their weekends kept pushing forward—especially “Obsession,” whose schedule suggests the audience didn’t just show up once.

YouTube horror Backrooms box office Obsession film A24 Kane Parsons Curry Barker Markiplier Iron Lung found footage box office weekend