What Should Hollywood Learn From Kane Parsons?

When Kane Parsons uploaded the first episode of his YouTube series The Backrooms in January 2022, he had no idea he was launching a marketing campaign. At the time, Parsons was a high schooler in Petaluma, California, testing out an animation in Blender. Within two weeks, the video hit 20 million views, and Parsons, now just 20 years old, kept posting. The videos created an experimental visual world based off the existing internet urban legend of The Backrooms, an infinite series of rooms that descend and extend, with different floors playing host to different creatures and structures. They share a uniform drabness, similar to an office building, but are irrationally constructed and of unknown origin, giving the space a haunted feeling. Parsons was still releasing episodes as recently as February 2025, by which point his series had crossed 190 million views and his feature adaptation, Backrooms, was deep in production with the film studio A24. The movie, which premieres May 29, is expected to gross $31 million in its opening weekend. That four-year drumbeat of free, canon-adjacent content leading up to a theatrical release is the kind of marketing rollout Hollywood studios have tried to engineer for decades. The difference is that Parsons had no intention of engineering anything. "I'm just having a conversation with a bunch of people through my work," he told ADWEEK. "I don't think any of this is new." Parsons, who creates under the YouTube channel Kane Pixels, is part of a small but growing class of YouTube-native directors getting handed the keys to feature productions. Others like the YouTube creator Mark Edward Fischbach, known by the handle, Markiplier, astounded analysts earlier this year when his self-distributed film, Iron Lung, pulled $50 million at the box office. Curry Barker, one-half of the YouTube duo behind the channel That’s a Bad Idea, turned his short-form horror channel into Obsession. And creator Max Reisinger, the founder of Creator Camp, is building out a production pipeline where the directors are almost entirely YouTube creators. The appeal to studios is clear: These filmmakers arrive with prebaked audiences, distribution instincts, and a feel for how attention actually moves online, all without the marketing spend usually required to manufacture it. "YouTube forces you into certain patterns of behavior that are advantageous to staying in contact with your audience," he said. "I can’t stand going more than a certain period of time without giving my audience more. I feel like I have a contract with them." That contract, which both deepens engagement and builds out a richer world for the film to eventually inhabit, is something that traditional rollouts, with their three trailers and a press tour, have historically foregone. But while Hollywood studios would love nothing more than to bottle and replicate this formula, it might not be so portable. The reason The Backrooms worked, according to Parson, is that it was an exceptionally rare piece of intellectual property. FOR Scoops, Sharp Analysis, and Insider Context By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy . You may opt-out anytime by clicking 'unsubscribe' from the newsletter or from your account. The story, which grew from an anonymous comment on the website 4chan, has no original author, no fixed canon, and no central rights-holder. Instead, the random post became a prompt, spurring an outpouring of grassroots world-building, with fans contributing their own narratives, imagery, and lore to add to the foundational concept. "It's a unique case, partially because no one knows the author of the original piece,” Parson said. “It’s an urban legend. I'm not saying that there are no other versions of this that could work, but the Backrooms is almost an impossibly rare situation." The implication for marketers is bittersweet. A drip strategy works when the IP is already universal enough that audiences feel they own it. But apply the same tactics to original IP, either an unknown concept or one tied to the vision of a single creator, and the premise comes undone. What studios can credibly borrow is the operational shift Parsons embodies: a director treating audience contact as a continuous practice rather than a release-window obligation. What they cannot recreate is a piece of IP with no author, a 350,000-member subreddit, and a 20-year-old willing to spend four years answering to it.

Influencers & Creators

What Should Hollywood Learn From Kane Parsons?

The 20-year-old YouTube creator, whose A24 film Backrooms premieres May 29, has created a new kind of rollout strategy.

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Mark Stenberg

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