The Daily - A Gen Z Revolution at the Movies

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

For years, Hollywood has been trying to figure out how to get young people into movie theaters. This spring, it has happened at an unthinkable scale thanks to two low-budget horror films made by 20-something directors. Today my colleague Kyle Buchanan explains what younger audiences see in these films and how they’ve energized an entire industry. Guest: Kyle Buchanan, a pop culture reporter and awards season columnist for The New York Times. Background reading: The viral creator Kane Parsons, who directed “Backrooms,” has gone from YouTube sensation to A24’s youngest director. Photo: Focus Features For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.  Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Okay, Natalie, what time is it? It's 836, I want to say, in the morning, to be clear. We're going to see obsession, which is going to be scary. So you're somebody who's reported on, like, cartels. Yes, yeah. Where are you out on nervousness? I'm terrified. This is different.

From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitcherov. This is the day. For years, Hollywood's been trying to solve an existential problem, how to get young people to go to the movies. And then, this summer, it happened at an unthinkable scale, thanks to two low-budget horror films made by 20-something directors, which drove Gen Z to the theaters in such high numbers that I had to go to the movies to find out what was behind it.

I'm going to get so much food. I'm going to stress eat every year. in this theater. Today, my colleague Kyle Buchanan explains what younger audiences saw in these films and how they've energized an entire industry. It's Tuesday,

June 16th. I don't know, I literally don't know why I agree to do this. We should have gotten Michael to do this. Hello. Kyle, I'm really excited to have this conversation in part because I need therapy after watching both of these movies.

We are, here because something crazy is happening at the box office right now. And this is your world. This is your beat. Tell me what is going on. Something crazy is happening and it's still happening. We have two movies, obsession and backrooms that are such runaway successes that they basically shocked the industry. They were made for almost no money by young people who got their start on YouTube way, way, way outside the Hollywood studio system. And now here they are, beating Hollywood at their own game. And when we say runaway hits, what do you mean by that?

What I mean by that is you have the film Obsession, which is defying gravity of the box office from week to week in ways that have never been done before. And then you also have backrooms, which became the highest grossing movie ever released by the studio A-24 in the space of just 10 days. This is the studio that released films like Everything Everywhere All at Once and Marty Supreme.

And backrooms lapped them like, it was nothing. But it's not just that these films are making money, it's also who's going to see them. These are huge, huge hits with Gen Z. And talking to people in Hollywood, executives, producers, directors, all sorts of people over the last several years, the number one anxiety I keep hearing is how do we get young people to care about the movies? Right. And for years now, it's become almost a cliche, I think, to hear that movie going is dead, that young people just don't go to the theaters. This seems to disprove that. It absolutely does. And, you know, these films are on track to make hundreds of millions of dollars, like to put that into perspective. This is all

happening at the same time as the first Star Wars film in seven years, the Mandalorian and Grogu, is out in theaters. And these two movies are making basically the exact same amount of money. They cost virtually nothing compared to Star Wars, obviously. And I think what they're proving is Young audiences don't want their parents' franchise hand-me-downs. They want a sense of investment in these movies, and if you can make it feel like an event to them, they absolutely will go. Okay. So with that as our premise, help me understand how and why this is happening, how young people are connecting with both of these films.

And we should both acknowledge, we are not Gen Z. I'm a millennial. I'm just living in their world. And so I do need to understand this. Let's start with the first one to come out. Obsession. Just lay out what this movie is about. So this is a horror movie, but it kind of almost starts like a date movie. Have you ever actually, like, flirted with Nikki?

It's about a young man in his 20s. He has a crush on his best female friend, and he can't quite tell if that crush is reciprocated. Nikki, wait. I was going to ask you, um... What? I lost my train of thought. And instead of simply summoning the courage to find out,

he makes a wish on a toy that he finds in a novelty store, and that wish is that his friend will be as obsessed with him as he is with her. I wish Nikki Freeman loved me more than anyone in the entire world. And unfortunately, he gets that wish times a million. I love you so, so, so, so, so much. Because she becomes so obsessed with him that her fervor is unnerving. I thought we were having a nice date.

We are parents. And anybody who threatens to get in the way of what she perceives to be their love is in real danger. I love you! I love you! And we're going to get to why those themes resonate, but I'd imagine a big part of why this film

has connected with young audiences is that the guy who made it, who wrote it and directed it, is himself in his 20s. Exactly, yeah. Curry Barker, the writer and director, he's just 26, so it makes sense that he's making a film that speaks directly to young audiences, and he got to start on YouTube where that generation lives. He made this film obsession independently for just $750,000, and I'm telling you that to put its

massive success into some perspective, because at this point, after this last weekend, it just crossed $265 million at the global box office, which is more than 300 times that are original budget. Wow. And young audiences just keep going and going to it. Okay, I want to understand why that is. Without spoiling the movie, which I don't like horror movies generally, but I found it both terrifying and extremely compelling. What has made Gen Z come out in these numbers? What makes it an event for them? That is the big question that everybody in Hollywood is asking, why? And it isn't just that the movie is effective as a horror film, though it is. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that it is grappling with, you know, Gen Z. Moors, the things that this younger generation is obsessed

with, ideas of consent and fear about relationships, anxiety over whether people like you or not. It doesn't do that in a didactic way. That's all just underneath the surface. And it means that you can go see this film with your friends or talk about it with them on social media. And people are going to have different interpretations. I think that the film walks a really smart tightrope, and there's things that you want to dig into after you've seen it a first or even a second or third time. Right. It plays on this idea that dating and relationships and sex can be scary, you know, anxiety provoking at a very deep level. Talk about how this film is being consumed because there is such a high demand to see it in the theater.

Well, I think that's part of the reason why even in this Nobody Knows Anything era of Hollywood movie making, horror still continues to do well, especially with young audiences. There really isn't anything like that feeling of being with an audience, feeling them get scared, and feeling them react. However, the audience for Gen Z is not simply who's in the theater with them. It's who's online with them. Come with me and my friend, Kieran, to watch Obsession. I know nothing about this movie besides it's scary and that it's apparently good.

Everyone's giving mixed reviews, so come see it with us and we're going to give you our opinions at the end. We've seen a lot of people who are reacting. This is me and my mom before watching Obsession. There's the before I saw Obsession, after I saw Obsession meme. Okay, what do you think? There are people in the audience.

This isn't something I love. But there are people on the audience who will film their own reactions while in the audience. They'll be like, bro. Yo. No, they genuinely got too scary, bro. I can't. No, that did not just happen, bro. You know.

You do a good bro, Kyle. I know. It honestly kind of scares me how easily I slipped into that. But, you know, there's new ways of feeling like you have to be part of that sort of thing. And I think that's why obsession is continuing to defy box off. gravity because nobody wants to feel left out of this conversation. This is a movie that really rewards being seen multiple times because there's additional layers to dig into.

It kind of reminds me of, have you ever heard of the term corn plating? I have not. Introduce me to that term, Kyle. So this is a term that was invented by the animated film Encanto, oddly enough. And it refers to that point where you're so far into the discourse of a movie that people can't stop talking about, that basically no detail becomes too small for the internet to dig into.

And they call it corn plating because there was this meme of somebody posting the image of a secondary character from Enkanto and saying, I never realized that she was holding a plate of corn in this scene. That's when you know you're really desperate for more details to dig into

when you're getting down to that plate of corn. And you're saying this happened in this case with this movie? How did people, is it a verb, cornplate this movie? Oh yeah, we're definitely now weeks into release. We're at the corn plating stage. Okay. Bear killed his cat in hopes to gain sympathy from Nikki because he is a covert narcissist.

Let me explain. There are people who are suggesting that maybe our lead character is possessed by the spirit of his dead cat. So I don't think something jumps into Nikki's body. I think she's split into two. There are people that are analyzing. the strange, possessed movements of our female lead. And immediately as a writer, I was like, no, absolutely not. Like, they are technically not the same thing.

They are not the same genre because romance as a genre. They're really going deep on the themes and motifs of the movie. Like, it's hour three of a creative writing class and the students are getting punchy. And even though some of these might strike you as reaches, I think they're emblematic of a discussion that people love to have on social media. They want to dig into the Lord. of a movie. And if they can put forth a compelling enough through line in a YouTube video, they themselves might be able to draft off the success of the film.

So basically what you're saying is that the themes in this movie and the way that it was consumed created so much discourse around the film itself that it immediately generated this very particular Gen Z cultural moment and therefore drove ticket sales. It did, and this is a Gen Z cultural moment at the box office, the likes of which we've never seen before. And you could be forgiven for thinking we might not see it again because it's so unique. And yet, two weeks later, lightning struck again. Another Gen Z movie defied box office records. We'll be right back.

Okay, Kyle, let's talk about the second Gen Z hit, Backrooms. I also saw it and it also scared me a lot. What do we need to know about it? Obsession might have crept up on the box office, but backrooms took off like a rocket. It made $80 million its first weekend. And again, it's huge with young people. Like, virtually the entire opening weekend audience was under 35.

I found something. It's another horror movie. And it's about people who get trapped in this sort of liminal space universe. I found a place. These hallways that go on forever and are governed by some sort of

unknowable dream logic. I've been there every night since I found a place and I still barely scratched the surface. I just take a slow. You'll see strange things, sometimes strange figures, but also just kind of like sickly yellow wallpaper

vibes. It has this feeling of walking to the break room in a terrible job and never, ever getting there. Put me up, pull me up, put me up. What do you see? And it makes sense that it's connecting with young people because it was made by one. It was made by a 20-year-old director. 20 years old is just bananas.

So young. Yes. The youngest director, by far, to ever top the box office. And the craziest part is he was actually only 17 when he was signed by 824 to make this movie. It's just hard to actually believe. You spent a lot of time with him, Kyle. Just tell us his story. Much as I'd actually like to sit down on, this wee menu music, I think, is going to interfere with the recording.

Maybe we find a different person to walk a little. Okay, great. Yeah, his name is Kane Parsons. And of course, before I met him, I wondered, who could this guy possibly be? You know, you might imagine some young cinephile who's eager to get into the criterion closet and give you his letterbox top four. And what I found is someone quite different from that. I would love to work in games at some point.

I don't know when. It's probably not right. This is somebody who, honestly, as he'll tell you, didn't watch a lot of films growing up. His approach is much more motivated by video games. like Portal and Half-Life. The point is, Parsons does not have the resume of your typical filmmaker. No, he very much doesn't.

But I found him to be incredibly unpretentious, very thoughtful, very solid feeling. And I could absolutely see why people would be willing to follow this young man into battle. In a lot of ways, he's self-taught. But then my 2020 hit, I, you know, during the pandemic, during, like, online classes,

I was able to, So I'd have my screen split and be just playing around with... You know, he came up on YouTube. He was born four months after YouTube was invented. I don't mean to scare you by saying that. It scared me when I learned it. But, you know, he taught himself how to do all of this. His film school was essentially YouTube tutorials.

His feedback from fellow students was more like comments on YouTube and comments on Discord. And you can quibble with whether that's an acceptable substitute for an actual film school, but you can't beat the free tuition. And so I started trying to figure out how to do 3D and after effects, and Blender wasn't quite on my radar at the time. So he taught himself how to use Blender, which is a free visual effects software. And he made his original short backrooms found footage, which ended up getting, I think it's now at 80 million views.

It sounds like this guy is just a total self-starter. I mean, he literally teaches himself on YouTube. Is that why the thing he makes goes so incredibly viral? That's part of it, but also he was basing this web series on something that had already gone viral. It's called a creepypasta, basically a scary meme that the internet finds and builds upon, sort of like a collective creative writing project, or maybe like the online version of telling spooky stories around a campfire. There's an original backroom's image that got posted on 4chan of this decrepit department store. It's got creepy yellow fluorescent lighting.

It feels run down in that kind of abandoned mall kind of way. And people would write sort of short stories that were based on this image, imagining what might be just down the hallway if there's something even more terrifying. So what Kane Parsons did is he was inspired by the lore that had already been created, but he made his own offshoot. Hello? Is someone there? Found footage of a guy being lost in the backrooms,

but what's really startling when you watch this is not just how smartly made it is. It's the fact that it was made by one person that he did all of these special effects, that he made this location in this free software. These are special effects made by a teenager that outclass almost everything that we see on big screens these days.

So Parsons is a... adapting IP in a sense. I mean, maybe not in the traditional sense, but this backroom's story is something that Gen Z is already iterating on and engaging with. Yeah, and he continued to iterate on it long before he made this film. He made a few dozen installments of his backroom series for YouTube that has recurring characters, an eerie corporation that gets involved. And what really impressed me and surprised me, to be honest, is that he was perfectly happy there. You know, this is somebody who came up on YouTube

as his primary means of expression, but also the primary thing he would watch. The idea of making a movie, you know, though he wasn't opposed to it, wasn't the be-all-end-all goal. You know, as he told me, he got a perfectly adequate level of creative satisfaction

and financial compensation from staying on YouTube. So why did he decide to make this a future film then? Well, at first he didn't want to. He was extremely skeptical, even when he was getting all of these amazing offers within weeks of posting his first video, because he'd seen it before.

To drive this is something that I cared about, like supremely of, like, you know, making sure that it doesn't get away from, you know, its origins. And it doesn't become, like, American Horror Stories did a background's episode. Did they? Yeah, and it's everything that, like, it should. Right.

It fundamentally fails. He had seen, out-of-touch Hollywood producers, take something that got big on the internet and, in the big screen translation, lose everything about it that made it appealing to his generation. There needs to be a respect to the material that already exists and respect to the people online who are already there for the material and the understanding that it's, you know,

there's an elevated aspect to it beyond just, like, turning it into a slasher, haunted house, like a flick, which, you know. So he really resisted for a long time. It took the right arrangement of people, including 824, which is probably the most youth-focused studio there is. But also, Kane had his own idea of how he wanted to approach this. He didn't want this to be an adaptation or a remake. He considers this to be a supersized installment of the series that he already had going on

for years. And that's exactly what he's made. And because of the success of it, I presume that we're going to see a long. lot more from this series going forward. And do you think that what has been so compelling about this movie is that a bunch of young people basically are excited to see something that they watched on YouTube for a really long time on the big screen? Is it just that?

I think that's a large part of it. I think he speaks in a visual language that a lot of young people recognize from video games, especially first-person shooters. These really prolonged takes that anxiety over what might be just. around the corner of a very long hallway. But also, there's a lot of other ways that you can parse this. If you allow me to cornplate a little bit. Please.

I think that there is, there's a creeping fear of, you know, AI simulating us in ways that don't actually resemble what the human mind produces. Parsons been not shy about his perspective on AI during this press tour. He said that if he could stop generative AI with the snap of his finger, he would do so. And you see that in the backrooms where whatever this little pocket universe is doing, it just doesn't feel quite right.

It feels like somebody who's trying to get us and doing us wrong. Just to step back, Kyle, what should we make of these two huge successes? I could see the argument that, you know, maybe this is just a flash in the pan and we should not read too much into it, you know, from an industry perspective.

But is it indicative of some broader shift in the consumer behavior of Gen Z when it comes to the movies, when it comes to the theaters? I think it absolutely is, and it's undeniable based on the strength of these two movies. It proves that young people do want to go to the movie theater. You just have to give them a reason. You have to make it feel like an event. It might not be an automatic thing like it was, you know, in previous generations. Well, they'll just go on a Friday and decide what to see, once they get to the theater.

They want to go see specific movies, but they absolutely do want to go, and they'll go back once, twice, three times if you give them something that's worth discussing. Is the premise there underneath what you're saying that Hollywood hasn't been giving them a reason thus far? Hollywood's been giving them hand-me-downs, you know? Do you want to wear all the clothes that, you know,

your dad or mom or even grandparents gave you? Star Wars is a franchise that started in the 19, 1970s, another film that we've got out right now, Masters of the Universe, which is underperforming, that's based on He-Man toys from the 80s. If you didn't grow up with those properties, you might not understand the fervor with which an older generation would greet them. And you're certainly not going to rush out to the theater to see them when you could go to obsession or backrooms again.

Films made by your generation for your generation. So what is the lesson then for Hollywood from these two movies? If there is, obviously, a huge desire to replicate this success, what's the roadmap that this offers? That's the million-dollar question, and that is the question that everybody is asking each other, and they're asking me. I was at the premiere of Toy Story 5 this past week, you know, a film based on massive IP, and it's going to be a big blockbuster. But at the same time, that's not what people wanted to talk about at the after party. They wanted to talk about obsession and backrooms. I was just also recently interviewing Emily Blunt, who stars in Steven Spielberg's New Film Disclosure Day.

And the most animated she got during the whole interview is when we talked about backrooms and obsession and this cultural moment. I think it is exciting to executives, to producers, to talent to see that young people still want to carry on this tradition of going to see movies, especially when they have so many options available to them. They have TikTok, they have streaming services. So if you can craft a compelling case, if you can say this is worth experiencing with your fellow moviegoers, this is worth actually leaving your house to go do, I think young people want to. You know, both these films were made for under $10 million. Obsession was made for under $1 million. So it doesn't cost a lot, and the dividends can be so great when you hit. So suddenly, somehow the future of Hollywood looks brighter kind of thanks to YouTube.

And truly, who would have thought? But let me be clear, you know, this isn't the end of corporate IP. This isn't the end of major film franchises. You've got a Spider-Man movie about to come out. You've got Toy Story 5. But still, at the same time, there's a moment happening that can't be ignored. It can't be swept under the rug. Both obsessions and backrooms, they're these really sharp, provocative visions from young and talented filmmakers.

They definitely could not have been made by Hollywood's old guard. And I think that's the big lesson to draw from here. Because the enormous, staggering, record-breaking popularity of these movies suggests that this is something these audiences have been waiting for. Well, Kyle, thank you so much. Thank you for having me, Natalie, and I hope having to see these two movies didn't traumatize you too terribly. Not too bad.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The U.S. and Iran have signed a first. framework agreement ending their months-long war, but neither side published the deal's full text. The immediate scope was focused on ending military attacks and allowing tankers to begin moving freely through the Strait of Hormuz, which President Trump said could happen as soon as Friday. But even though Trump said the Strait would open without tolls, Iran said on Monday that it

intended to charge fees for unspecified services rendered in the Strait. The net effect could add a new expense and complications for commercial ships that need to pass through the waterway. And Donald Trump isn't just coming after me because of my mean tweets. He's coming after me because I'm considering running for president. In a video on Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom said that federal agents had been questioning his and his wife's friends and associates, describing the inquiry as politically motivated. They're demanding records. They're abusing the grand jury process, digging through years and years of random documents. The full scope of any investigation remains unclear, but Newsom's aide say that it appears to focus

on his wife, Jennifer Seibel Newsom. Someone who has done nothing wrong other than having the temerity to advocate for what she believes in. A person familiar with the matter told the times that multiple federal investigations were underway related to the governor, including one looking at his wife's finances, but said they'd been initiated by federal law enforcement officials in California, not by officials in Washington. Today's episode was produced by Alex Stern and Eric Krufke,

with help from Mujah Zady and Ricky Nevetsky. It was edited by Brendan Klingenberg with help from Michael Benoit, and contains music by Rowan Nemistow, Marion Lazzano, and Alicia Baito. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for the Daily. I'm Natalie Kittrowaf. See you tomorrow.