To YouTube and Beyond: How Gen Z Online Filmmakers Took Hollywood by Storm

This time last year, the idea of ​​a blockbuster feature film director cutting his teeth on YouTube was, if not unheard of, but certainly still a niche story. Siblings Michael and Danny Philippou had just released Bring Her Back, the sequel to their surprise horror hit Talk to Me, to fairly good reviews and a decent box office; it is clear that they would continue to work, but the slightly diminished returns did not portend a YouTube explosion. The Outright Ugliness of Shelby Oaks, from longtime YouTube film critic Chris Stuckmann, also wasn't the same when it premiered in theaters later in 2025. The generous horror-fest buzz died down as more people laid eyes on the film; Stuckmann was an obvious enthusiast, and some saw promise in his first effort, but a clunky pastiche of found footage without much emotional meaning didn't seem like the next big thing either.

But in 2026, something has changed. In January, YouTuber Markiplier self-released his adaptation of the video game Iron Lung into theaters, and it outperformed a number of major studio titles. Then, Curry Barker, whose comedy sketches are essential on YouTube, unveiled his first feature film Obsession. The film, made for less than $1 million, has become the box office phenomenon of the summer thus far, pulling off a virtually unheard of feat when its second and third weekends surpassed its first. Obsession shares multiplex space with Backrooms, directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, who previously brought the creepy internet meme to life in a series of YouTube shorts. Although it takes place in a series of purgatorial, sparsely furnished, neon-lit spaces, it is the top film at the North American box office this weekend, on track to become distributor A24's highest-grossing film in a matter of days. Backrooms has also opened to more audiences than any number of more famous or bigger brand 2026 titles like Wuthering Heights, Scream 7, The Devil Wears Prada 2 or the latest Pixar film. That makes three YouTube-trained filmmakers who have presided over some of this year's biggest and/or most surprising hits. With them came countless social media posts explaining how YouTube, not film school, provides the real training that tomorrow's directors need.

Of course, what YouTube training actually involves varies greatly. Parsons has a background in visual effects and the original web series Backrooms, much like some former feature directors who started in visual effects or television. Stuckmann, as mentioned, is best known for his film reviews. Barker was part of a sketch-comedy duo before branching out into horror shorts. Similarly, though less tactfully, the Philippous specialized in over-the-top special effects demos and zany comedies. (Check out their Marvel v DC video, under their handle RackaRacka, for a preview of something you'd never want to see made into a TV episode, much less a two-hour movie.) Markiplier has perhaps the most traditional (or stereotypical?) YouTuber background, in that he's become famous for his play videos — meaning, yes, viewers watching him play various games.

So it's remarkable that despite this diversity of experience, almost every YouTube creator has branched out into features in the horror genre, even if they didn't specialize in it on their previous platform. Barker in particular feels most closely connected to Zach Cregger, a sketch comedian – from the good old days of linear television, no less! – who pivoted with his unpredictable and ambitious horror films Barbarian and Weapons. Obsession isn't as inventive as those films, but shares with them an affinity for a hooky premise with tricky (and often darkly funny) complications. At least the progression from sketch comedy to Obsession feels more natural than the progression from crude sex jokes about Wonder Woman to trying to explore very serious trauma in Talk to Me.

Part of this is likely because horror became more marketable post-pandemic than comedy, which was already experiencing a contraction in the late 2010s. For a time, the more fanciful or irreverent superhero films served as a substitute for comedy; Today, horror and comedy, natural companions in their desire to produce a visceral reaction, share this space, and horror has often thrived with emerging voices from outside the Hollywood system, with its less risky budgets. Horror is also generally a youth-oriented genre at the box office, and these younger filmmakers seem to have a better idea of ​​what resonates with their peers than many older filmmakers. This intense focus can also result in films that feel calculated rather than intensely personal – as with Bring Her Back's catchy but vaguely algorithmic geek show. Visually, Backrooms depicts a dreamlike atmosphere with uncanny precision, but Parsons struggles to draw compelling characters outside of the film's meticulously designed copy spaces. It feels like the work of someone who has spent a lot of time contemplating the nature of industrial-influenced architecture, video games, and liminality, but perhaps less time accumulating life experiences that might give these ideas a more electrifying life. Even Obsession, the most experienced of the group, has a somewhat confusing depiction of the socio-economic situation of twenty-somethings. (Do several characters really pay their rent by working at a music retailer?!)

Are these filmmakers learning their particular knowledge or limitations through YouTube? It's hard to say. Despite the optics, YouTube isn't really a training system; it's a platform with endless passages and scenes of its own. This could be seen as more analogous to MTV, which gave a number of filmmakers their first major exposure as makers of eye-catching music videos in the 1980s and 1990s. Just as a true student of YouTube learns primarily what gets clicks, not the fundamentals of filmmaking, MTV itself wasn't teaching anyone how to make music videos (or by extension, feature films); he showed what was particularly well broadcast on MTV. The filmmakers themselves behind music videos often came from the same places as feature film directors – although there were certainly more alternative exceptions like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, whose music video success brought them to film from less traditional backgrounds as a skateboard photographer and a rock band drummer, respectively.

Interestingly, the recent filmmaker who feels most in tune with these boundary-pushing sensibilities is Boots Riley, whose I Love Boosters seems to be a more political cousin to Gondry's work, and is much crazier and more visual than the work of the aforementioned YouTube creators. Despite having only directed two feature films and one TV series, Riley is decades older than these newcomers – and his status as a black man raises another notable point of comparison. With the exception of Markiplier, who has Asian heritage, all of these prodigies are white men. YouTube has certainly opened the door for much younger, more scrappy filmmakers to become known to a wider audience earlier in their careers. At the same time, it's not exactly revolutionary to see more ambitious twenty-something white people rushing through that door. Starting a YouTube channel may not cost as much as attending film school, but it can foster the kind of pseudo-bootstrapping that inevitably leans in favor of those who have already had the time and means to work on their videos, undermining the vision of the underdog triumphing in a kind of digital meritocracy.

Yet a more encouraging form of traditionalism also lies behind this trend: the fact that YouTubers are making feature-length films means that a number of them actually care about making it. In the thick of the pandemic, as viewing habits underwent a seemingly permanent shift for many demographics, there was much talk of younger, phone-addicted eyeballs lacking the patience to sit down and watch a full movie without the presence of a second screen. Youth-focused phenomena like Backrooms and Obsession prove this assumption about younger generations to be completely false. Backrooms in particular is a film in which it would be easy to point to online shorts as a free substitute for what it offers, but audiences have come forward — the youth culture equivalent of adapting, say, a Disney+ streaming series into a blockbuster. This does not mean that these directors were equipped to make better films than their various theater, film school, music video, or self-taught forebears, nor that this new form of public practice space will change filmmaking forever. But the fact that Curry Barker, Kane Parsons, and Markiplier all wanted to make films, rather than grind their way through daily micro-doses of content, is a testament to the strange and beautiful resilience of cinema. If YouTube is some kind of new film school, that means that for some people, movies are still worth studying.