Midweek Scroll: Some very unfortunate AI news
Plus! YouTubers in the box office, BookTok drama, and a very good Odyssey post
Welcome to the Weekly Scroll! Today we’re talking about the ever-thinning line between online creators, the latest BookTok drama, and what’s going on with AI these days.
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YouTubers at the Box Office
A million years ago, when television networks still had drawing power and dinosaurs roamed the earth, there was a bright line between online fame and offline fame. The real world had real celebrities - Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Steve Jobs, etc. Everyone recognized the real celebrities, and it was normal chat about them and to know details of their lives. Online celebrities existed, but they normally had names like Numa Numa Guy or CaptainSparklez or PewDiePie, and while a lot of people knew about them it was vaguely embarrassing to admit you knew who they were, or to talk about them at all. “Hey did you see the news about PewDiePie?” said literally nobody with a mortgage, ever. Online creators and personalities existed in a kind of cultural ghetto, a less real version of fame that was shoved away into a corner like an unloved stepchild.
One of the trends I’ve been following here for years is the disappearance of that gap. The lines between online celebrity and ‘real’ celebrity are thinner than ever, if they even exist any more. Traditional celebrities and creatives are increasingly flocking online to start YouTube shows, podcasts, and other online projects. They’re guests on internet-native shows like Chicken Shop Date or Hot Ones. They both intermingle with online celebrities and adopt their successful tactics as their own. But what’s even more interesting is how online celebrities are slowly infiltrating traditional media.
Last weekend, the two biggest movies at the American box office were Backrooms and Obsession. Obsession is directed by 26 year-old YouTuber Curry Barker in his theatrical debut, and Backrooms is directed by Kane Parsons, a 20 year-old YouTuber making his theatrical debut. Both are massive, massive hits made on tiny budgets - Backrooms debuted with an $81M opening weekend on a budget of $10M, while Obsession is on track to make around $250M total gross on a budget of only $1M.
Last weekend was an inflection point. This isn’t the first time YouTubers have struck gold in mainstream entertainment. Markiplier directed and starred in Iron Lung earlier this year, and you can point to even other projects like 2022’s Skinamarink or 2025’s Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie as well. But this is the first time YouTubers have had this much success and made this much money in such a dramatic fashion.
There are a number of interesting things to note here. First is that horror is by far the dominant genre for these young, unproven filmmakers. Horror movies are typically cheap, and horror fans are typically down with weird/experimental concepts and don’t need celebrity casting to draw them in. It’s easy for studios to throw a couple million at a young director with only short YouTube films to their name and see if some magic happens.
But the films above are also capitalizing on ‘online fame’ in very different ways. Markiplier’s Iron Lung was an exercise in flexing a fanbase - the film was self-financed, self-produced, and Markiplier heavily promoted the film to his 30M+ subscribers. The majority of buzz and money for Iron Lung came from the fact that Markiplier is massively famous online, and his fans would flock to see his work even if he had to work outside the major studios. But the directors of Obsession and Backrooms only had low single digit millions of subscribers, and were nowhere near as famous as Markiplier. Instead, they used YouTube as a proving ground, directing short films that got them noticed by major studios. And in the case of Backrooms, the actual concept of the film came from an old series of 4chan posts.1
Hollywood is a town of copycats, and anything that makes money will be pushed to its absolute limits (see: every superhero movie of the last decade). So don’t be surprised if you see 20 horror movies by unproven YouTubers in the next year or two. The lines between creator and traditional star have never been blurrier, and my guess is that at some point it won’t even make sense to separate the two concepts any longer.
The Odyssey as Taskmaster
Checking in on AI
Oh boy.
