April 15, 2026
Nostradamus Perspectives
By Hillevi Gustafson
From Viral to Theatrical: Creators and New Hit Pipelines for Film
Two recent feature films present compelling case studies for the intersection between the creator economy and the traditional film industry. Several past Nostradamus reports discussed the emergence of the creator class, with many predictions made about how this might pan out in the future. We have come a long way from the fledgling days of online video and there are key lessons to be learned for those curious enough to listen.
Indie studio A24 recently dropped the trailer for the upcoming horror film Backrooms, based on the internet phenomenon that once originated on the infamous forum 4chan. Kane Parsons, now 20, turned that online folktale into a successful series of YouTube shorts. The first video in the series, titled The Backrooms (Found Footage), was uploaded in 2022 and has over 70 million views on his channel to date. The series as a whole has amassed almost 200 million views and caught the attention of A24, making Parsons the youngest director that the studio has ever worked with.
The film industry has for a long time found talent on YouTube but often what that means is that the filmmaker then steps away from their role as an online video creator. For example, the director duo Danny and Michael Philippou behind horror hits Talk To Me (also A24) and Bring Her Back started off as content creators under the name RackRacka. Notably, the last video RackaRacka uploaded was about Talk To Me releasing worldwide. They entered the industry and do not seem to be looking back to their origins in the creator economy. Traditional thinking tends to view online video as the farm league: a place where you learn, grow, and will then leave behind.
It will be interesting to see how Backrooms performs as a feature film and what Parsons will do with the industry seal of approval. Can that clout be leveraged back into his own work as an online creator, growing his 3 million subscribers on YouTube? Or will he take this as an opportunity to leave the creator economy behind and focus entirely on the traditional film industry? Is it possible to somehow keep working in both worlds? Up-and-coming filmmakers and creators today need to ask themselves what they gain, and what they lose, from following these different creative paths.
“Some go on to develop their one-man-bands or friend groups into successful production companies, or to leverage the audience they’ve built into projects with the established industry. Many don’t even attempt to, which from a business perspective may seem incomprehensible. But the vast majority of people in the film industry were never going to own points in a project or shares in a company, and they would always be working long hours with little or no job security. In that light, an acceptable income, full creative control, and complete ownership of one’s creations starts to look like a pretty good life.” - From Nostradamus Report 2021 “Transforming Storytelling Together”, Johanna Koljonen.
On the other side of this divide is feature film Iron Lung, adapted from an indie game with the same name, that came out earlier this year. This is the debut feature directed and written by Mark Fischbach, known on YouTube as Markiplier. Fischbach has built a huge online following over ten years through gaming videos, comedy and increasingly more ambitious work. Iron Lung was self-financed and self-distributed. The film grossed $18 million at the US box-office for its opening weekend, impressive for a film with a budget of about $3 million. After a big fan-led push, the film opened on thousands of screens around the world and even beat out Sam Raimi’s Send Help in terms of actual tickets sold in the US (Send Help grossed more due to higher ticket prices).
Success is of course not a given, there are other YouTubers who have tried to leverage their online audience for a film project and not succeeded. What Iron Lung shows is how a well-established creator - who knows his audience well - can use that relationship to build a successful cinema release. The key is that the creator fully embraces and understands their unique audience and takes their credibility with that audience seriously. While Backrooms is an example of how the traditional industry finds and absorbs both the talent and the IP from the creator economy, Iron Lung shows what it can look like when creators don’t court the traditional industry.
Which brings to mind the success of the comedic chat show Chicken Shop Date, created by Amelia Dimoldenberg over a decade ago. She has refused to sell the format because she understands that there is power in holding on to her own IP. When she first started, the industry did not recognize the potential of her work. Now that it is successful, she does not need the industry to keep it going and growing. Rather, the industry needs her – she was The Academy’s official red carpet correspondent at the Oscars for the third time this year. Telling for an institution that has been struggling to keep audiences tuned in.
The upcoming Nostradamus report will continue to explore the evolving intersection between the creator economy and the traditional film and TV industry. For now, a question we all might want to consider is this: what does it mean for the industry if the creator economy becomes less of a pipeline and more of its own ecosystem of ambitious filmmaking that has stopped looking for the approval of traditional gatekeepers?