In the past few weeks, Curry Barker’s Obsession and Kane Parsons’ Backrooms have taken the box office by storm. Of course, producers Jason Blum and James Wan couldn’t be happier about that fact. Not just because of the money they are raking in, but because of what it signals for the industry as a whole.
On May 30th, Blum and Wan spoke with PGA President Stephanie Allain at a Produced By Conference at Universal Studios. They spoke about the state of theatrical releases in a post-COVID world and the future of Blumhouse–Atomic Monster.
photo by Gage Skidmore, Flickr
Theatrical Releases
“Since COVID, there’s been this lethargic feeling around theatrical, and is it relevant anymore and is it going to survive?” said Blum. “And what I think is so incredible about Obsession and Backrooms is that they’re a new kind of movie. They’re made by non-traditional directors, directors who really honed their skills as creators online.”
Both Parsons and Barker started their careers making content for YouTube. Barker made his film for $750,000, and it’s the first movie since Christmas 1982 to have box office numbers increase in its 2nd and 3rd weekends.
“Obsession this weekend went up 20 percent from last weekend,” Blum explains. “Last weekend it went up 30 percent from the opening weekend. No movie has done that, gone up two weekends in a row, since E.T. It is unbelievable.”
Only to have Backrooms, directed by Parsons, be A24’s biggest opening in history. The film, adapted from the 20-year-old’s own YouTube series, was made for $10 million but could gross as much as $90 million.
When it comes to the horror genre, studios tend to stick to well-worn IPs, creating bulky and often convoluted franchises. Despite fans screaming for decades that they were sick of this trend, there was very little box office data to back it up. Now with Obsession, Backrooms, M3GAN, Barbarian, Weapons, Longlegs, and Talk to Me all being wildly successful original IPs, it’s getting harder to keep acting like this isn’t what customers want.
The Past & Future
“Their hope and desire and dream is to make cool movies,” Blum said. “Backrooms and Obsession are edgy and weird and fucking nuts. And to me, there’s almost this feeling of the ’70s, of a new generation of young people making edgy movies that are connecting in theaters in a crazy way. So many young people grew up in a time when they couldn’t go to the movies, and they haven’t had something made for them that gets them off their iPad and into theaters. Suddenly they have two movies.”
“I’ve been a horror fan since I was a kid, and so naturally I grew up on a steady diet of horror movies through the ’80s and ’90s, inspired by great filmmakers like John Carpenter and Wes Craven,” said Wan. “I look at them and think, ‘You know what? I kind of want to do what they did.’ Today we kind of mimic that model. And here we are. I say this to anyone who will listen: The horror genre keeps saving our industry.”
And the pair intend to ride this wave as far as it will take them. “What’s the aspiration?” Blum asked. “‘The Disney of horror’ is the aspiration in five years.”
