| ▲ | 'Backrooms' Stuns with $81M Debut(variety.com) |
| 149 points by mindcrime 6 hours ago | 63 comments |
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| ▲ | peteforde 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I'm a long-term "OG" Kane Pixels fan. I took a friend to see the opening night preview and we both loved it. Anyone not familiar with Kane - who was 16 when he started making his "found footage" films in Blender - the guy is a truly brilliant mind. Listening to him talk... you can close your eyes and he speaks like someone middle aged. It's almost uncanny. Anyhow, in addition to his genuinely excellent Backrooms videos, I highly recommend you turn off the lights and take in his The Oldest View series as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjY897CCu4g&list=PLVAh-MgDVq... He painstakingly recreated a random demolished suburban Texas mall from archival footage. It's wild how good he is at this. |
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| ▲ | samtheDamned 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I wasn't aware he was behind the oldest view. That makes me more excited to see this movie because that was really good on what couldn't have been much of a budget to begin with. | |
| ▲ | thrance 35 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The Oldest View is really great. And it's surprisingly deep if you care to look into it a little. | |
| ▲ | idbnstra 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I’m pretty sure someone else did a majority of the mall recreation, but i may be wrong |
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| ▲ | ramenat2am 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That really shows the hunger for original stories and IC among cinephiles. Major studios were too afraid to produce something fresh instead of numberless sequels and reboots in the last decade or so. |
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| ▲ | darth_avocado 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Matt Damon talked about this somewhere. The risk aversion stems from the move away from DVD sales. Historically a lot of low and mid budget movies relied on DVD sales to recoup costs even if theater releases didn’t get you as much money as you expected. With the safety net gone, studios don’t want to take the risk. They make big budget movies with massive marketing budgets that rely on known IP and established fan bases to guarantee income. This also ensures that the story itself is average because you want an average fan to like it. I think calculus somewhere has changed that is allowing these small/mid sized movies to be made again. | | |
| ▲ | hangsi 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | This is from the interview on Hot Ones (released August 5, 2021):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaXma6K9mzo&t=816s > Sean Evans: > I think a scenario lots of viewers can relate to is sitting on the couch on a Friday night, going through the streaming services, cycling through the movies and thinking to themselves "they're not making movies for me anymore". As somebody who's been intimately involved in movie making for 30 years, what are the macro Hollywood conditions behind that sentiment? > Matt Damon: > Well, so what happened was the DVD was a huge part of our business - of our revenue stream - and technology has just made that obsolete. And so, the movies that that we used to make: you could afford to not make all of your money when it played in the theater because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release and 6 months later you'd get a whole other chunk - it would be like reopening the movie almost. > And when that went away, that changed the type of movies that we could make. I did this movie "Behind the Candelabra" and I talked to a studio executive who explained: it was a $25 million movie. I would have to put that much into print and advertising to market it - what we call P&A - so now I'm in $50 million. I have to split everything I get with the exhibitor, the people who own the movie theaters, so I would have to make $100 million before I got into profit. The idea of making $100 million on a story about this love affair between these two people... Yeah, love everyone in the movie, but that's suddenly a massive gamble in a way that it wasn't in the 1990s when they were making all those kind of movies - the kind of movies that I loved and the kind of movies that were my bread and butter. | |
| ▲ | lazypenguin 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It’s because nobody has made Steam for Movies. Let me have a movie collection that I can buy movies $1-$5 per movie and never lose it and I promise you I will buy a lot more movies. Just like people buy hundreds of steam games | | |
| ▲ | mrkpdl 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The iTunes movie store launched 20 years ago. It’s far from perfect but it is essentially steam for movies. Sadly it’s been de-emphasised over time. But it is still there and was pretty good for a while. | | |
| ▲ | righthand an hour ago | parent [-] | | The iTunes movie store is not friendly outside of the Apple ecosystem. Making the entire idea not really affordable since you need a expensive electronic device to utilize it sanely. Might as well find another way to get to it at that point. | | |
| ▲ | extra88 an hour ago | parent [-] | | MSRP of an Apple TV device is $129. The iPhone's market share in the U.S. is already over 60%.
But neither matters because the Apple TV app is available on basically everything and can be used to buy movies. https://support.apple.com/en-us/119890 | | |
| ▲ | righthand 41 minutes ago | parent [-] | | But if you use the app you’re only streaming from Apple servers. That Apple server copy can be revoked at any time. And 60% is not 100%, my point stands you need an expensive device just to purchase and watch it. Probably multiple expensive devices if you want to actually watch it on your TV. When can I download my movie onto my Linux laptop and play it through an HDMI cable? | | |
| ▲ | radley 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > When can I download my movie onto my Linux laptop and play it through an HDMI cable? Probably because the Linux market is too small to support an iTunes for Linux. By my understanding, the Linux market prefers free, open source, community effort. So essentially the real question is: why aren't you making movies yourself and sharing them free with your Linux peers? | |
| ▲ | arusahni 30 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A "Steam for Movies" service (as expressed in an ancestor comment) is basically that, though. One doesn't own their Steam games. | |
| ▲ | extra88 25 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | You're moving goalposts and ignoring what I wrote. An Apple TV box is not expensive and you can use even cheaper streaming devices to buy and watch instead. |
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| ▲ | 1123581321 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You can buy at several places that interop with each other—iTunes and Amazon are the two biggest. They don’t have literally every movie, but they have most that most people want to watch. https://moviesanywhere.com/participants Cost ranges from $5-30. Fewer dirt cheap sales than Steam, but the standard price point at launch is lower, in exchange. (Having to explain “buying movies” makes me feel old!) | | |
| ▲ | im3w1l an hour ago | parent [-] | | Unlike with steam, things can appear disappear from your iTunes library if you move countries. At least music can. | | |
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| ▲ | whyenot an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | As someone already mentioned. Steam for movies already exists (iTunes, also Amazon’s offering). The problem seems to be that hardly anyone wants to actually own a movie anymore. There are places where the ownership model seems to still be thriving (books), but for video and audio, ownership (vs. streaming or renting) is largely dead. | |
| ▲ | HeWhoLurksLate 17 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Steam had John Wick on it at one point | |
| ▲ | simonbw an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | People are saying that you can buy movies online, but I think they're missing the key point of putting lots of movies on massive discounts and promoting the movies that are currently discounted. Like sure you can buy basically any movie on Amazon or Apple's store or wherever, but I know that wherever I go, it's going to cost $4 to rent a movie, except every once in a while when it's on sale and I get it for $3, and buying it is going to be some higher amount that is almost certainly not worth it. When steam has sales, I might browse and buy quite a few games that I'm not gonna play right away. Or I buy things in bundles because it just seems like such a good deal. If movies were usually $10 to buy, but the Amazon store had a very visible section of movies that were $5 or less, but for a limited time, I'd be way more likely to buy multiple movies that I'm not intending to watch right now. | | |
| ▲ | slg 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I just opened the Apple TV app on my phone and "$4.99 Essential Movies" is listed prominently just under the top charts and new releases. I'm not trying to be rude, but this whole thread has people just speculating on stuff with limited self-awareness. The reason you aren't building a big film library is probably because you aren't that passionate about films, it isn't because no one is providing you a list of cheap movies. It's all there already, you just had to open the app. | |
| ▲ | 1123581321 42 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Games industry has an oversupply problem that is the root cause of flash sales. I thought about mentioning that in my answer. |
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| ▲ | anamax 19 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Matt Damon talked about this somewhere. The risk aversion stems from the move away from DVD sales. DVDs and even video tape are relatively recent. Hollywood was a lot less risk averse before DVDs and video tape. Heck, Hollywood was less risk averse before TV became mainstream. | | |
| ▲ | protocolture 11 minutes ago | parent [-] | | When Hollywood didnt have to compete so much for spectacle with television and could afford to have a cheaper B movie on every roll as a value add. |
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| ▲ | delfinom 4 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | The calculus has changed because people don't give a flying fuck about celebrities on golden thrones these days, especially since your average YouTuber is more popular. The cost of celebrities in movie spins is fucking massive. And the cost of production has gone way down, you don't need a specialized studio to put in CGI these days when some guys Blender can do better. So Hollywood is busy being in a downward spiral eating itself while so much room has opened for "indie" to eat their lunch and dinner. |
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| ▲ | petercooper 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This year seems to be turning a bit of a corner. Of the top box office movies so far this year there's Michael, Project Hail Mary, Hoppers, Wuthering Heights, GOAT.. with Obsession and Backrooms rapidly rising. Last year it was basically F1 and Minecraft (and while not sequels, both are arguably well known "franchises" outside of movies - but I guess MJ and Wuthering Heights are too ;-)). | | |
| ▲ | torben-friis 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Wuthering Heights was a remake, and Hail Mary was also a safeish bet since it's a novel by the same guy as The Martian. Not to say that it isn't an improvement, but we're still pretty far from seeing American cinema catching up to the world stage in originality, let alone to the golden Hollywood era. | | |
| ▲ | muglug 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | And Michael was based on some of the most expensive & beloved IP in the world (extremely popular with Gen X despite everything) | |
| ▲ | peteforde 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I don't think it's a hot take to say: give Kane Parsons the keys to the kingdom. |
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| ▲ | manquer 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Is it though? Backrooms was a quite successful web series on YT which in turn originated in 4chan boards. Only the medium being sourced from is changing from successful Broadway shows, popular novels or comic books in the years past. The calculus remains the same - properties with name recognition even from other formats tend to be green-light. | |
| ▲ | Joeboy 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The big IP films got better distribution and marketing, but there hasn't really been a shortage of original films produced over the last decade. The big franchise movies are a small proportion of films produced. | |
| ▲ | sandworm101 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | But is this fresh content? Back rooms and liminal spaces have a history in games and websites. This wasnt an out there pitch. This was an identified interest area put on screen. A good movie, but not something totally new. | | | |
| ▲ | fontain 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Does it qualify as something fresh? I guess fresh to cinemas but it is well established IP that has a readymade audience. Certainly a risk compared to Spider-Man: Another Adventure Again but the risk was in the execution. A lot like the Slenderman movie. Something like Iron Lung would be a better example of fresh cinema? |
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| ▲ | atleastoptimal 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| All they had to do was simply hire a talented person who knows how to make compelling narrative art. This is lost on the movie industry, though Hollywood has been treading water for over a decade now, failing to examine its failures and coasting on inertia. In general, there is sooo much free money on the ground for large, hierarchical American corporations to do the following 1. Give young talented people resources and freedom 2. Don't put them through endless bullshit internal status games The reason why the tech industry in the US thrives so much is partially due to the fact that it is one of the few industries that gives people high salaries and agency in their roles without a huge amount of experience. Almost everywhere else is just an artifically gated series of internal politics, nepotism and pointless rituals in too-big-to-fail industries, which attract people who prefer these games over actual results. |
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| ▲ | Triphibian 43 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I saw a Youtuber recently make a compelling argument that one of the features Hollywood has been missing is the pipeline of young, imaginative talent that music video direction used to provide. Backrooms, Iron Lung, etc. make a good case that YouTube can be that new pipeline. | | |
| ▲ | Triphibian 39 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I suppose if The Daniels were the last directors to enjoy the music video > Hollywood path then Neil Blomkamp might be the proto-example of Internet content > Hollywood. |
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| ▲ | prvc 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The new Star Wars movie grossed $81.6 million at its debut last weekend, for comparison. |
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| ▲ | Modified3019 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I really enjoyed it. I had no idea what a “backrooms movie” would end up being, but it was exactly what I could have hoped for having enjoyed his other work.
Honestly creators from youtube putting out movies recently has probably been the most interested in going out to see something in years. |
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| ▲ | ChrisMarshallNY 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I enjoyed Impulse. It looked a lot more polished than what I'd expect from an indie producer, though. I liked it, and it's a shame that it was killed. Kind of a "slow burn," though, so I think I know why it was killed. | |
| ▲ | portly 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I also thought obsession was decent. Spooked me a bit like horrors used to do when I was little. |
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| ▲ | wewewedxfgdf 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I saw it. I'm not a young Internet kid. And I enjoyed it - it's quite clever, I never cringed at terrible dialogue, people behaved in ways that you would expect them to in strange circumstances. Worth seeing. Amazing it was made by a 20 year old. |
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| ▲ | dgan 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I practically never watch any movies because they are almost always trash, but decided to go watch Obsession after seeing a youtuber (penguinZ) talking positively about it Yeah it's pretty good. I am in my late 30. Excited for Backrooms which isnt yet available |
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| ▲ | spartanatreyu 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| No spoilers below: The movie was great but it's not a stand-alone movie, it is a small piece of the full story so don't go in thinking that everything will be explained and tied up in a neat little bow. The movie takes place in Kane Pixel (the movie director's) youtube series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVAh-MgDVqvDUEq6qDXqO... It makes a lot more sense if you watch the full youtube series first. |
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| ▲ | collinmcnulty an hour ago | parent [-] | | I am aware of the existence of the web series but have never seen any of it, and I felt it was a great standalone experience. The lack of explanation I think worked really well. |
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| ▲ | Triphibian an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Backrooms and a new Boards of Canada record coming out on the same weekend feels like some kind of cultural signal. |
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| ▲ | lwansbrough 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think people are excited for new ideas in cinema. A24’s track record is far from perfect, but I respect their willingness to try things. In my opinion, this movie is no exception. Very meandering and largely devoid of any real plot. Did a good job holding the tension at points, but ultimately fell flat in delivering on that tension. Probably worth a watch if you enjoy the genre. If you’re someone who just enjoys a good story, this is a pretty easy skip. |
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| ▲ | fmajid 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Chiwetel Ejiofor is a phenomenal actor, that probably helped. This is more of an indictment of Hollywood’s creative bankruptcy than anything, strip-mining Star Wars or Marvel will only take you so far. |
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| ▲ | HDBaseT 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Sucks this film had exclusivity rights for different cinemas. |
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| ▲ | squidsoup 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Showing alongside Obsession, another horror film made by a YouTuber. |
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| ▲ | unsnap_biceps 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Neither of these two movies are my jam, but I'm glad they are finding success. It's giving me hope that we're going to get a revitalized movie industry focusing on new IP and talent. | |
| ▲ | candlemas 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | And Iron Lung earlier this year. | | |
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| ▲ | deadbabe 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Now that Backrooms has been a hit, I wonder if we’ll ever get a House of Leaves movie, which was somewhat of an inspiration for the original backrooms lore. |
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| ▲ | moralestapia 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Glad to see another 4chan original going mainstream. <:) |
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| ▲ | ChrisArchitect 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The what? Horror something? ....started on 4chan? Yeah, immediate aboutface here. And reading wiki articles about it that throw around words like "creepypasta" like that's widely understood? Liminal spaces I get. Reminds of Severance. And anyways, how is this worth going to a theater for? <Shrug> A24 has done well. Is 81M considered breaching 'mainstream'? Because these niche horror things being portrayed as part of the greater 'culture' is tiring. |
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| ▲ | peteforde 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is not the reaction of someone trying to keep an open mind, especially given that this isn't your usual cup of tea. If you can get over your preconceived notions, I'd bet that you'd really enjoy this movie. It's extremely well executed and genuinely unsettling without ever getting gory, comedic or stupid. | |
| ▲ | altairprime 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | A darkened theater with a glowing screen is precisely the sort of liminal space that is the topic of the movie. $20 to fall through the skin of the world for a couple hours? Seems like a no-brainer to me, given how rare and precious any liminal feeling at all is these days. And, if I go support this, maybe they’ll finally make a House of Leaves movie. One can dream. | | |
| ▲ | BLKNSLVR 21 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm 150 pages away from the end of my current book. At which point House of Leaves shall become my current book. I'm looking forward to the experience. | |
| ▲ | Slow_Hand an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I’d hardly consider a movie theater a liminal space. To me a theater is a destination, not a transitional area. That said I do like your description of “falling through the skin of the world.” A+. |
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