Major studios were too afraid to produce something fresh instead of numberless sequels and reboots in the last decade or so.
I think calculus somewhere has changed that is allowing these small/mid sized movies to be made again.
> 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.
AAA video game makers are having the same problem.
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.
Pre-Covid there was simply not enough major weekends to release a big movie. They end up competing with each other.
Sure, Baby Driver made $300m on a $40m budget. But for pure profit maximization you are better off making a billion dollars on a $500m budget.
Hollywood has also completely failed to cultivate a new generation of celebrities. God, we had a few years of nothing but Pedro Pascal to the point we have memes inside memes.
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.
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 ;-)).
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.
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.
But the original element that set backrooms/liminal spaces apart wasn't what was in them, but what wasn't. Sure it's creepy to be all alone, you may be afraid to get jumped, but you aren't. Some of the backrooms-inspired video games stay true to this concept.
So point is, the "Backrooms" film author may be an outsider, but he sticks to a very well-tried formula - one mainstream authors probably avoid for being too cliche more than anything.
What A24 is doing with this movie is what the large studios have been doing, they're just doing it for a different audience. It's franchise driven content but simply 'gamer-coded' and sourced from Youtube or game-related media rather than from more traditional sources, mobilizing the gen-z fans of that content.
Still a lot of people buy those, so studios continue to make them.
Also indie games are too cheap. I noticed the need to correct my own thinking: Why should the boring game of a big publisher cost more than the great game made by a single guy? And allowed myself to use more money when I want to support smaller studios.
Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die
Honey Bunch
Cold Storage
Send Help
Marty Supreme
Dust Bunny
Fackham Hall
Eternity
Rental Family
Bugonia
Roofman
Is it worth being involved in indie production when success just guarantees a hate campaign against you? It will probably happen over Backrooms soon enough.
Major studios produce movies that most people want to see. The cinephiles don't like those films, but conveniently, they do like films that don't cost a quarter of a billion dollars to make.
The headline here is about a movie that took in $81 million. The Mandalorian took in about the same amount in its first weekend, and it's considered a financial disaster.
If people would start going to see more of those low-budget movies, they'd see a lot more interesting films. The cinephiles would be thrilled, because it would get those films into major theaters (over 2,000 for this film), rather than having to seek them out in tiny arthouse theaters for very few showings.
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.
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.
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.
Give me comedy. Oh how I miss the 90 minute comedy movie.
If it helps, there's some stratification that makes understanding it a bit confusing at first. There's basically four layers:
- The original 4chan post, a vaguely unsettling photo of an odd yellow room with an evocative caption about it being a vast realm outside reality that you can accidentally fall into to be stalked by unseen monsters.
- This post went viral and kicked off the "creepy liminal spaces" trend, where people found or created unnerving images of dark or abandoned places that are normally busy, like malls, schools, hotels, airports, etc.
- This evolved into the idea that the original yellow Backrooms is just one of infinitely-many connected environments/levels, each reflecting a different surreal aesthetic: tiled pools, children's playspaces, empty suburbs, etc. People also invented their own weird creatures that inhabited them (think the SCP Foundation stuff crossed with Five Nights at Freddy's). This resulted in an explosion of videos, wikis, and indie games exploring and expanding the concept.
- Kane Parsons created a more restrained and focused version of the above in his YouTube series, dispensing with the profusion of levels and monsters and drilling down on various first-person, found-footage explorations of the original Backrooms and glimpses of the mysterious company researching it. His take became by far the most popular, and landed him the director role for the film, which has turned out to be quite thoughtful and well-done.
I definitely recommend checking it out if you like surreal psychological horror. It's good even if you're not familiar with his web series.
That said I do like your description of “falling through the skin of the world.” A+.
Backrooms for me was definitely a yum!
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.
To fair, the original WTF appeal of the web series' creepy Backroom vibe was great but it did start to get a little tired for me right before Kane expanded things beyond the initial "I'm trapped all alone in this endless place." But I've never been a big fan of horror plots that revolve too much around "two minutes of suspenseful creeping" building to an inevitable jump scare. Now that the movie is doing great, I'm hoping we'll get a follow-up that further develops the later parts of web series and keeps going.
Vg nafjrerq gur gvzryvar bs ubj gur onpxebbzf jrer perngrq.
Va 1972 Vina Orpx jnf qbvat culfvpf rkcrevzragf naq jnf noyr gb znxr znggre qvfnccrne sebz bhe fcnpr.
Bapr ur svtherq bhg gung vg unq orra genafcbegrq vagb n qvssrerag fcnpr, ur crgvgvbarq gur tbireazrag sbe rkgen shaqvat. Vs gur HF tbireazrag pbhyq perngr rkgen fcnpr ng jvyy, vg jbhyq or n fpvragvsvp oernxguebhtu ba gur beqre bs fcyvggvat gur ngbz naq jbhyq punatr gur jbeyq. Vg sryy haqre gur cheivrj bs gur Qrcnegzrag bs Raretl (gur fnzr qrcnegzrag vaibyirq jvgu ahpyrne jrncbaf).
Guebhtu gurve rkcrevzragf gelvat gb perngr n ynetre qbbejnl ("guerfubyq") gb n arj fcnpr, gurl pnhfrq gur snzbhf 1989 rnegudhnxr naq trarengrq gur onpxebbzf nf jr xabj gurz, qvfpbirerq gur ragvgvrf jvguva, naq jrer erfcbafvoyr sbe gur nppryrengvat zvffvat crefbaf pnfrf nf zber naq zber bcravatf orpnzr cbccvat hc.
Gurl xarj gur ceboyrz jnf trggvat jbefr, naq gurl pbagvahrq gb pbire vg hc naq pbagvahr gur rkcrevzragf, nyy va gur ubcrf bs zbargvfvat gurz be hfvat gurz gb tnva n fgengrtvp nqinagntr bire bgure pbhagevrf.
Gur zbivr fubjrq jung unccrarq jvgu bayl bar bs gubfr qbbejnlf. (naq gur qbbejnl gur frnthyy pnzr guebhtu, naq gur bevtvany guerfubyq va gur Nflap snpvyvgl).
Jr nyfb fnj gung gur onpxebbzf pbagvahrq gb ribyir bire gvzr orpbzvat zber ernyvfgvp, riraghnyyl sbezvat gur "fgvyy-yvsrf" jvgu rqvoyr juvgr znff syrfu.
Juvpu yrnqf gb gur gehr ubeebe:
Nf gur jnyy orgjrra obgu fcnprf orpbzrf guvaare ng na rire vapernfvat engr, naq nf gur onpxebbzf pbagvahrf gb ribyir, jung unccraf arkg, naq jvyy jr or noyr gb fnir bhefryirf?
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.
It was unsettling but maybe that was the point.
The two leads are a guy you never see and a small puppet (with the big reveal new character being a CGI alien). As great as they were, C3PO, Yoda and Chewbacca couldn't have carried Empire Strikes Back as the leads. What was Disney thinking?
"We continue to make a shit-load of money off toys and merchandizing"
I'd love to see a serious live-action show based on the idea of the Bad Batch (not copying the same story as the animated series, of course).
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.
In the meantime, claymation studio Laika has a faithful adaptation of "Piranesi" in the pipeline. It's more dreamlike and beautiful than gothic horror, but it does center on a similar concept of an infinite structure existing beyond physically reality that reflects human thought in enigmatic ways.
Wandering around the halls of some functional institution was definitely a childhood past time of mine. Now still wondering how our parents and grandparents enjoyed private office space, lounge furniture designed by professional celebrities like Eames, and time, doing more with less. Now stuck at home or wandering in some open plan space that looks like college kids got permission to use a charge card at Ikea.
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.
Yeah it's pretty good. I am in my late 30. Excited for Backrooms which isnt yet available
<:)