2026 started with YouTube personality Markiplier’s video game to movie adaptation, Iron Lung, bathing cinemas in a blood bath across the globe. It was the start of a trend we’re seeing a lot of this year, in which the deepest darkest corners of the internet – and a bunch of incredible creators – are making a splash on the silver screen.
Across the period of a month, Cineworld is screening Obsession and The Amazing Circus: The Last Act, both with YouTube origins. Then there’s Backrooms, which festered from forum 4Chan and is now making waves as one of the next big horror films of the year.
So where have these films climbed out of the woodwork from and why are big Hollywood industry heads and distributors putting their stock behind these creators?
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The creators behind the flurry of online content transferring to the big screen
Curry Barker, Gooseworx, and Kane Parsons are the creators behind three intriguing titles that, until now, have been watched hunched over a smartphone. Now, though, these names have hit the big time, creating films playing out on the silver screen.
Gooseworx is a British-American YouTuber who created The Amazing Digital Circus, a zany animation that played out across a series of videos on independent animation studio, GLITCH’s channel. The pilot of the series has garnered over 400 million views, and now its final instalment is having the red carpet rolled out for it.
Meanwhile, Curry Barker is the director behind the latest horror hit, Obsession, following a boy who makes a wish on a toy for the girl he has a crush on to be…obsesssed with him, with varying, disconcerting outcomes.
His directorial debut, though, was another horror film called Milk & Serial which, failing to get a distributor on board, he released on his channel, ‘that’s a bad idea’, on which he created other fun skits, often with the other half of his comedy duo Cooper Tomlinson.
Lastly, there’s the Backrooms. This was a concept that first came to be on image forum 4chan, delving into liminal spaces. These are largely abandoned, never-ending corridors in basements, etc. with the concept then developed by Kane Parsons into a series of short films, published on YouTube. And now… it’s got an award-winning cast.
Why online creators are bringing audiences to cinemas
Well, first things first, all of these creators have an established audience who are fans of their work and who are invested in their storytelling. Not so dissimilar from pre-existing IPs, studios can almost guarantee tickets will sell and bums will be firmly planted in seats, rather than take the punt on something completely new and potentially quite left-field.
All of these projects have had millions of subscribers and followers behind them, with the Backrooms in many ways being a whole community effort and an example of collaborative storytelling. What's more, they speak to a generation that largely grew up on the internet, with many of these films capturing the essence of that online aesthetic.
Online creators have the freedom to be more creative
While these titles have found their way into the mainstream, they didn’t start that way, which meant these YouTubers and forum dwellers alike could create without any limitations. They could be as wild and as niche as they liked, allowing room to make something truly unique and both genre-bending and genre-defying.
It's an exciting pattern to see forming as we bring in a wave of new, young storytellers – and they're clearly getting something right, because there is so much buzz about these films. Make sure you book and catch them at Cineworld – Obsession is screening now, with Backrooms and The Amazing Digital Circus releasing soon.
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