The Trouble With Trying to Turn Viral Videos Into Blockbusters

Almost 14 years ago, the producer Scott Glassgold stumbled on a short film on Vimeo about a woman who believes she’s encountered an alien.

The project, by a pair of filmmakers named Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell, was “a wonderful, lo-fi science-fiction story” that conveyed a distinct storytelling voice, Glassgold told me.

He immediately set out to work with them, hoping to introduce the pair to Hollywood as fresh directing talent.

“That was an early moment for me on the internet,” he explained.

“I just saw it as an incredibly viable path to meeting artists, finding ideas, frankly, in a place where, at the time, really no one else was looking.” He learned from that period, however, that Hollywood wasn’t universally enthusiastic about turning such material into feature-length movies—at least, not with unknown, internet-bred creators involved.

Even though Earl and Caldwell’s work attracted potential studio buyers, Glassgold sought independent financing to help the pair avoid what’s known in the industry as development hell.

“The first call I would get from a studio head would be like, We’re so excited.

When can we fire the director? ” Glassgold recalled.

“I would just put my hands on my face, because it was entirely antithetical to what we were trying to achieve.” That was, as Glassgold put it, “the 1.0” of Hollywood’s dalliance with the internet—a far cry from the industry’s upgraded view of digital-native talent these days.

Works by filmmakers who first found success online consistently scored at the box office this spring: Backrooms , directed by Kane Parsons, who went viral as a teenager with a web series set in the same world of liminal spaces , is now the studio A24’s highest-grossing movie ever.

Obsession , a horror-comedy made by Curry Barker, who first built an audience on YouTube through sketch-comedy videos, became a word-of-mouth hit.

And Iron Lung , a video-game adaptation self-financed, directed, and released by the gaming YouTuber known as Markiplier, grossed at least 10 times its budget worldwide with the help of his nearly 40 million subscribers. [ Read: A no-name director to everyone but his 38 million fans ] Hollywood, inspired by these triumphs, is doing what it does best: working overtime to capture the same magic again.

Several projects with online roots have recently entered into development to become feature-length films, including Siren Head and Cartoon Cat , each inspired by the disturbing viral imagery of the artist Trevor Henderson; Seasons , an adaptation of a short story first published on the Subreddit r/nosleep, a forum for grassroots horror writing, about a couple whose dream ranch turns out to be haunted; and The Mandela Catalogue , a script based, much like Backrooms , on a popular horror series on YouTube.