At this time last year, the idea of a wide-release feature film-maker cutting their teeth on YouTube was, if not unheard of, certainly still a niche origin story. Siblings Michael and Danny Philippou had just released Bring Her Back, the follow-up to their surprise horror hit Talk to Me, to pretty-good reviews and OK box office; clearly they would continue to work, but the slightly diminished returns didn’t predict a YouTube explosion. Nor did the outright lousiness of Shelby Oaks, from longtime YouTube film critic Chris Stuckmann, when it premiered in theaters later in 2025. Generous horror-festival buzz died down as more people actually laid eyes on the movie; Stuckmann was an obvious enthusiast, and some saw promise in his first effort, but a clumsy found-footage pastiche without much emotional sense didn’t seem like the next big thing, either.

But in 2026, something has shifted. In January, YouTuber Markiplier self-released his adaptation of the video game Iron Lung to theaters, and it outgrossed any number of big-studio titles. Then Curry Barker, whose comedy sketches have been a YouTube fixture, unveiled his feature debut Obsession. The film, made for under a million dollars, has become the box office phenomenon of the summer so far, managing a virtually unheard-of feat when its second and third weekends actually outgrossed its first. Obsession is sharing multiplex space with Backrooms, directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, who previously brought the spooky internet meme to life in a series of YouTube shorts. Despite being set in a series of purgatorial, sparsely furnished, fluorescent-lit “liminal spaces”, it was the top movie at the North American box office this weekend, poised to become the biggest-grossing movie from distributor A24 in a matter of days. Backrooms also opened to bigger numbers than any number of starrier or bigger-brand 2026 titles like Wuthering Heights, Scream 7, The Devil Wears Prada 2 or the last Pixar movie. That makes three YouTube-trained film-makers who have presided over some of this year’s biggest and/or most surprising hits. With them have come countless social media posts about how YouTube, not film school, provides the real training tomorrow’s directors need.

Of course, what YouTube training actually entails varies greatly. Parsons has a background in visual effects and the original Backrooms webseries, not unlike some past feature directors who started in VFX or TV. Stuckmann, as mentioned, is known mostly for his movie reviews. Barker was in a sketch-comedy duo before delving into horror shorts. Similarly, if less delicately, the Philippous specialized in outsized special effects demos and goony comedy. (Check out their “Marvel vs. DC” video, under their handle RackaRacka, for a glimpse at something you would never want to see turned into a TV episode, let alone a two-hour movie.) Markiplier has perhaps the most traditional (or stereotypical?) YouTuber background, in that he became famous for his play-through videos – which means, yes, viewers watch him play various games.

It’s notable, then, that despite this diverse array of experiences, just about every YouTube creator has gotten into features through the horror genre, even if they haven’t specialized in that area on their earlier platform. Barker in particular feels more closely related to Zach Cregger, a sketch comedian – from the old days of linear TV, no less! – who pivoted with his unpredictable, ambitious horror movies Barbarian and Weapons. Obsession isn’t quite as inventive as those movies, but shares with them an affinity for a hooky premise with thorny (and often darkly funny) complications. At least the progression from sketch comedy to Obsession is more natural than the one from making gross sex jokes about Wonder Woman to attempting to explore dead-serious traumas in Talk to Me.

Some of this probably has to do with how much more marketable horror has been post-pandemic than comedy, which was already experiencing a contraction in the late 2010s. For a while, the more whimsical or irreverent superhero movies served as a comedy substitute; now horror and comedy, natural bedfellows in their desire to produce a visceral reaction, are sharing that space, and horror has often thrived with up-and-coming voices from outside the Hollywood system, with its less risky budgets. Horror is also typically a youth-driven genre at the box office, and these younger film-makers seem to have a better idea of what resonates with their peers than a lot of older film-makers. This intense focus can also result in movies that feel calculated, rather than intensely personal – as with the hooky but vaguely algorithmic geek show of Bring Her Back. Visually, Backrooms depicts a dreamlike atmosphere with unsettling accuracy, but Parsons has trouble drawing convincing characters outside of the movie’s meticulously designed copy-of-a-copy spaces. It feels like the work of someone who has spent a lot of time contemplating the nature of industrial-influenced architecture, video games and liminality, but maybe less time accumulating life experiences that could bring those ideas to more electrifying life. Even Obsession, the most lived-in of the bunch, has a somewhat baffling depiction of the socioeconomics of twentysomethings. (Are multiple characters really paying their rent from working shifts at a music retailer?!)

Are these film-makers learning their insights or limitations from YouTube in particular? It’s hard to say. Despite the optics, YouTube isn’t really a training system; it’s a platform with endless passages and backrooms of its own. It might be seen as more analogous to MTV, which gave a number of film-makers their first wide exposure as directors of eye-catching music videos in the 1980s and 90s. Just as a true student of YouTube is mainly learning what attracts clicks, not fundamentals of film-making, MTV itself wasn’t teaching anyone how to make music videos (or by extension, feature films); it showcased what played particularly well on MTV. The film-makers themselves behind music videos were often coming up from the same places as feature directors - though there were certainly more alternative-minded exceptions like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, whose music video success led them into film from less traditional backgrounds as a skateboarding photographer and rock-band drummer, respectively.

Interestingly, the recent film-maker who feels most in line with those boundary-pushing sensibilities is Boots Riley, whose I Love Boosters feels like it could be a more political cousin to Gondry’s work, and is far loopier and more visually minded than the work of the aforementioned YouTube creators. Though he’s only directed two features and one TV series, Riley is decades older than these newcomers – and his status as a Black man brings up another notable point of comparison. With the exception of Markiplier, who has some Asian heritage, all of these wunderkinds are white men. YouTube has certainly opened doors for much younger and scrappier film-makers to brand themselves to a wider audience earlier in their careers. At the same time, it’s not exactly revolutionary to see more ambitious twentysomething white guys hurrying through that door. Starting a YouTube channel may not cost as much as attending film school, but it can favor the kind of pseudo-bootstrapping that inevitably skews toward those who already gifted the time and means to work on their videos, undermining the vision of underdogs triumphing in some kind of digital meritocracy.

Yet a more heartening form of traditionalism lurks beneath this trend, too: A shift toward YouTubers directing feature films means that a bunch of them actually care to do it at all. Circa the heart of the pandemic, as viewing habits underwent a seemingly permanent shift for a lot of demographics, there was plenty of talk about younger, phone-addicted eyeballs lacking the patience to sit and watch a full movie without a second screen present. Youth-driven phenomena like Backrooms and Obsession are proving that assumption about younger generations dead wrong. Backrooms in particular is a movie where it would be easy to point to online shorts as a free substitute for what it’s delivering, yet audiences have turned up – the youth-culture equivalent of, say, adapting a Disney+ streaming series into a blockbuster. This doesn’t mean these directors have been equipped to make better movies than their various forebears with roots in theater, film school, music videos or backyard self-tutorials, or that this new form of public practice space will change film-making forever. But the fact that Curry Barker, Kane Parsons and Markiplier all wanted to make movies, rather than grind their way through daily micro-doses of content, is a testament to the strange, beautiful resilience of cinema. If YouTube is any kind of new film school, that means for some people, films are still worth learning about.