It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
Beyond Fest: “This is the most significant weekend in the film industry in over 30 years. Emerging generational talent has forever shifted the paradigm. There is no turning back, there are no rules, chaos reigns. It is glorious.”
Tyler C. Whitmore: “Haven’t been this optimistic about the state of movies in a long time. The energy at the theaters right now is something special. Obsession and Backrooms buzz is real and extends far beyond just the internet.”
Mia Moore: “Obsession is such an embarrassment to every producer and studio head and filmmaker who bemoans the impending death of filmmaking and wants to shepard [sic] us towards ‘evolving' into AI filmmaking. Sorry bozos, just make better movies.”
Jason Blum: “A fun one… Comscore chief box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian is among those left stunned, saying there are virtually no comps. ‘I’ve been tracking and analyzing box office for 33 years now, and I thought I’d seen it all until this past weekend with the incredible performance of Obsession that required no caveats. A second weekend jump nearing 40 percent is virtually unprecedented in the annals of modern box office tracking, and there really is no direct apples-to-apples comparison available.’”
Jordan Ruimy: “That’s $10.4M in Thursday previews for Kane Parsons’ “Backrooms.” On top of that, Friday pre-sales are already at $15M+, which is on par with some of the biggest openings of the year so far. We’re expecting a $28M Friday, resulting in a $90M weekend. Simply incredible […] The film has already made all of its money back, as the budget for “Backrooms” was only $10M. This is going to destroy A24’s previous opening record — “Civil War,” which had a $25M weekend. What’s wild is that tracking has been horrendous on this film — almost nobody saw it coming, except a very few. On May 8, “Backrooms” was tracking at a $20M weekend, and on May 20 it went up to $35–40M. So, in essence, it’s more than doubled expectations. What’s more, it goes to show just how out of touch the industry is when it comes to how popular YouTube content creators are — they can now deliver blockbuster hits.”
Girl you know it’s true!
Ooh, Ooh, Oooooh
I love you…
As a filmmaker, as a moviegoer, as an American, how can you not be excited right now? Six-and-a-half years after the pandemic destroyed the world as we knew it, order’s being restored. The “New Normal” is over, there won’t be any more censorship, blacklisting, or bigotry and resentment disguised as activism. Nobody likes that shit, and Generation Z has demonstrated three weekends in a row that everything we were told about the future of movies was wrong. People said that nobody would go to movie theaters anymore, people said Zoomers and Millennials didn’t even like movies, people said social media and virtual reality would sweep the zeitgeist, people said the New Political Correctness would never go away, much less be rejected, and people said that the world as we knew it was never coming back, and you know what? They were all wrong. Absolutely wrong.
If Kane Parsons and Curry Barker listened to Ted Sarandos and all the other Boomers who insisted that the movies were over (because they didn’t go to theaters anymore), they wouldn’t have hit movies right now. They’d be sitting in their bedrooms, alone. “Netflix and chill”? Fuck you. Barker’s Obsession and Parsons’ Backrooms have finally given a generation stymied and abused by the powers that be a communal experience that everyone over a certain age took for granted. The astonishing success of both films, against a new Star Wars movie that no one wanted, is the answer to every prayer to pause the terminal devolution of pop culture. Neither are great films, but they’re good and better than recent horror hits like Weapons, Longlegs, Nope, and M3GAN; more importantly, they’re clearly the work of a new generation, unlike all the aforementioned films, which relied on tired scenarios, tropes, and cinematic conventions that’ve been exhausted.
Obsession is the superior film, comparable to a remarkably well-made episode of Goosebumps; Backrooms is slightly undercooked in comparison, with one foot in the first half of the 2020s. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays the owner of a furniture outlet in San Jose, and Renate Reinsve is his therapist. As in Weapons, these characters are given a dash of “depth” before they’re thrown in the maw of the monster: Ejiofor’s wife just left him, and Reinsve grew up to become a bestselling self-help writer after enduring a peripatetic childhood, which we only glimpse in dreams. But make no mistake, the star of the movie is the set, “the Backrooms,” which are nice and cozy. Faded yellow? I’ll take it. It’s certainly less spooky than the dusty blue of Skinamarink. Like Longlegs, Backrooms devolves into nonsense, a combo of unexplained and ineffective magic and the kind of “therapy speak” that’s widely recognized as a defining 2020s cliché.
If Backrooms came out before Obsession, it wouldn’t have meant anything. But it’s impossible not to overrate or excuse Backrooms right now, because for all its shortcomings, it is something new from someone young. Everyone who insisted movies were over was wrong. Have fun at home, losers.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM