If I read or hear one more report about how “Backrooms” and “Obsession” have changed Hollywood forever, or how YouTube is the new New Hollywood (or the new Sundance), I’m going to gag. Yes, I’m sure that young hungry agents and studio executives might be more aggressively combing YouTube for the “next big thing” since those two films blew up, but they already were. How do you think “Backrooms” director Kane Parsons was discovered by A24 in the first place?
But don’t mistake these two hits for a trend… yet. The numbers just don’t add up. Consider the massive volume of content that exists on YouTube, with approximately 62 million YouTube creators actively uploading content everyday. If a few creators a year break out to the mainstream, that’s about a 0.0000048% rate of discovery. Even Sundance’s acceptance rate of 1% is a whole lot better than that.
For all the filmmakers thinking that YouTube is going to save them, remember, discoverability is key—and when you have billions of hours of …