Years before Backrooms burst into theaters with its $118 million global box office debut, it was the focal point of fan debate, creativity and discussion on Reddit.
The tech platform is built around “subreddits,” communities focused on specific topics, from the broad (r/sports, r/movies, etc.) to the hyper-niche. One of those communities was r/backrooms, which was formed after a post on the image board 4Chan sparked the idea for the fantastical and dreary world.
“It started back in 2019, and it was where people were coming together to really take this simple concept into all these discussions and the lore-building that happened in there,” says Jim Squires, chief marketing officer of Reddit, tells The Hollywood Reporter.
Kane Parsons, then using the pseudonym Kane Pixels, took the concept and ran with it, creating a Backrooms video series on YouTube, leading to the feature from A24.
“Reddit has helped build communities on different topics, and that includes internet phenomena. The bigger the community, the bigger the opportunity to create something worthwhile,” says a moderator on the r/movies subreddit who agreed to speak to THR on the condition that he be identified by his username, SanderSo47. “Users not only witness the concepts, but they also help contribute with new ideas. There’s a lot of material to explore. It’s just about finding the right talent. Going back to r/movies, we had a lot of updates for the project in the past three years, and it all led to high engagement from our users: Every trailer, every poster, every interview, it all built awareness and more curiosity. It’s no surprise that this, along with Obsession, has been one of the best titles we’ve had in the subreddit for discussion.”
As Hollywood appears poised to pivot to digitally native creatives like Parsons and Obsession director Curry Barker, Reddit is emerging as a focus point (alongside obvious suspects like YouTube and TikTok) for agents and execs seeking the Next Big Thing. Indeed, one agency veteran says that assistants at their agency have identified “a bunch” of subreddits and short stories that they think could lead to compelling ideas.
The platform, which was founded in 2005 and now counts the Newhouse family as its largest individual investor, has become a place to gauge fandoms and increasingly where studios, writers and directors can even uncover new IP and talent. “It’s almost a real-time IP incubator of sorts, with moderators and communities that are cultivating these spaces where stories and fandoms can grow organically,” says Squires.
That includes Backrooms, where a community helped create a world, but also subreddits dedicated to short stories, or the popular r/nosleep, where people write and read original horror. One of those stories on Reddit is being developed as a feature film produced by and starring Sydney Sweeney called I Pretended to Be a Missing Girl.
“I think of Reddit as the most powerful focus group that’s ever existed. So that’s both for discovering ideas you may not have thought of but also for testing ideas and interacting with the communities to understand how things are being received and what’s happening,” says Squires. “Ultimately, if [a studio or producer has] an idea and they want to develop it, like the Sydney Sweeney idea, that’s for them to ultimately reach out to the moderators and the right people on the platform to do that, and they do those deals directly, but we will help facilitate when needed.”
And entertainment content is increasingly taking up more and more of the time spent by users on the platform. Reddit says that such content on the platform captured 240 billion views over the past year, while research it conducted with Samba indicated that marketing campaigns from entertainment companies contributed to an 18 percent incremental lift in viewership on the content in question.
Squires says the authenticity of those efforts matters. “We really foster and encourage brands or movie studios or directors to use the tools — organically as well as the paid marketing tools — to drive scale and to get in front of those audiences,” he says. “I always advise brands, do exclusive AMAs [ask me anything Q&As] that people might be interested in — that always fosters and brings true fans out.”
Parsons, for example, did an AMA on r/movies about Backrooms that attracted more than 1,400 comments — a full-circle moment for a creative releasing IP that is very much of the internet.
“The future is always uncertain, but the one hope is that it can look at this place not as a place for discussion for movies but as a place where there can be future talent, where their efforts pay off, which can lead to big opportunities,” SanderSo47 says. “They see what’s popular, and they want some of that. What Parsons built with his short films led to a lot of communities taking notice. He displayed a level of originality and creativity, and that was welcome in all these circles.”
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