The Backrooms caught a lot of people in Hollywood by surprise when it arrived in theaters and made over $330 million worldwide on a tiny budget. The massive box office success of the big-screen adaptation of the popular YouTube horror series has seemingly kicked off a buying spree across Hollywood as studios are bidding over creepy internet culture in a desperate rush to produce the next Backrooms-like super hit.
On July 2, as reported by Deadline, The Mandela Catalogue became the next online viral horror project to get a movie deal. Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment and Amazon MGM Studios have reportedly nailed down the film rights to the viral YouTube series, apparently following a bidding war between 11 different movie studios.
Spielberg isn’t helming the adaptation; instead, similar to The Backrooms which was directed by Kane Parsons who created the YouTube phenomenon, Mandela Catalogue creator Alex Kister is set to direct. The movie will feature a screenplay from Kister and Tyler Clifton.
Debuting in 2021, The Mandela Catalogue, which now has over 100 million views on YouTube, tells the story of shape-shifting beings invading the fictional locale of Mandela County, Wisconsin.
Meanwhile, on July 1, The Hollywood Reporter reported that Warner Bros. Pictures has grabbed the film rights to Siren Head, an online viral internet monster created by creature designer Trevor Henderson. The monster is a large, very tall, thin figure with two big sirens that act as its head. WB got Siren Head after winning a bidding war involving five studios.
One of the big reasons WB and other studios were so interested in grabbing up the Siren Head project was not just because of Backrooms fever, but also because Weapons director Zach Cregger, who is becoming the biggest name in horror right now, is involved with Siren Head. He’s writing the script with Brian Duffield, with the plan being for Duffield to direct the flick.
It was previously reported that, after Backrooms blew up big, at least one Hollywood studio has started digging through Reddit in a search for more lucrative online source material. So it makes sense we are seeing big names like Spielberg and studios like WB buy up spooky web content so rapidly.
With younger audience members less likely than ever to see big movies from previously reliable franchises like Star Wars and the MCU, movie studios are scrambling to figure out how to get their money. And it seems Backrooms has become the blueprint. Buy up a creepy, already established online meme or series, give the creator some money, and roll the dice that they end up making something special that attracts millions of moviegoers.