[orig to FB, by Pier Luigi Sacco]
Two films land in American cinemas within a week of each other this May.
One: The Mandalorian and Grogu. Budget around $165m. A property born in 1977, owned by Disney, extended through five decades of corporate stewardship, returning to the big screen after a six-year absence. The Economist last week called it the moment Star Wars went “from space opera to soap opera.”
The other: Backrooms. Directed by Kane Parsons — twenty years old. At sixteen, he began uploading found-footage shorts to YouTube using free Blender software, building on a 2019 4chan post that consisted of a single image and a one-line caption. A24 picked it up; James Wan is producing.
Same week. Same medium. Opposite production logics.
The Economist’s diagnosis of Disney’s predicament is right, but partial. The cultural industry, lavishly equipped with generative tools, capital, and distribution, has lost the capacity to manufacture genuinely new narrative universes. It can only refurbish ones it already owns. The Star Wars saga is a 49-year-old idea on increasingly elaborate life support.
Meanwhile, the most vital cosmologies of the last decade (the Backrooms, the SCP Foundation, analog horror, the whole liminal-space aesthetic) have emerged from distributed, anonymous, often teenage authorship. No greenlight committees. No franchise bibles. No earnings calls. Just open-ended worldbuilding by thousands of contributors who could afford to fail because nothing was at stake except attention.
This is not a story about taste. It is a story about generativity.
The industrial logic of contemporary cultural production (IP custodianship, capital markets allergic to subscriber churn, algorithmic greenlighting that rewards the legible past over the speculative future) selects against the kind of risk that makes new universes possible. The bottom-up logic of the open internet inverts every one of those constraints. Costless contribution. No IP gatekeeper. No penalty for failure. A combinatorial worldbuilding capacity no writers’ room can match.
The poetic justice is that Hollywood now has to buy its novelty from the margins it cannot replicate. A24 absorbing the Backrooms signals an industry that has begun outsourcing imagination to its own audience.
The real question, for studios and cultural policymakers alike, is whether the industrial pipeline can learn to commission novelty rather than capture it once it has already happened elsewhere.
Because the Backrooms is not a one-off. It is a working prototype of a different cultural economy.
And it opens one week after the Mandalorian.
[Again, this was written by Pier Luigi Sacco, not me.]