Warner Bros. Motion Picture Co-Chair Michael De Luca used a conference appearance Saturday to explain why two films directed by YouTube creators are dominating the box office right now.
Speaking at the Produced By conference hosted by the Producers Guild of America on the Universal Studios lot, De Luca pointed to A24's Backrooms, directed by Kane Parsons, and Focus Features' Obsession, directed by Curry Barker, as examples of a new wave of filmmakers who arrive at the theater with an audience already built in. Backrooms opened to between $85 million and $88 million at the North American box office, the biggest opening in A24's history. Obsession cleared $106 million domestically, a record for Focus Features, according to Deadline.
"They hone their craft online. Kane worked on Backrooms for five years," De Luca said. "These filmmakers are in a dialogue with their audience from the word 'Go'. Their subscribers have direct input in each iteration of these things."
He added, "By the time you get to the movie, they've had a billion test screenings."
De Luca drew a comparison to earlier moments when outside forces reshaped the film industry. He likened the YouTube generation of directors to the indie boom of the 1980s, when the rise of home video created the financial conditions for companies like New Line Cinema, Cannon Pictures, and Vestron to emerge. That era, he said, came about partly because the major studios were out of step with audiences, just as lower-budget films like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider had outpaced expensive studio musicals in the late 1960s.
"In that first wave of independent companies in the '80s, fueled by the VHS boom you had Cannon [Pictures] and Vestron and New Line and New World — that whole explosion of independent companies," De Luca told producer Sara Murphy, who produced Warner Bros.' Oscar-winning 2025 drama One Battle After Another with director Paul Thomas Anderson.
De Luca also addressed the risks of cutting development budgets for original material. "The North Star [is] the relentless pursuit of new talent and fresh voices, and a way to refresh the pipeline, because if you don't look for new voices and new talent, and you rely on what's worked before, innovation dies within your organization," he said. "If you cut it too deep, your pipeline dries up and you don't have enough movies."
He described his own career as starting with an internship at New Line Cinema and rising to head of production at age 27. He recalled that his first slate in 1993 included The Mask and Dumb and Dumber, followed by Seven. "We didn't get to my problem years until later with 'The Long Kiss Goodnight' and 'The Island of Dr. Moreau,'" he said.
De Luca also touched on digital marketing, crediting the creator community with amplifying the Barbie campaign and noting that Tom Cruise posting a photo with tickets to both Barbie and Oppenheimer helped fuel what became known as the Barbenheimer effect. He said Warner's regret over the Oppenheimer situation was pointed: "our popcorn experiment cost the studio Chris Nolan. We could have been at the Oscars with both Oppenheimer and Barbie."
On the subject of filmmaker relationships, De Luca said, "You can't fumble these balls," describing directors as the real intellectual property, not the content they produce.
