The Youth Lab

YOU CAN BUY THE SCREEN. CAN YOU BUY THE HYPE?
From fan-powered films to Hollywood’s most inventive campaigns, what cinema is teaching brands about turning attention into action.

At the start of the year, Markiplier asked his followers to go and ask their local cinemas to show his film. They did. Iron Lung, self-financed and self-distributed, opened on 3,015 North American screens and took $18.2 million in its first weekend.

Then things got bigger. Curry Barker's Obsession, made for $750,000, went on to pass $400 million worldwide. Two weeks after it landed, 20-year-old Kane Parsons' Backrooms opened to $81.5 million, more than triple A24's previous record.

Three YouTubers. Three horror hits. One year. None of it started with a media plan. So who really creates the hype?

THE BOX OFFICE HAS A NEW FRONT ROW

Being seen isn't the same as being unmissable. Leaving the house, paying for a ticket and giving one story two hours of undivided attention is a big ask when there's an endless feed in your pocket.

Yet young people keep saying yes. In the US, Gen Z's average cinema trips rose from 4.9 to 6.1 a year between August 2024 and August 2025. Closer to home, 2026 became the best year for Irish cinema sales since 2019. After a 2025 drop, Irish admission soared to 7.2 million in the first half of 2016 - a 12% year on year jump.

Horror is where youth are showing up loudest. For 2025's biggest horror releases, 18-44s made up 70-75% of audiences, against roughly half for films overall. Backrooms skewed younger still: 86% of its opening-weekend audience was under 35, and 44% was under 21.

So what convinced younger generations these films deserved their time? It wasn't just social media, a genre or a famous face. It was a feeling of being in on something before the lights went down.

HOLLYWOOD'S NEW RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

1. The audience comes first. The film comes second.

Markiplier spent more than a decade building his relationship with viewers before Iron Lung. Kane Parsons' Backrooms lore videos racked up hundreds of millions of YouTube views years before A24 came calling. Warner Bros' Michael De Luca put it simply “these filmmakers were making films for people who had followed their channels for years.” Fandom can't be ordered on demand.

2. Say less.

NEON's Longlegs hid Nicolas Cage, ran coded newspaper ads and set up a hotline that took more than 250,000 calls in 48 hours, then opened to $22.4 million. In an industry obsessed with maximum exposure, holding back became the hook. This is especially true for an audience that is increasingly fluent in lore drops and Reddit theory threads. To them, a clue beats an explanation every time.

3. Make the marketing part of the story.

Focus Features brought Obsession's One Wish Willow toy into the real world, with evolving billboards and a character-led text line that around 70,000 people signed up to. A24 aired a gloriously ropey furniture-store ad for Backrooms, complete with a working fax number. For a digitally-fatigued audience raised online, pre-dot com era relics worked a charm.

It's not just horror. Marty Supreme engaged audiences via an absurd faux marketing meeting starring Timothée Chalamet.

Different tactics, one shared principle: embed marketing into culturally ripe cinematic content.

WHO REALLY CREATES THE HYPE?

Careful calling any of this "organic". Iron Lung came from a creator with an exceptional following. Backrooms had an established mythology, bolstered by the A24 name behind it.Hype can still be a budget line item. Movie makers are just spending it differently.

Still, the people closest to these campaigns are saying something interesting. Regal's Brooks LeBoeuf on Iron Lung: "The fans did the work of what multimillion marketing budgets do." In an interview with Letterboxd, Focus Features chairman Peter Kujawski explained how Curry Barker's direct line to his audience shaped the ideas the studio backed.

While the phenomenon of blurring fiction and promotion isn’t new – The Blair Witch Project did it in 1999 – the speed at which it happens is. Creators are now building communities in public as audiences investigate, remix and share film commentary and content in real time. Fittingly, Obsession sales beat Blair Witch's fourth-weekend record.

On the surface, increased fan participation seems like the driving force bolstering cinematic hits. Strip back a few layers and what’s underneath all this participation are strategic marketers and creatives mastering the art of leaving enough space for curiosity, and enough substance to reward it.

BRAND TAKEOUTS

YOU CAN'T MEDIA-BUY MEANING

The temptation is to copy the execution: a mystery phone number, a strange product, a deliberately terrible ad. Following suit runs the risk of feeling like a gimmick. Here's what's worth taking from cinema success stories instead.

• Find your fandom before you need it. Every one of these hits had an audience before it had a release date. Build relationships with communities and creators long before launch day.
• Give clues, not instructions. Youth enjoy the hunt. Leave gaps worth filling, then reward the people who fill them.
• Make the marketing worth watching. A fake furniture ad, a toy on a billboard, a staged meeting. Each one was entertainment first and advertising second.
• Measure what people do next. A hotline call doesn’t guarantee the sale of a ticket. Track action, not just reach.

The strongest marketing doesn't just occupy a moment in culture. It gives people a reason to step inside the story.

You can buy the screen. You still have to earn the hype.