(2026-06-16) Backrooms Sends Hollywood Running To Reddit For New Ideas

‘Backrooms’ Sends Hollywood Running to Reddit for New Ideas. 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.

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

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.

“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.

As Hollywood appears poised to pivot to digitally native creatives like Parsons and Obsession movie 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.

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.

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.