YouTube beats Hollywood at the box office, now it’s waiting for it at the Oscars.

The American box office has just sent an unmistakable message: old Hollywood may still own the brands, but it no longer necessarily controls where desire begins. In the weekend when Backrooms and Obsession outperformed The Mandalorian and Grogu, it was not only Star Wars that lost, but the last remnants of a tradition in which the studio decided, the audience received, and the movie theater consecrated.

Backrooms, directed by twenty-year-old Kane Parsons and born from a YouTube series inspired by the creepypasta of the same name, opened with around $81 million in North America and $118 million worldwide, becoming a record for A24. Obsession, directed by Curry Barker, another author who grew up on YouTube, continued its run to roughly $148 million globally, while The Mandalorian and Grogu slipped to third place in its second weekend.

And it is no small detail that YouTube itself is preparing to become the global home of the Oscars from 2029: even the ritual that, for a century, certified the prestige of old Hollywood will end up on a YouTube-colored red carpet.

The new idea of intellectual property is born before the industry

Backrooms is now 100% IP, except that it was not born in a Burbank meeting room, but from a meme, from an internet mythology, from a video series, from a community that had already learned its atmosphere, rules and language before the film even existed.

Obsession follows the same trajectory, though it does not come from an already mythic brand, but from an author shaped inside the language of the platform. Curry Barker built an audience, rhythm, recognizability and trust long before Hollywood could turn him into a “project”.

For decades, studios thought they controlled cinema because they controlled catalogs, franchises, theatrical windows, marketing and distribution. The result? A long agony of remakes, reboots, sequels and prequels, expanded universes squeezed to the last drop, and an industry convinced that repackaging the past was enough to keep owning the future.

Today the production chain has shifted: the internet creates the audience, algorithms measure desire, and the theater monetizes the phenomenon once it has already exploded.

YouTube is a nursery and a market test, but deep down it uses cinema to clean up its algorithm and reputation

YouTube claims first place in streaming watch time in the United States thanks also, and above all, to Shorts, which averages 200 billion daily views.

Neal Mohan, in YouTube’s 2026 letter, proudly states that creators are both the new stars and the new studios. Too bad many of those “new stars” have seen video revenues shrink, squeezed by algorithm changes, advertising saturation, AI content and platforms increasingly hungry for retention.

But the cinematic success of web-born IP does not only serve to prove that YouTube can generate new stars. It also serves to clean up the public image of an ecosystem that in recent years has filled up with AI slop, synthetic videos, clones, automated formats and serial content designed to trick the algorithm.

YouTube’s homepage, especially after the explosion of Shorts, has become a foreign territory compared with the platform many of us still remember, and Backrooms and Obsession perhaps offer Google a much more convenient narrative: that of a global nursery for authors and intellectual property. Yet paradoxically, it is already exploiting the first forms of nostalgia for the old YouTube community.

The ones truly surviving are those who managed to make the leap out of YouTube: merchandising, tours, podcasts, subscriptions, personal brands, books, cinema. In other words, Google is showing Hollywood both muscle and crystal balls, celebrating creators as the future of the industry precisely while proving that, to truly become an industry, they can no longer remain only YouTube creators.

Likeness and AI: whoever owns the face owns the next cast

The other piece is control over identity. YouTube is expanding its likeness detection system, a tool that allows creators to identify videos in which their face appears altered or generated by AI. To activate it, verification, an ID document and a video selfie are required; YouTube specifies that the system is aimed at recognizing enrolled creators and that it is also working on audio expansion in 2026.

Deepfake protection, then. But the industrial substance is that Google, like the other major platforms, is building the infrastructure of personal rights in the synthetic era. Faces, voices, templates, consent, removals, remixes, watermarks, AI disclosure. In the same package, YouTube brings Ask YouTube, Gemini Omni in Shorts remixes, AI tools to transform videos and generate new controlled versions of content.

Studios have always managed stars, agents, contracts and image rights; the next cinema will pass through those who certify a face, authorize a likeness, distribute a remix, and decide what is synthetic and what is not. With this new power over identity, the ground is also being prepared for synthetic actors, virtual stars, generated characters, posthumous presences and modular casts.

Google TV and microdrama are already trying to control the entry point

Then there is the living room. Google TV / Android TV OS has surpassed 300 million active devices, and Gemini has been introduced as a conversational assistant — just as JioHotstar and OpenAI had already done months earlier in India — to search for films and series, get summaries, ask for recommendations in natural language and reach a title even from vague memories, moods or confused preferences.

The viewer no longer enters the catalog through the poster, the trailer, the review, the homepage or the goldfish paralysis: they enter by talking to an artificial intelligence, and Google is the point where the user’s desire is translated into choice. In this scenario, microdrama is not a side detail.

It is the perfect format for a Big Tech company that wants to test stories quickly, measure reactions, localize content, monetize attention and identify intellectual properties before they become too expensive. “Short videos for you” on YouTube’s homepage and the “Short-form drama” format on Google TV will be the next experiments in that direction.

Google is not simply pushing YouTube creators out of the feed and into Google TV; it is building a possible path and a lightweight industrial chain: short episodes, aggressive pacing, episode-by-episode monetization, AI localization, rapid production, continuous audience testing. The creator who works can be transformed into a format, the format into a series, the series into intellectual property, the intellectual property into a tradable asset.

And if the creator does not work, the asset will work for someone else.

Because Hollywood must still be able to tell stories that the public wants to hear: it can still make blockbusters, own catalogs and mobilize enormous capital, but cultural command has shifted toward those who control infrastructure, data, interfaces, digital identities and daily habits.

Engagement is no longer only viewing, commenting, liking or sharing: it has also become a creative gesture, or at least the illusion of a creative gesture. The YouTube community, for better or worse, has often been more effective than Hollywood at recycling catchphrases, franchises, characters and imaginaries: fan-made trailers, alternative edits, expanded lore, theories, amateur remakes, animations, mash-ups, parodies, derivative universes.

Where studios turned the past into an industrial procedure, the internet turned it into a collective game. Now AI is taking this dynamic to the next level, and every user is being sold the idea that they can become an author, director, editor, screenwriter, world-builder — not necessarily to produce masterpieces, but to guarantee the platform the threshold of attention it needs.

And since Hollywood has lost part of its ability to generate desire, Google promises to turn the viewer into a permanent collaborator. Or at least to make them believe they are one, until something emerges that is close enough to an idea that can be packaged, sold and finally called new cinema.