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The Rest Is Entertainment

Backrooms: Has YouTube Just Saved Hollywood?

01 Jun 2026

Transcription

Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?

0.031 - 13.072 Marina Hyde

The rest is entertainment is presented by Octopus Energy. Now, the moment someone becomes properly famous, they stop traveling as a person and they start traveling as a situation. And yes, I am talking about the world of entourages.

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13.092 - 20.284 Richard Osman

It's amazing. Anytime you do a TV show when someone properly famous comes on, you can just have a spread bet as to how many people they're going to bring with them.

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20.264 - 30.384 Marina Hyde

Most people don't actually need a bodyguard and a fixer and a straw lady. But not having to start from scratch every single time you get in contact with someone is actually undeniably appealing.

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30.404 - 50.158 Richard Osman

So Octopus Energy, you know, anytime you ever ring any company, you start from scratch right from the beginning again. With Octopus Energy, they recognize your number. And that goes through to a very, very small team of around 10 people who are there to deal with you. So you'll almost certainly be dealing with someone who you've dealt with before.

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50.639 - 54.305 Richard Osman

That's the Octopus Energy entourage that they've built around you.

54.505 - 67.222 Marina Hyde

A great satisfaction not having to tell your story for new every single time, which I think most major celebrities also feel. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest Is Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde.

67.262 - 70.308 Richard Osman

And me, Richard Osman. Good day to everybody. Good day, Marina.

70.328 - 71.369 Marina Hyde

Hello, Richard. How are you?

71.51 - 82.789 Richard Osman

I'm not too bad. We're going to be talking to Steven Spielberg this week, so we're still looking for questions. If you want to send your questions to therestisentertainment at goalhanger.com, we would love to hear them. We'll put them to Spielberg. But how's your week been?

Chapter 2: Who is Kane Parsons and why is he significant in Hollywood?

178.772 - 181.98 Richard Osman

Why has it been so successful? And what does that mean?

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182.028 - 188.316 Marina Hyde

Okay, well, this is an A24 movie. It's actually A24's biggest opening now of all time.

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188.416 - 190.019 Richard Osman

It's going to be their biggest movie by a long time.

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190.039 - 206.28 Marina Hyde

Yeah, it's the second biggest horror opening of all time, only after Stephen King's It. It stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renata Reincevain. It's directed and created by a guy called Kane Parsons. And this is where it gets interesting. This is where it gets interesting. By the way, he's 20.

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206.26 - 226.899 Marina Hyde

He is not only the youngest director ever to have been given a studio film, so beating people like Brian De Palma or Sam Wells, he is the youngest director ever to have a number one film. He is an unbelievable YouTube native and he was called Kane Pixels on YouTube and he made lots and lots of interesting things, including music. He co-creates the score for this film.

227.399 - 236.267 Marina Hyde

And one of the things that he made was called The Backrooms Found Footage when he was 16. It's a sort of nine minute horror short and it went by

236.247 - 240.113 Richard Osman

And it's based off a single still posted on the internet, isn't it?

240.153 - 253.355 Marina Hyde

Well, what was the original Backrooms? The original Backrooms is there was an internet sort of fascination with liminal spaces, which I suppose are sort of empty spaces, sometimes transitional spaces, abandoned spaces, strangely purposeless.

253.375 - 258.323 Richard Osman

We all love that sort of stuff. Like you'll open a little iron door in a tube station and wonder what's behind it.

Chapter 3: What controversies surround Tom Hardy's role in Mobland?

351.704 - 372.894 Marina Hyde

And people expanded this whole, it became this whole universe and people were posting their own sort of liminal spaces. It really took off in about, in the sort of early 2020s, this particular thing. And the idea of these kind of creepy liminal spaces. yet when we can go anywhere. And there had been a website that I'd remembered from, honestly, 25 years ago called UK Entrances to Hell.

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373.315 - 391.264 Marina Hyde

And I had to check this weekend, is it still there? Go online and it's like this incredibly basic website and you'll see what someone's done. They just, people kept adding weird doorways or blocked in things and they give them names and they say that they're entrances to hell. So there's a sort of element of that, like everyone can join in, everyone can whatever. But

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391.244 - 404.11 Marina Hyde

It became a sort of subculture of popular imagination and Cain Parsons, he's like extremely online, said he's interested in why people are drawn to that because it's kind of like you've been there before. Like he calls it a tainted nostalgia or a type of purgatory.

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Chapter 4: What backlash is Belle Burden facing for her memoir Strangers?

404.13 - 408.679 Richard Osman

By the way, he's like 16 when he's starting off with this. So where he's getting tainted nostalgia from.

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408.659 - 430.62 Marina Hyde

But yeah, exactly. But you can see how influential it is because Dan Erickson, who created severance, and if you've seen severance and you haven't seen the backrooms, you'll understand that idea of these kind of corridors, weird office space, whatever it is. And Dan Erickson says that the internet sort of subculture of the backrooms really influenced severance.

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430.66 - 431.562 Richard Osman

Yeah, I mean, you can see severance.

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431.542 - 442.28 Marina Hyde

You can see. But also those things are influenced by kind of our cultural memories of things like The Shining, which is full of corridors. Again, there's a lot of sort of weird space in that film.

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442.3 - 451.255 Richard Osman

The artist Mike Nelson used to just fill sort of whole rooms with just so you've been an unusual weird back room that wasn't quite right. Things are slightly off.

451.235 - 460.159 Marina Hyde

Lots of people created things based on this idea. And his nine-minute short, though, went the sort of most viral. He was offered a deal by A24.

460.56 - 462.465 Richard Osman

His shorts, by the way, were digital animation.

462.505 - 480.397 Marina Hyde

Yes. Yeah, he used like Blender and something else to kind of create it. It's amazing, yeah. And now they've built it and they've built like 33,000 square foot of these sets. And it's all, you know, they've realized it and it's all a practical set. But there is obviously some CGI and what have you. But obviously so many people have gone. They've spent very little on the marketing.

480.417 - 497.261 Marina Hyde

They've spent about 10 million, but they've done it all in the native areas where this thing sprung from. So when I went on Friday, I went to the earliest possible screening I could find, which was at 3.45 on a Friday. The cinema was full of, I would say, 18 to 25-year-olds. Same. like, obsessed, really wanting to see it.

Chapter 5: How did Backrooms achieve box office success against expectations?

561.462 - 581.945 Marina Hyde

And it's a horror. Again, it's a horror. It's part of the sort of YouTube to cinema pipeline that obviously includes Cain Parsons. But we talked about Markiplier who made that film Iron Lung, which I think actually was quite expensive by some standards. It was $3 million. It made $51 million. Hayley Boston, who does the TV show for Netflix called Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen.

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582.165 - 584.888 Richard Osman

The Phillippe brothers in Australia. There's lots of good examples.

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584.868 - 594.437 Marina Hyde

Hayley Boston had only ever been on a film, on a set once, on sort of two-week placement as a runner. She is now the showrunner of a massive Netflix show.

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594.797 - 608.23 Richard Osman

The thing I love most about Cain Parsons, he said, well, I didn't really watch films because why would I? Because I had all the entertainment I needed. I saw it, I think it was in the New Yorker, and he admitted to not watching Blue Velvet. And they'd gone, are you kidding? You haven't watched Blue Velvet? And do you know what?

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608.27 - 613.575 Richard Osman

Right there, right there is the issue about why cinema went wrong and where it has to go next.

613.555 - 632.044 Marina Hyde

It's interesting that lots of them start in the found footage horror genre and they're all really young. One of the things that I think is very interesting about these people is that they massively understand audience. Because if you put things on YouTube, you sadly cannot kid yourself about audience. You understand a lot of things very quickly.

632.064 - 647.038 Richard Osman

Well, it's the Beatles. Playing Hamburg for two years, isn't it? It's night after night after night. You see exactly what works and what doesn't work and why. And they've had, you know, without even thinking about it, it's just what they've been doing in their bedrooms for five, six, seven, eight years. And every single time they see exactly what works and what doesn't.

647.098 - 665.033 Richard Osman

And that's not, by the way, a sort of cynical argument. I, it is actually, if you're a creative person at all, getting that kind of feedback is incredibly instructive sometimes because you're still being your creative self. You're just going, oh, do you know what? I won't make that single mistake though. Or I'll take the fact that they liked that and I'm going to twist it in this direction.

665.313 - 671.625 Marina Hyde

So I think a lot of these things they built, you know, it's really interesting. Kane Parsons was still making backroom stuff for YouTube.

Chapter 6: What impact do Gen-Z filmmakers have on the film industry?

1662.991 - 1665.553 Richard Osman

And the same with it, if you've got Pierce and Helen there as well, you're delighted.

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1665.593 - 1673.28 Marina Hyde

But you want to keep him in your show if you're Paramount, because they need these big shows that go on and on and on. Exactly that. And you build up big libraries, as they did with Yellowstone.

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1673.3 - 1687.473 Richard Osman

So you think, wow, you must have done something really, really awful. When the news first came out, it said that he'd definitely been fired. Now, of course, everyone's slightly backtracking, going, oh, we're going to sit around a table and do this, that, or the other. So maybe it was just a warning shot. Because it doesn't happen very often that actors get replaced.

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1687.993 - 1693.98 Richard Osman

Charlie Sheen, when he got replaced on Two and a Half Men, I mean, the stuff he had to do, to get fired was completely insane.

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1694.541 - 1710.065 Marina Hyde

But you can see that on another Paramount show, look what happened on Yellowstone, eventually Taylor Sheridan, Kevin Costner, again, you know, I'm just wondering about that hormone, but there was so much butting of heads that he wasn't there for the end, Kevin Costner.

1710.225 - 1719.58 Richard Osman

Chevy Chase on Community, again, I mean, you have to really, really do, I mean, always read about Community, I think that was a troubled setting for lots and lots of different ways, but

1719.56 - 1722.127 Marina Hyde

And I love the show so much. It's amazing what came out of it.

1722.147 - 1739.008 Richard Osman

Yeah, it really is amazing. Isaiah Washington and Patrick Dempsey on Grey's Anatomy. I mean, any of these shows that are ensembles, because that's the thing with actors, is I think it's quite hard for them, if they've got something that's an enormous success. It's quite hard for them to accept that success might not be down to them.

1739.028 - 1760.333 Richard Osman

I think Katherine Hegel was nominated for an Emmy for Grey's Anatomy, and she publicly asked to have her name removed because the work she had been given to do wasn't good enough. She's saying to Shonda Rhimes, no, this is tat. She did later admit that that was slightly unclassy. But yeah, it's quite hard. Roseanne Barr is another one that they, you know,

Chapter 7: What are the implications of the YouTube-to-cinema pipeline?

1845.413 - 1865.321 Richard Osman

from Valerie and replaced her with someone else and called it Valerie's Family. That's bad. And also Monk, which is one of my favorite shows of all time, his assistant in the first few seasons disappears mid-season, completely disappears and is replaced. And she was amazing. And then you look it up, you go, oh, it would have been a huge hit. So all the male actors got a raise and she didn't.

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1865.982 - 1880.492 Richard Osman

So she asked for one and they fired her. So there you go. But again, that's... That's showbiz. That is showbiz, yeah. Well, showbiz if you're a woman, for sure. Talking of women, how's that for a segue?

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1880.793 - 1881.173 Marina Hyde

I love it.

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1881.914 - 1883.096 Richard Osman

Belle Burden, tell us about Belle.

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1883.116 - 1897.936 Marina Hyde

Right. Belle Burden is the author of a book called Strangers, a memoir of her sort of disintegrated marriage. Now, it's been an absolute monster hit since it came out earlier this year. It's already going to be adapted as a film for Netflix and Gwyneth Paltrow's... Of course she is.

1897.956 - 1898.416 Kane Parsons

Yeah.

1898.476 - 1912.234 Marina Hyde

I know she sort of plays just sort of meta versions. Since her on retirement from acting, she's sort of playing ironic meta versions of herself as far as I can see. After that Marty Supreme role, which was sort of hilarious. Anyway, it is the story of an unexpected marriage split.

1912.334 - 1927.355 Marina Hyde

If you haven't read it, I've actually just read the magazine Serialization because I don't particularly read bullets like this. But it's a... I thought you were going to say I don't particularly read books. No, I don't. I was going to say that's a kind of a... It's a story of an unexpected marriage, but it's unexpected on her part. A true story, by the way. A true story, yeah.

1927.736 - 1938.673 Marina Hyde

He's a hedge funder. She is a stay-at-home mother. And during the pandemic, they decide to move from their New York place for lockdown, and they go to their waterfront house in Martha's Vineyard.

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