A hosts' hangout with Andy and Jo, prompted by a conversation that has been running hot across LinkedIn all week: creator-made films are pulling audiences into cinemas in a way that Hollywood studios haven't managed for years. Backrooms — made by 20-year-old Kane Parsons who taught himself Blender during Covid — and Obsession, made by Cory Barker for under a million dollars, are both seeing successive weeks of audience growth in theatres. The last film to do that was E.T.

The conversation goes beyond the hot takes to ask what's actually driving it. Andy and Jo's argument is that this isn't really about filmmaking — it's about trust, built slowly, over years of showing up for an audience before it ever made commercial sense to do so. The parasocial relationships these creators have with their fans are something no studio can manufacture, and the co-created lore around something like Backrooms means audiences don't just watch the film — they feel they made it. Mr. Beast is the useful counterexample: so big he's effectively become the kind of corporate entity his audience was rooting against.

The episode then pivots to what all of this might mean for kids and teens media specifically — from the structural problem of COPPA preventing younger audiences from participating in the kind of creative sandpits that made Backrooms possible, to whether Roblox game adaptations like 99 Nights in the Forest could replicate the Minecraft movie moment, to the genuinely exciting question of what happens when this generation of creators starts having kids of their own.