Everyone can agree on Patient Zero. Joker: Folie à Deux. The hotly anticipated sequel starring a beloved comic book-villain seemed destined for success. Its star-studded cast arrived at the Venice Film Festival in 2024 to sparkling fanfare.

And then the reviews started coming out.

Todd Phillips’ first Joker had premiered at Venice in 2019, sparking awards buzz for Joaquin Phoenix, with some mixed reviews, and heated debate about its violence and darker themes. Audiences flocked to cinemas anyway, making it the first R-rated film to pass a billion dollars at the box office. The sequel was expected to perform just as well.

Instead it bombed spectacularly.

The consensus was that harsh festival critics killed it before it could reach “real” audiences. Disney had felt something similar the year before with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, whose rotten post-Cannes score cooled audiences before later reviews could lift it into fresh territory.

Looking beyond giant IP sequels, Eddington and One Battle After Another offer another interesting case study. Eddington, released by A24, is of course a smaller movie in terms of budget. Reportedly, it’s in the $35 million dollar range compared to the $130-170 million dollars that Warner Brothers put into One Battle After Another (not counting marketing spend). However they are both R-rated, heightened dramas from indie darlings (Ari Aster and Paul Thomas Anderson) grappling with the political landscape and conspiracy theories that infuse US society today.

One Battle After Another went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture while Eddington kind of, well, fizzled.

Eddington generated a lot of buzz before its premiere in Cannes and was ‘hotly anticipated’ when A24 brought it to the EFM in advance of its premiere. Pedro Pascal was, at the time, the internet’s favorite boyfriend. But post-premiere the response was best described as ‘muted’. So the two months leading up to the US theatrical release, when general audiences were actually able to see it, was dogged by bad vibes. Warner Brothers opted instead to go directly to theatrical with One Battle After Another, premiering in September and launching the film into a carefully curated awards season push.

The conclusion is that by leaning into embargoed reviews and courting influencers, studios can set their films up for a more robust launch that insulates it from potential bad takes. If there is no guaranteed box-office bump and you don’t need the festival clout to garner awards buzz, then what is the upside for a studio film to show up on the Croisette? One Battle After Another and Sinners showed that the festivals are not the only arbiters of cultural status these days. In a world where there is direct access to audiences through social media and viral moments can be manufactured, as long as you have the money to spend, a fancy red carpet is not the only spectacle that matters.

However, Hollywood departing is not necessarily bad news. Festivals are crucial places for indie films to access international audiences and build momentum, see Anora, Sentimental Value or The Secret Agent as just a few examples. In this age of audio-visual glut, curation is ever more important. Audiences are looking for guides through the cacophony and that is the role festivals can continue to play to stay relevant. The numbers show that audiences at film festivals are still growing and both Berlin and Göteborg hit new records for attendance in 2026. For many independent films, the festival run may be their most important audience window. Yet there is still surprisingly little data on how individual titles actually perform at festivals. That leaves a major blind spot in terms of how films perform. But that’s a discussion for another time. Fewer Hollywood studios taking up space at festivals could open up for other voices to break through.

As Johanna put it in this year’s Nostradamus report “as an industry we enjoy stories more than we do numbers, regularly projecting dramatic narratives of hope and despair onto some minor surprise hit or disappointing opening weekend.” Hollywood skips Berlin and Cannes this year? The end of the major blockbuster festival moment forever. What happens if there is even just one Hollywood blockbuster at any of the major festivals next year? Will that negate this truth or just replace it with a new one? Is 2026 the start of a new trend, or just a blip? Time will have to tell. Chasing an overarching lesson from individual moments is difficult and yet we are tempted to do it all the time.

It is also worth noting that this is all happening at a time when consolidation is sweeping Hollywood. Soon one family, the Ellisons, will likely be in control of not only Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery but also several major networks and a big share of TikTok. Realistically, they won’t even have to go outside of their own company in order to access millions. And, with their ties to the Trump administration, there is a real fear of what their politics could do to the industry.

Perhaps the bigger question is not if Hollywood studios will ever come back to festivals, but rather how can the top festivals turn their absence into an opportunity to redefine their own purpose?

If you want to dig deeper:

‘Hollywood Is Trading Cannes’ Uncertainty for Controlled Hype’

‘Did Cannes Just Confirm Hollywood Studios’ Growing Fear of Film Festivals?’

‘Why are the studios ghosting film festivals?’

The last issue of this newsletter dug into the emerging YouTube-to-Film-Industry pipeline and now we have some impressive receipts to show for it. One of the films we discussed was Kane Parson’s Backrooms. The film, released by A24, has now hit theaters in the US and started rolling out around the world. Simultaneously, Obsession by fellow YouTuber Curry Barker continues its theatrical run in the US for the third week. Together they are, believe it or not, dominating the box-office - beating out the latest Star Wars installment. Backrooms has so far taken in $118 million worldwide, significantly outperforming its predicted debut and making this A24’s highest grossing opening weekend ever and Kane Parsons the youngest filmmaker to top the box office charts. Meanwhile, Obsession continues to increase its take for the third week, up another 10% after its second week bump of 39%, showing just how strong the word of mouth is for that film. According to Focus, its distributor this is the first film to achieve this week three increase feat since ET in 1982.

One of the major themes in this year’s Nostradamus report is how the creator economy and the traditional business are converging. Unlike the success of Markiplier’s Iron Lung earlier this year, Backrooms and Obsession are examples of the industry successfully absorbing talent from the creator class, rather than them going at it alone. All three projects - not to mention the multiple TV-like shows on YouTube that are submitting for Primetime Emmy consideration - seem to indicate that 2026 might be seen as a bit of a watershed year. If you want to dig deeper into this, make sure you check out chapter three of the report.

Further listening:

The Rest is Entertainment: ‘Backrooms’: Has YouTube Just Saved Hollywood

The Big Picture: ‘Backrooms’ Is the Future of Movies, With Kane Parsons!

The Town: Peter Chernin on ‘Backrooms’ and Where the Smart Money Is Going in Hollywood

Annually commissioned by the Göteborg Film Festival since 2013, the Nostradamus Report analyses and forecasts the near future of the audiovisual industries through research and interviews with leading industry experts.

The 2026 report captures an industry navigating overlapping upheavals. Film, television, streaming, and creator media are no longer separate lanes but parts of one connected ecosystem. TV drama contracts, short-form scripted video is surging, and feature film production volumes are increasingly unsustainable. Starting out online now offers viable paths both into our industries and to independent creator careers, and many talents refuse to choose. The logic of the New Content Economy increasingly describes sustainable business models for all forms of IP – popular storytelling and fan creativity both sustain long-term value and demand serious attention. At the centre of this transformation sits one urgent question: whose definitions of value and success shape our art, industry, and aspirations?

“To the traditional film and TV industries, things like the creator ecosystem or the positive qualities of vertical video used to feel really abstract. But in the last year, creator-led theatrical features and the microdrama surge have finally made it click.” Johanna Koljonen says.

“What we’re still struggling with is understanding how this media ecosystem works, especially around our content, and this year’s Nostradamus report updates that map.”

Key insights from the 2026 Report:

• Projections
  With global systems in upheaval and media power concentrating into fewer hands, navigating the road ahead requires grounding ourselves in observable facts rather than projecting our fears onto the sector’s map.

• The Situation
  TV drama production is settling at around 75% of its peak, while feature film output hits records and micro-dramas boom. The boundaries between film, television, streaming, and online video are dissolving.

• Creators and Influencers as Film Professionals
  Scripted online content has been a path into film and TV for over 15 years, yet industry prejudice against creators continues to block recruitment pipelines and obscure how our ecosystem already works.

• Traditional Work in the New Content Economy
  The creator business model, built on direct audience relationships and diversified revenue, increasingly applies to all IP, opening real possibilities for work that relies less on traditional funding.

• Reckoning With the Popular
  The film industry’s tendency to equate the popular with the trivial draws the wrong lessons from unexpected successes and stands between our work and audiences.

• Fans and Creators as Creative Partners
  Creator, fan, and audience-community production now play a central role in launching titles, sustaining IP value, developing talent, expanding storyworlds, and reshaping traditional media’s relationship with online creativity.

• Reimagining Success
  From measuring impact over box office to ensuring the whole ecosystem can thrive, the report asks what success should mean – for institutions, companies, and the individual people who make this industry work.

Download the report

Indie studio A24 recently dropped the trailer for the upcoming horror film Backrooms, based on the internet phenomenon that once originated on the infamous forum 4chan. Kane Parsons, now 20, turned that online folktale into a successful series of YouTube shorts. The first video in the series, titled The Backrooms (Found Footage), was uploaded in 2022 and has over 70 million views on his channel to date. The series as a whole has amassed almost 200 million views and caught the attention of A24, making Parsons the youngest director that the studio has ever worked with.

The film industry has for a long time found talent on YouTube but often what that means is that the filmmaker then steps away from their role as an online video creator. For example, the director duo Danny and Michael Philippou behind horror hits Talk To Me (also A24) and Bring Her Back started off as content creators under the name RackRacka. Notably, the last video RackaRacka uploaded was about Talk To Me releasing worldwide. They entered the industry and do not seem to be looking back to their origins in the creator economy. Traditional thinking tends to view online video as the farm league: a place where you learn, grow, and will then leave behind.

It will be interesting to see how Backrooms performs as a feature film and what Parsons will do with the industry seal of approval. Can that clout be leveraged back into his own work as an online creator, growing his 3 million subscribers on YouTube? Or will he take this as an opportunity to leave the creator economy behind and focus entirely on the traditional film industry? Is it possible to somehow keep working in both worlds? Up-and-coming filmmakers and creators today need to ask themselves what they gain, and what they lose, from following these different creative paths.

“Some go on to develop their one-man-bands or friend groups into successful production companies, or to leverage the audience they’ve built into projects with the established industry. Many don’t even attempt to, which from a business perspective may seem incomprehensible. But the vast majority of people in the film industry were never going to own points in a project or shares in a company, and they would always be working long hours with little or no job security. In that light, an acceptable income, full creative control, and complete ownership of one’s creations starts to look like a pretty good life.” - From Nostradamus Report 2021 “Transforming Storytelling Together”, Johanna Koljonen.

On the other side of this divide is feature film Iron Lung, adapted from an indie game with the same name, that came out earlier this year. This is the debut feature directed and written by Mark Fischbach, known on YouTube as Markiplier. Fischbach has built a huge online following over ten years through gaming videos, comedy and increasingly more ambitious work. Iron Lung was self-financed and self-distributed. The film grossed $18 million at the US box-office for its opening weekend, impressive for a film with a budget of about $3 million. After a big fan-led push, the film opened on thousands of screens around the world and even beat out Sam Raimi’s Send Help in terms of actual tickets sold in the US (Send Help grossed more due to higher ticket prices).

Success is of course not a given, there are other YouTubers who have tried to leverage their online audience for a film project and not succeeded. What Iron Lung shows is how a well-established creator - who knows his audience well - can use that relationship to build a successful cinema release. The key is that the creator fully embraces and understands their unique audience and takes their credibility with that audience seriously. While Backrooms is an example of how the traditional industry finds and absorbs both the talent and the IP from the creator economy, Iron Lung shows what it can look like when creators don’t court the traditional industry.

Which brings to mind the success of the comedic chat show Chicken Shop Date, created by Amelia Dimoldenberg over a decade ago. She has refused to sell the format because she understands that there is power in holding on to her own IP. When she first started, the industry did not recognize the potential of her work. Now that it is successful, she does not need the industry to keep it going and growing. Rather, the industry needs her – she was The Academy’s official red carpet correspondent at the Oscars for the third time this year. Telling for an institution that has been struggling to keep audiences tuned in.

The upcoming Nostradamus report will continue to explore the evolving intersection between the creator economy and the traditional film and TV industry. For now, a question we all might want to consider is this: what does it mean for the industry if the creator economy becomes less of a pipeline and more of its own ecosystem of ambitious filmmaking that has stopped looking for the approval of traditional gatekeepers?

If you want to dig deeper:

• “How A24s liminal horror movie Backrooms was born from the Internet” (Esquire)

• Interview with Markiplier on The Town podcast

• ‘Chicken Shop Date’: $6,000-an-Ep. & Turning the Tables on TV (The Ankler)

“In very few years, the pay TV set-top boxes are gone, and all small screen content will be represented by streaming icons on a single device. We will probably call it all “television”. The whole metaphor of chronological “windows” will be increasingly incomprehensible to consumers, who found it difficult to grasp even when the windows were represented by physical media or separate remote controls. Now it will all be one thing or divided into broad conceptual categories of “free”, “subscription” and “transactional”. This is the context in which feature films too will eventually find the majority of their audience.” (Nostradamus Report 2018)

Already in 2015, one of the interviewees in the Nostradamus report predicted that within five years likely 75% of all viewing would be streaming for people under 40s as opposed to linear television. By 2018 there was a strong sense from several interviewees that SVOD would soon eclipse TV entirely.

Broadly, the predictions hold up. Linear TV still exists, but streaming is now the norm. In the US, streaming surpassed both broadcast and cable TV viewership in all ages in mid-2025.

More surprising though is the paradigm shift away from traditional TV content altogether.

In 2026 media consumption means not just streaming TV and film but also includes microdramas and creator-driven content on social media. Social media itself has moved away from social and is increasingly used as distribution for professional and semi-professional video content. In the US, reports show that viewers spend more time watching vertical video on their phones than they do watching the major streamers on their mobile devices. Even on TVs themselves, YouTube now outperforms all other streamers and does not seem to be slowing down yet. The conversation about the ideal theatrical windows continues though and there seems to be indications that show that a successful cinema release does help a film find its streaming audience as well.

So yes, streaming won. But the deeper Nostradamus flashback is this: linear TV was not simply replaced by “television on demand”. It was taken over by a much bigger and more fragmented video ecosystem than most of us could even imagine.