In the 1960s, Hollywood tried to compete with a booming new medium — television — by rolling out bloated spectacles like “Cleopatra,” “The Greatest Story Ever Told” and “Paint Your Wagon.” (The equivalent today would be the manner in which studios, panicked by the skyrocketing popularity of Netflix, TikTok and Fortnite, have churned out big-budget sequels with marathon run times.)
Young audiences in the ’60s were unmoved. But a new generation of filmmakers revived Hollywood with pictures that spoke more directly to the counterculture and its anxieties. Examples include “Easy Rider” (1969), “Mean Streets” (1973) and “American Graffiti” (1973).
No studio has pushed harder to court young audiences by fostering young directors — movies for us, by us — than A24, which was founded in 2012 in New York. A24 started to court Mr. Parsons three years ago, when he was 17, after noticing how his horror-based YouTube videos were resonating among teenagers.
Other young directing talents that A24 has discovered or greatly amplified include Barry Jenkins (“Moonlight”), Ari Aster (“Hereditary”), Benny and Josh Safdie (“Good Time”), Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”), Alex Garland (“Ex Machina”), Sean Baker (“The Florida Project”) and Celine Song (“Past Lives”).
More than 50 percent of “Backrooms” ticket buyers cited A24 as a main reason for going out to see it, according to PostTrak. The movie, which stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, received strong reviews. The plot involves a furniture store owner who discovers a portal into a strange, labyrinthine realm and disappears into it.
For the weekend in North America, “Obsession” was No. 2. “Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu” (Disney) fell off sharply from its opening weekend, landing in a disappointing third place, with about $25 million in ticket sales, for a new domestic total of roughly $137.4 million, according to Comscore, a data firm.
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