“People don’t want to just watch anymore. They want to participate,” says Cathy Hackl, describing the future of new IP. She’s pointing at a telling 2026: Netflix’s upcoming Unhinged turns your phone into a controller — flashlight, receiver of in-game calls and texts — while A24’s Backrooms became the studio’s biggest film based on a world its audience had spent years exploring through YouTube videos and games.
Hollywood has always mined other media for its next franchise: comic books (Marvel, Batman), toy lines like Transformers ($5.4B worldwide box office), and video games from Angry Birds ($352M) to Super Mario ($1.36B) to Minecraft ($960M).
The stranger story is on the internet's darker fringe, where horror memes and Gen Z/Alpha "nonsense" are finding their way to Hollywood, oddly, in part through gaming. Slender Man and Five Nights at Freddy's teed this up in years past, with 2026's Backrooms as the latest breakout example. However, what’s interesting and novel about Backrooms is that the IP started as a meme and grew organically through countless creators, until a next-generation standout creator ultimately took it to the next level. Is this a new playbook for the future of emergent, internet-native IP? Let’s break it down.
Checking Into the Backrooms
The Backrooms began in May 2019 as an anonymous 4chan post: a grainy photo of an empty, yellow-carpeted office under buzzing fluorescent lights — with the idea that you could "noclip" out of reality (a gaming term for clipping through a wall) into an endless maze of rooms stalked by entities, with no way out. It became part of the "creepypasta" category — user-generated internet horror folklore that anyone can copy, remix, and extend.
In January 2022, 16-year-old Kane Parsons turned it into a Blair Witch-style YouTube series that drew tens of millions of views. In parallel, creators built hundreds of Backrooms games on Steam and Roblox; the biggest by user count, Apeirophobia, has over 422 million visits on Roblox. Then Hollywood called: A24 optioned Parsons' shorts in February 2023 and released the film in May 2026 to roughly $330 million worldwide on a sub-$10 million budget, A24's biggest launch ever, with Parsons, at 20, the youngest director to top the U.S. box office.
Would A24 have optioned an unsettling photo off 4chan? Of course not. What it bet on was Parsons: a singular, internet-native talent with a proven ability to create for a large audience. But the fandom he tapped into was bigger than any single YouTube channel — or even YouTube itself. Gen Z and Gen Alpha had already walked the Backrooms on Roblox, and the hundreds of millions of gameplay visits kept the world alive between videos, helping the film become a far larger sensation than it may have otherwise been. Digital-native IPs build fandom momentum across platforms, and Roblox in particular is starting to play a role on par with YouTube.
Horrific Recipes for Success
From Slender Man to Backrooms, it has mostly been horror that makes the jump from meme to game to Hollywood. A successful horror concept has a vibe, lore, and rules rather than a fixed character and plot, so anyone can build and remix their own take. It is a more cost-efficient genre to produce for both games and films. The same shareability that spreads a scary meme makes jump-scare reaction videos endlessly rewatchable.
Slender Man, a faceless figure in a dark suit invented by Eric Knudson in 2009 as a submission on the Something Awful forums, went viral through multiple independently developed games (notably SlenderMan: The Arrival and Slender: The Eight Pages) and reaction videos from PewDiePie and Markiplier. It then reached a 2018 Sony film (~$52M on a ~$10M budget, panned at 8% on Rotten Tomatoes). It was arguably the first meme to run the full route: forum post to fan-made games to Hollywood.
Five Nights at Freddy's ran the loop in the other direction: Scott Cawthon built it in 2014 as a low-budget indie game that itself spawned memes and theories through Let's Play footage, grew into a cross-platform hit, and seeded two Blumhouse films that grossed over $500M combined.
What’s notable is that games, memes, and video content increasingly feed one another as the foundation for what becomes popular in today’s online ecosystem. Decentralized fandom builds organic growth — even when the IP isn’t owned by anyone — while standout talent helps take it to the next level.
We continue to see echoes of this pattern in Roblox breakout 99 Nights in the Forest. After amassing 26 billion visits and reaching an all-time peak of 14.2 million concurrent players, the game sparked a competitive bidding war for its film rights, which 20th Century Studios ultimately won. All three of the game's creators signed on as executive producers. Mob Entertainment’s Poppy Playtime — a similar example that began on Steam before blossoming into physical toys and a plethora of Roblox experiences — recently closed a movie deal with Legendary, the producers behind the Five Nights at Freddy's films. In these cases, there is a clear owner of the IP, whether talent on par with Parsons can help them succeed on the big screen remains an open question.
We are also beginning to see examples beyond horror and more in the emerging “brainrot” category that took Gen Alpha by storm. Skibidi Toilet, which began in 2023 as YouTube videos about a war between toilets and "cameramen," racked up 47 million subscribers and 20 billion views. It also experienced an explosion of Skibidi-inspired Roblox games (like Toilet Tower Defense, which passed 6.1 billion visits), leading to its movie rights getting scooped up. Steal a Brainrot — the Roblox experience in which players collect and steal bizarre characters from one another, now up to 70.8 billion visits — got optioned by Story Kitchen. Its source material draws from a meme-driven IP with diffuse, largely open ownership. Of course, optioned movies don’t always make it to the finish line, and we’ll see if they do as the popularity of these IPs lose momentum online (what rises fastest often fades quickly too).
Who Do You Meme?
When a community develops the IP, ownership becomes the sticking point on the road to Hollywood. You can option a creator, but you cannot option a meme.
Slender Man had one identifiable creator, and a film got made. The SCP Foundation, a collaborative-horror wiki from 2007, spun off games whose biggest Roblox entry has over 800 million visits but, tellingly, no film. Backrooms sits in between: A24 couldn't buy the concept, because no one owns the original idea, so it signed Kane Parsons directly and adapted the characters and ideas he contributed to the open IP.
Then there is the platform itself. Roblox owns the platform but not the worlds on it: creators keep their copyright and sell freely. Roblox takes a large cut of on-platform spending — it paid creators over $1 billion last year — and asserts no claim on the IP itself. Like YouTube, Roblox is where culture spreads: memes and ideas inspire creators, creators build worlds, these worlds expand the fan base, and fans deepen the IP.
Related, a UGC platform does three jobs no marketing department can: It hands world-building over to thousands of creators (sometimes for free), enables converting videos fans watch into worlds they play in, and it produces live demand signals (visits and concurrents) that are often more telling than a trailer view count. As a result, “user generated fandom” becomes an organic, growing force that elevates simple memes or IP into deep, lore-filled worlds that millions of people become interested in, setting the foundation for even more creation and success to come.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
It isn't only a gaming phenomenon, either: Hollywood increasingly wants a proven crowd before acquiring adaptation rights, the way the music industry now expects a following before it signs. Self-published novelist Matt Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl grew organically enough to secure a Peacock series; TikTok comedian Curry Barker's channel @thatsabadidea attracted funding for Obsession, another summer indie breakout, grossing over $370 million against a $750,000 budget.
A layer of specialists is also forming in between creators and the industry. On Naavik's podcast, Story Kitchen’s co-founder Dmitri Johnson, who optioned Steal a Brainrot, compared the moment to the early, dismissed days of YouTube and encourages peers to engage these worlds without strip-mining them (think of Hollywood’s push to acquire any and all comic book IP in the ‘90s/’00s).
Of course, adaptations can be slow. A24 optioned Backrooms in early 2023 and released it three years later (fast, by Hollywood standards), so the options now in development will take years to prove out, if ever. The pipeline is unforgiving: most meme-to-film attempts land poorly even when they turn a profit, hyped memes and IP can flame out before a film is ready, and it takes judgment to know what will last: being ubiquitous is not the same as being good.
If we pierce through all the noise, what’s really emerging is a new kind of IP development process. Internet-native IP may have a single spark (like the Backrooms meme on 4chan), but it’s increasingly owned by the collective. Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Roblox are the cultural petri dishes in which the network effect of millions of creators and fans bring the IP universes to life in an organic, compounding way. Out of these passionate creators occasionally comes an internet-native, next-generation elite talent (like Parsons) that can transcend the crowd and take an IP to new heights in new ways.
Not all internet-native IP will have the same story, so we shouldn’t extrapolate from Backrooms too heavily, but we expect to see more echoes of this type of IP growth in the years to come. For the games industry, it’s worth double-underlining that Roblox, in particular, is a cultural vessel for upcoming generations more so than any other platform. So the next time a kid or teenager yells “six-seven,” “Skibidi,” or whatever new goofy phrase at you, remember: it might be coming, soon, to a screen near you.
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In Other News
💸 Funding & Acquisitions:
- Disney Solitaire maker SuperPlay could be purchased by Tencent in deal worth up to $1.5B.
- Humanoid raises $152M Series A, becoming Europe’s first pure-play humanoid robotics unicorn.
- Neon raises $13M Series A to expand direct-to-consumer commerce platform for game publishers.
- US-based real-money peer-to-peer games platform Pure has raised $8M in a Seed round.
- Saudi Arabia-based mobile casual games developer Floaty Studio has secured $1M.
- Uzbekistan launches first game investment fund for developers.
📊 Business & Products:
- Pokémon Champions makes $7.2M in first month on mobile.
- Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced surpasses 3M sales in its first week.
- Netflix Playground drives 600% surge in kids games engagement.
- Saudi PIF-led $55B Electronic Arts deal set for EU approval.
- Judge halts Paramount-Warner Bros. merger for a minimum of 14 days.
- Yahoo’s gaming audience has increased by 60 percent in 2026.
👾 Miscellaneous:
- Gamecity Hamburg opens second prototype funding round in September.
- Xbox announces backwards compatibility for PC and handheld devices.
- Unity says Unity 7 game engine coming in Q1 2027.
- How adjoe fixes early game engagement for hardcore games.
- UKIE's Nick Poole: "The social media ban will change the rules of engagement".
- ESA Foundation awards 31 university students scholarships to support careers in games and esports.
Content Worth Consuming
Ethical, Low-Power, and On-Device: Studio Atelico's Vision for the Future of Generative AI (gamesindustry.biz): “In January last year, gaming startup Studio Atelico launched the Atelico AI Engine, which operates on-device rather than relying on costly cloud solutions. Six months later, the company secured $5 million in seed funding "to redefine the role of generative AI in games." Now, the team is developing its first title using its own tech. Bobium Brawlers, a turn-based creature battler, is serving as a testbed for Studio Atelico's AI-first ecosystem, which uses generative AI trained on the studio's own artists' work. In this case, the AI is used to generate creatures.”
Why CEOs Shouldn’t Be Afraid to Make Big Bets on Fun | Owen Mahoney — Former CEO, Nexon (The BIG Show): “Owen Mahoney says fear is holding the games industry back. The former NEXON president and CEO joins Dean Takahashi for a candid conversation about leading one of gaming's biggest companies, why public company executives have become reluctant to fund new IP, and how that hesitation is shaping the industry's future.”
Why an Ad-Tech Insider Says Ads Will Help Game Devs (Building Better Games): “In this episode, Ben sits down with Colan Neese, SVP of Gaming at Screen Engine/ASI and author of the Patch Notes newsletter, to deconstruct the shifting macroeconomic tectonic plates of gaming. They dive into the reality of platform economics, why Microsoft is losing an estimated 64 cents on every dollar invested in gaming, the likely rise of ad-supported models in the PC/console ecosystem, and the terrifying market realities of the Grand Theft Auto VI release timeline.”
RuneScape CEO: We Want to Be Bigger Than World of Warcraft (The Game Business): “Returning to The Game Business Show is Jagex CEO Jon Bellamy. Chris visits the RuneScape developer to hear about its ambitious plans to topple World of Warcraft, the phenomenon that is Old School RuneScape, the 'pain' of trying to save standard RuneScape, coming to consoles for the first time, and finding fans in China”
How 007 First Light Adds to the James Bond Legacy with Hakan Abrak (The AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook): “Trent Kusters chats with Hakan Abrak, CEO & Co-Owner of IO Interactive. Hakan is also the Game Director on IO’s take on the Bond legacy with 007 First Light. Together they discuss how IO met with MGM and the Ian Fleming estate to first pitch the project; the responsibilities they felt to stay true to the Bond IP; balancing dialogue and humor and how that differs from film to games; the casting process of finding a new Bond; and what they learned from the Hitman series that informed the design of a 007 experience.”
JP Kellams(ex-Epic Games) on Fortnite Festival, Virtual Concerts & the Future of Music in Games (GXM Podcast): “In this episode of GXM, Mat speaks to JP Kellams, former lead producer on Fortnite Festival at Epic Games. They discuss the evolution of music in games, from Fortnite Festival and blockbuster virtual concerts to the resurgence of rhythm games and the future of interactive music experiences. We explore why today's biggest in-game concerts aren't sustainable, the music licensing challenges holding the industry back, the game knowledge barriers facing the music industry, and why the next generation of music experiences in video games will be built around long-term fan engagement rather than one-off events.”
More About Naavik
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