The Backrooms copyright controversy risks tainting the movie's breakthrough success

Backrooms has been the breakthrough hit of the year. With a budget of $10 million, a movie that began life in YouTube shorts animated in Blender as a hobby has already earned over $360 million. It's the studio A24's most successful movie yet by far, but things have taken a controversial turn.

The Skibidi Toilet legal controversy highlighted the tensions that can emerge when corporate studios become involved with viral social media hits. That animation at least has a single artist who's generally recognised as its originator. Backrooms is a piece of internet folklore that many people helped develop. Some creators fear A24 is now trying to erase that history.

Part of what made Backrooms so successful is its rich history of online lore. The movie's director Kane Parsons played a big role in popularising it with his found footage-style Backrooms YouTube videos, which he began making in 2022. But Backrooms as both an urban legend and an aesthetic began in 2019 with an image posted anonymously on 4Chan.

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By the time the location of that photo had been traced to an abandoned furniture store in Wisconsin, communities had sprung up on Reddit to flesh out the lore around a strange liminal space comprising a maze of empty rooms with yellow wallpaper.

Those communities are suddenly having conversations about copyright law. Several creators of Backrooms-related visuals and merchandise say their content has been removed from platforms such as the online marketplace Redbubble due to copyright complaints.

This might be normal procedure for movies with recognisible original IPs, but these creators say their work was not connected to A24's Backrooms movie and even existed before the movie was made.

"Whatever they’re doing is ridiculous. The Backrooms belongs to all of us," one person writes on Reddit. "I love the Backrooms movie so much and have supported it immensely. But if they continue on with this then I’m going to lose respect for A24," another person says.

Some are wondering whether A24 might even end up demanding the takedown of Kane's original Backrooms films from YouTube.

Kane, who uses the name Kane Pixels on social media, has acknowledged in interviews that he does not own Backrooms and that he hopes others will make their own Backrooms movies. On Discord, he's commented that the takedown orders "should not be happening" and has said he'll look into it.

A24's complaints could turn out to be the fault of overzealous automated bots , but this modern collision of Hollywood's traditional protectiveness of IPs vs decentralised internet folklore serves as a warning to studios keen to sign up a viral YouTube filmmakers (also see Amazon's Gen AI Creators' Fund).

When a studio adapts a creepypasta, they enter a world with a different set of norms and expectations. Automated AI scrapers can work to flag infringements of Disney characters, but when it comes to collaborative IPs, a bot might not be able to distinguish between a movie asset and community creations.

A24 owns specific film elements like characters and the lore around Async, but not the general aesthetic of yellow walls, fluorescent lights, and moldy carpets. A false positive copyright strike can destroy an indie developer's livelihood, and that could hurt the studio's reputation in the process.

A24's brand is built on being a cool, artist-friendly, anti-establishment champion of independent cinema. Initiating a silent attack on small artists and indie developers contradicts that and makes it look like a corporate bully moving in to colonise community-made internet culture. It also creates intense anxiety and distrust as Hollywood eyes other internet properties.

We've reached out to A24 to invite clarification on its stance.