Almost 14 years ago, the producer Scott Glassgold stumbled on a short film on Vimeo about a woman who believes she’s encountered an alien. The project, by a pair of filmmakers named Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell, was “a wonderful, lo-fi science-fiction story” that conveyed a distinct storytelling voice, Glassgold told me. He immediately set out to work with them, hoping to introduce the pair to Hollywood as fresh directing talent. “That was an early moment for me on the internet,” he explained. “I just saw it as an incredibly viable path to meeting artists, finding ideas, frankly, in a place where, at the time, really no one else was looking.”He learned from that period, however, that Hollywood wasn’t universally enthusiastic about turning such material into feature-length movies—at least, not with unknown, internet-bred creators involved. Even though Earl and Caldwell’s work attracted potential studio buyers, Glassgold sought independent financing to help the pair avoid what’s known in the industry as development hell. “The first call I would get from a studio head would be like, We’re so excited. When can we fire the director?” Glassgold recalled. “I would just put my hands on my face, because it was entirely antithetical to what we were trying to achieve.”That was, as Glassgold put it, “the 1.0” of Hollywood’s dalliance with the internet—a far cry from the industry’s upgraded view of digital-native talent these days. Works by filmmakers who first found success online consistently scored at the box office this spring: Backrooms, directed by Kane Parsons, who went viral as a teenager with a web series set in the same world of liminal spaces, is now the studio A24’s highest-grossing movie ever. Obsession, a horror-comedy made by Curry Barker, who first built an audience on YouTube through sketch-comedy videos, became a word-of-mouth hit. And Iron Lung, a video-game adaptation self-financed, directed, and released by the gaming YouTuber known as Markiplier, grossed at least 10 times its budget worldwide with the help of his nearly 40 million subscribers.[Read: A no-name director to everyone but his 38 million fans]Hollywood, inspired by these triumphs, is doing what it does best: working overtime to capture the same magic again. Several projects with online roots have recently entered into development to become feature-length films, including Siren Head and Cartoon Cat, each inspired by the disturbing viral imagery of the artist Trevor Henderson; Seasons, an adaptation of a short story first published on the Subreddit r/nosleep, a forum for grassroots horror writing, about a couple whose dream ranch turns out to be haunted; and The Mandela Catalogue, a script based, much like Backrooms, on a popular horror series on YouTube.Mandela, set in a fictional county in Wisconsin that’s invaded by shape-shifting creatures, led to an 11-studio bidding war, with Steven Spielberg signing on as a producer along the way. Aaron B. Koontz, an indie filmmaker and a producer for Mandela, told me that Hollywood’s new fascination with digital creators has been vindicating—and overwhelming. “It’s the opposite of what I’m used to in my entire career,” he said, adding that after Backrooms’ release, he was on the phone every day for three weeks with executives interested in picking up Mandela. “People in Hollywood that never took my call,” he said, “are now calling me.”To the filmmaker Shawn Levy, whose production company 21 Laps worked on Backrooms and Seasons, these green-lighted projects merely underline “a predictable sort of frenzy” based on the latest Hollywood success story; they’re not a sure sign that the industry is shifting significantly. “Even though right now there’s a mad gold rush of assistants being tasked with scouring the internet for the next Kane Parsons or the next Curry,” he told me, “most long-shot bets don’t pan out.” Hollywood has clearly grasped that the next auteurs and franchises can be found on the web. “Nothing teaches Hollywood a faster lesson than a hit,” Levy said. But whether Hollywood’s intensive focus on all things internet leads to anything resembling this year’s box-office successes will depend on the industry seeing the internet as more than just a place from which to mine ideas.Hollywood once seemed baffled by the internet. Throughout the 2010s, almost every time the industry attempted to translate trendy web culture into conventional entertainment, the results were largely forgettable: The Grumpy Cat meme inexplicably starred in a Lifetime holiday movie, a thread about one writer’s father’s curmudgeonly sayings became a quickly canceled sitcom, and a major studio’s adaptation of Slender Man, a character that originated on an internet forum, bombed with critics.Yet over the years, the language of digital natives began to influence popular culture anyway as the internet became intertwined with daily life. Consider the growing slate of satires about influencers, the numerous coming-of-age films that have tapped into teenage angst amid the rise of social media, and the fact that entire movies have been made that take place exclusively on computer screens. TikTok users embraced Skinamarink, an experimental horror flick made for 15,000 Canadian dollars, by posting story breakdowns and their terrified live reactions. The director Jane Schoenbrun’s films—including their latest, Teenage Sex and Death in Camp Miasma—could be considered an offshoot of internet culture, trafficking as they do in esoteric online-fandom sensibilities. Their movies, packed with surreal imagery and dream-logic-driven plots, conjure the sensation of getting lost down an internet rabbit hole.The road to building such an oeuvre, however, required “lying,” Schoenbrun told me with a laugh. When they were pitching their projects to traditional studio brass, many of the executives they met didn’t understand the stories at first glance, even though they sought voices like Schoenbrun’s. “It’s like,” the director explained, “trying to say something in a way that will be understood and digestible.”[Read: The horrors of being extremely online]That kind of code-switching can create tension, according to Lucas Ford, a producer I spoke with. He would know: As an assistant at 21 Laps in early 2022, Ford brought Parsons’s YouTube channel to the attention of Levy and his fellow executive Dan Cohen. Today, Ford runs his own production company, translating ideas from all kinds of visual artists and writers into potential films. He told me that when pitching to studios, he tries to go beyond highlighting shallow metrics—viewer counts, subscriber numbers—and instead articulate why he’s personally drawn to the material.Any internet creator who has built an online following has a relationship with their audience that Hollywood should cultivate rather than erase, Ford noted; if a movie adapting an online work has forced its digital-native storyteller’s vision to fit conventional molds, viewers familiar with the original material “can sniff that out immediately.” Schoenbrun told me something similar, observing that Backrooms and Obsession had brought young people to theaters by appealing to their concerns about, say, the flagging economy and dating habits. “This was youth culture speaking to itself,” they said of those films.By offering more internet talent a chance to bring their visions to big-screen life, Hollywood seems eager to further invoke today’s youth culture. But deepening that relationship, Levy said, will require precise care. He told me that he’d initially had “healthy skepticism” about Backrooms’ ability to become a feature-length film: “Certainly, question marks abounded,” he explained, including “the fact that it was a teenager who was being given the keys to the car.” In the end, he pushed the movie forward; he trusted his team’s assessment of both the concept and, after meeting him, Parsons’s capacity to turn an aesthetic into a fleshed-out story deserving of a theatrical release.Adapting this kind of material can require different approaches. Koontz, the Mandela Catalogue producer, told me that he’d advocated for its creator, Alex Kister, to direct and co-write the film adaptation because a large part of the project’s appeal came from Kister’s creative flourishes: He uses alternating points of view, plenty of biblical allusions, even footage from a children’s cartoon. For Siren Head, though, Glassgold explained that the material warranted bringing experienced filmmakers on board. Henderson’s artwork, as striking as it is, isn’t enough of a foundation for a movie, so the film is moving forward with two Hollywood-horror veterans overseeing its creation: the screenwriter Brian Duffield and the Weapons director Zach Cregger, who are collaborating on the script.The internet has never been predictable: Backrooms’, Obsession’s, and Iron Lung’s collective overperformance at the box office argues against the kind of gold-rush thinking that is driving Hollywood to seek out digital storytellers. Even for the filmmakers who achieved liftoff from their online beginnings, the web can be an unreliable foundation on which to build. Kyle Edward Ball, the director of Skinamarink, told me that he began uploading videos on YouTube in the 2010s in part because he believed that going viral would help launch his career. He instead found the platform more useful as a training ground, honing his voice one video at a time. (Ball noticed at the time that amassing views certainly led some creators to Hollywood success, but many of the results seemed to involve “bedazzling the wheel instead of reinventing it,” he said.)[Read: Nobody knows what’s happening online anymore]Schoenbrun, for their part, pointed out that the flurry of headlines about digital-native talent impressing Hollywood has tended to flatten anything that began on the internet into one genre, despite the fact that, creatively, Backrooms isn’t Obsession, just as Siren Head won’t resemble The Mandela Catalogue. The artists behind these works also approach the internet differently; Parsons riffed on an aesthetic born on internet forums, for instance, while Barker treated online behavior as his subject matter. (His first feature film, Milk & Serial, is about YouTube pranksters.) Hollywood’s latest fixation could be just a brief, reductive detour away from tentpole franchises or superhero films and into horror movies (one of the most reliable genres for producing mainstream hits) that take nontraditional paths to being made. “I’m not like, Wow, this is the French New Wave for YouTube, you know?” Schoenbrun said.Maybe not, yet the film industry does seem to have hit the jackpot—these few times, at least—in a realm that has long appeared to confound it. Either way, Ball told me, it’s a thrilling moment for artists bred online to experiment without worrying about fitting any filmmaking molds. “Don’t chase Hollywood,” he said. “Have Hollywood chase you.”