A strange thing happened this weekend at the box office. A Star Wars movie, in its second weekend, failed to recapture the number one spot. The movie that took its crown? A low-budget psychological horror story, born from the deep web of Reddit and 4chan threads and the director’s own viral YouTube videos. This movie didn’t just overperform at the box office; it drew a bigger opening weekend than the previous week’s aforementioned Star Wars debut.

On top of that, something else strange happened. It wasn’t just this weekend; it was the previous one as well. In this case, a different low-budget psychological romance thriller didn’t just overperform; it outperformed its opening weekend by 30% and, in its third week, once again outperformed its previous week. Without doing any research, I’ll take producer Jason Blum’s reaction at face value and quote him: “No movie has done that, has gone up two weekends in a row since ‘E.T.’ It is unbelievable.”

All of this comes in a year that kicked off with an indie sci-fi horror movie debuting at #2 at the box office – a movie completely bankrolled and personally distributed by the director (no studio involved, not even a small, indie niche one). A movie by a filmmaker whose fanbase led a grassroots campaign to get it released at the top three national theater chains: AMC, Regal and Cinemark. Coincidentally, this weekend the film made its streaming debut exclusively on YouTube, the very platform on which this filmmaker made his name.

The three movies in question, Backrooms, Obsession, and Iron Lung, each come from unconventional content creators with tons of imagination and massive online followings. The respective directors, Kane Parsons, Curry Barker, and Mark Fischbach (a/k/a Markiplier), are not film school students – at least not in the traditional sense. Rather, they deepened their passion for filmmaking through their YouTube channels, all the while cultivating an eager audience of their own. This audience – the golden demo of 18-25-year-olds – is just as untraditional. Hammered by shifting economic and global forces, Gen Z has largely turned its back on the usual way of doing things, especially when it comes to entertainment, consuming said content (excuse the phrase) on its own terms, albeit through well-trained algorithms.

This does not, nor should it, undermine the films’ breakthroughs. Backrooms director Kane Parsons became the youngest filmmaker to achieve top-of-the-box-office success, while also fueling A24’s largest opening weekend. Curry Barker’s Obsession broke similar records for Universal’s specialty label Focus Features. Barker already has a follow-up planned and essentially has the green light for whatever else his mind can cook up. Lastly, Iron Lung – which netted $50M in its global run against an estimated $3M budget – proves both the power of real independent filmmaking and the passion of online fandoms, as well as the extent to which they have been overlooked. Iron Lung was only $1.3M away from overtaking Disney/Searchlight’s horror counterpart Send Help, from established director Sam Raimi, when both films opened against each other in January. This moment, if treated properly, represents the beginnings of a major shift, not unlike the 1970s, when a similar set of brash young filmmakers pushed the boundaries of cinematic art on their own untested terms. The fact that this moment is happening against the latest release of one of Hollywood’s greatest success stories from that era is fitting.

When Star Wars debuted on the Memorial Day weekend of 1977, distributor Twentieth Century Fox wasn’t sure of its success. In fact, not even George Lucas, the creative force and director behind the film, was either. Lucas secured Fox’s backing only after much convincing, and the doors of every other major studio of that era had closed. Fox gave Lucas a meager $11M budget to film his space opera, which even then was barely enough to cover the special effects needed to make that magic happen. Star Wars thereby became largely self-financed, as Lucas created Lucasfilm Ltd. to help offset the costs. The biggest film in the galaxy, by and large, was an independent picture! Moreover, Fox was so risk-averse with the film at the time that Lucas was able to secure full rights to any sequels and their merchandising – a deal from which Lucas laughed all the way to the bank.

Star Wars was not just a milestone in blockbuster entertainment but also a true testament to independent filmmaking and a clear indicator that the Hollywood of yesteryear had lost touch with the current generation. Lucas and his contemporaries, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma and others personified a change in Hollywood in the 1970s. The “new” Hollywood they forged shook off the lavish studio productions and multi-year contracts, bringing filmmaking back to its gritty roots. Their stories were real stories, featuring real people in real situations, speaking real dialogue (sans musical numbers and over-the-top melodrama). “Real” is not to be taken literally, though in some cases it was. Even Star Wars, while a fantastical space opera with an esoteric script, aimed to strip away the old Hollywood tropes of a glossy utopian future and present its sci-fi as something “lived-in” and “worn.”

Star Wars launched not just an empire of lucrative intellectual property, but it also helped usher in new approaches to filmmaking, distribution and marketing. Before Star Wars and Spielberg’s Jaws, the summer was just another season, and Memorial Day was just another extended weekend on the theatrical release calendar. Nowadays, to paraphrase Joni Mitchell, it’s all just another show.

Hollywood continuously relies on filmmaking for the masses – superheroes, remakes, reboots, sequels, prequels and anything else tied to long-standing franchises with built-in fanbases, from which modern risk-averse executives can cash out and bleed dry. To lazy Hollywood execs, these are the type of movies young people want. But if the 2020s are teaching us anything, it’s that too much of a good thing leaves audiences tired and bored. The latest Star Wars movie is a good example. The Mandalorian and Grogu feels more like a brand extension than a new chapter with something interesting to say. As such, it’s ironically hilarious that The Mandalorian, on both the big and small screens, features both Scorsese and ’70s absurdist filmmaker Werner Herzog in semi-prominent roles.

Here we are, nearly 50 years on – and a week from the very same holiday – when Star Wars and the new guard of Hollywood took the box office by storm. As Lucas once famously paraphrased Mark Twain while discussing his Star Wars prequels, history doesn’t repeat itself; it rhymes. These days, Star Wars stands as the old guard, part of the very same studio machine Lucas and his cohorts were once rebelling against. So, if Star Wars has become an Empire – or shall we say, “the First Order” – then filmmakers like Parsons, Barker and Fischbach are the new rebels – or, “the Resistance,” to keep borrowing from the Star Wars sequel trilogy.

Parsons, Barker, and Fischbach represent a new wave of filmmaking, born of the very same mold as the old “New Hollywood” rebels. Their style is just as raw, and their sense is just as modern and unique, replacing film school craft-honing with the unforgiving trial-and-error classroom of YouTube content creation. Barker, in particular, represents an interesting new corner of horror filmmaking, populated by comedic talent-turned-macabre auteurs (see Jordan Peele, Zach Cregger, the Philippou Brothers, David Gordon Green and John Krasinski).

This is Gen Z’s latest moment, from a generation that’s continuously tired of the conventional way things have always been done. Hollywood should take a lesson from this trio, that maybe to find what clicks, you need to look in non-traditional corners, but Hollywood will most certainly not. Instead, they’ll boil these successes down to the least interesting common denominator and bankroll the next viral YouTube or TikTok star, not realizing what these three actually brought to the big screen. It’s not about capitalizing on viral success. It’s tapping into something unique and taking it into bold new directions. Spielberg, Lucas and Scorsese did that by flipping the conventions of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Parsons, Barker and Fischbach are now doing the same, tapping into unique bits of Internet lore, building on them organically and empowering their fanbase to turn out.