Chris Ferguson was busy on Monday then Back roomsthe $10 million Vancouver-shot film produced by Ken Parsons for his viral YouTube short film series, grossed $118 million in its opening weekend in global ticket sales.
“I have never received so many calls interested in my company,” Ferguson said. Hollywood Reporter Over another phone call, where, as usual, he walks around his house while talking. He added: “On Saturday, which is not usually a work day, I did not leave a three-block radius of my house and walked 25,000 steps.”
As he pitches new collaborations, Ferguson said his friends have gone beyond simply betting on what his films will do at the opening weekend box office to betting on his daily step count as Hollywood comes knocking on his door. “Because the phone doesn’t stop,” he insists.
But when we move on to talk about Ken Parsons, 20, who first brought Atomic Monster to his Vancouver-based production company Oddfellows Pictures, Ferguson has little time to talk about his youth. “The story of his youth was interesting to me for about 24 hours, until I had a moment to interact with him,” Ferguson recalls. “At that point, the story really became that I was dealing with someone who was extremely intelligent and curious, and it was very different from anyone else I’d worked with.”
He added: “He’s like a wise old man, and he’s just waiting for his body to grow up. If you watch interviews with him, if you can put on a much older face than him, it will make more sense.” For his part, Ferguson is not an old-fashioned coach who believes emerging players need to pay their dues before they are actively involved in the game.
Believing that Parsons had the complete package to produce his first theatrical film following his YouTube web series, Ferguson hired the film crew he had assembled Long legs Director and producing partner Osgood Perkins turned around Parsons so he could navigate his first feature film shoot.
“I knew the best thing to do for him was to put him directly into a very tight crew that we’ve been building on all the films we’ve been doing over the last few years, exactly because I was basically looking for an extension of his arms,” Ferguson recalls. “He picks every camera angle in his YouTube series because he animates them all by hand. He picks every element of production design as he builds these 3D models. He scores the entire movie. He does everything.”
But a movie set is different from rolling cameras on a digital web series. “It’s a different scope, a different time frame, a different model. You need a whole group of people to do these things for you, so I knew our team could be an extension of it,” he added.
The film about a strange doorway that appears in the basement of a furniture showroom was first announced in January 2023 as a co-production between A24, Chernin Entertainment, 21 Laps Entertainment and James Wan’s production company Atomic Monster. But as much as Parsons was an undiscovered talent who came out of YouTube, just like… mania Director Cary Parker Ferguson insists it would be a mistake for Hollywood to flock to social media to find the next best thing in theatrical horror pictures.
“We’ve all been looking in a lot of places for a while. I’m sure there’s going to be a bit of over-correction when everyone goes and picks every random short film on YouTube. They’re not all feature films,” he said. Ferguson adds that Kane and Parker on YouTube were essentially making a long-form video.
“I think people will make the mistake of taking a bunch of TikTok videos and turning them into features,” he adds. “The internet is a great platform for people to express themselves, but it’s still about people who have trained themselves to go through a long-term process.”
success Back rooms As a horror picture shot in Vancouver, it also continues the winning streak of Ferguson and production partner Perkins through their joint production company Phobos, which has backing from Neon. Released in July 2024, Long legs Establishing Perkins as a trademark horror filmmaker, the project grossed $128 million worldwide on a budget of less than $10 million.
Neon released the first film, citing its marketing campaign as a blueprint for how to build anticipation for a scary movie. Perkins is already working on a new project Long legs movie, with star Nicolas Cage returning, but Ferguson has been tight-lipped about that project.
Perkins also fired Monkey for Neon, also in Vancouver, and directed locally Youtheven if he and Ferguson made rare box office flops a guard. Ferguson also discussed why the biggest independent horror pictures in the United States have been popping up in Vancouver in recent years.
“We’ve built something here. There’s a young, enthusiastic crew that wants to make movies, and has a passion for movies. Slowly since we started the company, we’ve been putting that team together. So I attribute that to our crew and the way we do things, as much as anything else,” he said.
