Walled Culture is using two recent horror hits to press a pointed claim about film financing: studios do not need $200 million production budgets to produce movies that audiences will show up for.
The argument matters because big-budget film has often been used as the hard case for traditional copyright. Books, music and visual art can be funded directly by committed fans, Walled Culture argues, then released freely or shared widely because the work has already been paid for. Film, critics say, is different because production costs can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Walled Culture’s answer is that the premise is wobblier than it looks. The site points first to Hollywood accounting, which Wikipedia describes as opaque accounting practices in film, television, video and music that can inflate expenses and reduce reported profit. That matters because net profit often determines taxes, royalties and profit-sharing payments. In plain English: some movie budgets are not clean engineering diagrams. They can also be weapons in contract fights.
The sharper evidence comes from box office numbers reported by the BBC. According to the BBC, two low-budget horror films, Backrooms and Obsession, have outperformed two far more expensive franchise releases in recent U.S. cinema results.
The BBC reported that Masters of the Universe, a new release based on the Mattel property, made $29 million in the U.S. over the cited weekend. Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, released in May, made $10 million that weekend, which the BBC described as weak for a Star Wars film.
Backrooms, by contrast, made $81 million in its U.S. opening weekend and had reached $135 million in the U.S., according to the BBC. Obsession had taken $152 million in the U.S. and $225 million worldwide. The BBC also reported that Obsession was the first film since ET the Extra-Terrestrial in 1982 to increase its takings in both its second and third cinema weekends.
The cost gap is the useful part, and the bit studio PowerPoint decks tend to mumble through. The BBC said The Mandalorian and Grogu was reported to have a $165 million budget, while Masters of the Universe was reported at $200 million. With marketing included, the BBC said such films would need $300 million to $400 million to break even.
Backrooms cost $10 million, according to the BBC. Obsession cost no more than $1 million, the BBC reported. Walled Culture argues that the latter figure is within reach of direct fan funding, at least in a way a $200 million production is not.
The site connects those economics to a separate Guardian report about younger audiences treating cinema as a social event. The Guardian quoted 22-year-old film TikToker Florence Rose saying that going to the movies has become a way to meet friends, share the experience and switch off from phones for a few hours.
The Guardian also reported that Letterboxd, whose main audience is 18- to 24-year-olds, grew from 1.7 million users in 2020 to 26 million in 2026, including more than nine million added since January 2025. Rose told the Guardian that online discussion around cinema releases encourages people to attend so they can join the conversation.
Walled Culture’s conclusion is not that every film can be made cheaply, or that fandom magically pays invoices. Its narrower claim is more useful: the recent performance of low-cost films weakens the claim that cinema requires mega-budgets, maximal copyright control and the same franchise machinery. For filmmakers with a real audience and a production plan that is not made of smoke, direct support looks less like a fantasy and more like a financing model worth testing.
This story draws on original reporting from Techdirt.
