Twenty-four hours. That’s how long the Siren Head deal held the record for Hollywood’s wildest internet-horror bidding war.
Deadline exclusively reports that Scott Stuber’s United Artists, Steven Spielberg’s Amblin, and Amazon MGM Studios have won the film rights to The Mandela Catalogue, the viral YouTube analog horror series from creator Alex Kister following an 11-studio bidding war.
Yesterday it was five studios fighting over Siren Head. Today it’s eleven fighting over an analog horror series. This isn’t a trend anymore. It’s a gold rush.
Amazon MGM Bets On The Creator
Per Deadline, Kister will direct the film himself from a screenplay he adapted with Tyler Clifton. Spielberg and Holly Bario are producing for Amblin alongside Aaron B. Koontz for Paper Street Pictures and Stuber and Nick Nesbitt for United Artists, with Kister and Clifton also producing.
Note the difference from the Siren Head deal.
Warner Bros. licensed Trevor Henderson’s creature and handed it to established filmmakers in Zach Cregger and Brian Duffield.
Amazon MGM is running the Backrooms playbook instead: the creator keeps the director’s chair. That’s the model that made Kane Parsons the youngest filmmaker ever to top the box office, and it’s the model Kister’s fanbase will trust, the audience didn’t show up for Backrooms as a brand; they showed up for the version Parsons built online. Eleven studios clearly understood which approach they were bidding on.
What Is The Mandela Catalogue?
Launched by Kister in 2021, The Mandela Catalogue is set in the fictional Mandela County, Wisconsin, which is invaded by shape-shifting, nearly immortal creatures called Alternates.
Per Deadline, the series has amassed well over 100 million views across its official episodes alone, making it one of the largest original analog horror franchises on YouTube and one of the defining titles of the genre alongside Local 58 and The Backrooms.
Analog horror — distorted VHS aesthetics, corrupted emergency broadcasts, wrong-looking faces — is a genre that was born and raised entirely on YouTube.
Hollywood didn’t build it, doesn’t own it, and until this year, mostly didn’t understand it. Now the industry is paying record prices to catch up.
Spielberg Just Validated the Whole Thing
Here’s the detail that makes this bigger than another rights deal: Steven Spielberg is producing it.
Three weeks ago, Spielberg’s Disclosure Day opened into a summer the YouTube filmmakers built, and the exit polls told the story, Spielberg’s name pulled the over-45 crowd while the under-30 audience was busy lining up for Obsession and Backrooms.
Now the man who invented the summer blockbuster is producing a movie from that exact pipeline. The filmmaker who defined what a theatrical event was for two generations just put his banner on what it’s becoming for the next one.
And Deadline says the quiet part out loud. The trade reports that Obsession ($374 million worldwide) and Backrooms ($331 million-plus worldwide) outstripped even anticipated Disney and DC tentpoles — naming Star Wars: The Mandalorian & Grogu and Supergirl specifically — and that studios are mining YouTube to keep Gen Z and Gen Alpha audiences flowing into cinemas, a demo Hollywood historically couldn’t crack.
Read that again: the trades are now using the year’s biggest superhero movie and biggest Star Wars movie as the yardsticks that YouTube horror beat.
That’s the exact scoreboard we laid out when Curry Barker said Gen Z is “tired of slop”, and the industry’s biggest names are no longer debating it. They’re bidding on it.
