Horror adaptation … David Howard Thornton as Steamboat Willie in Screamboat. Photograph: SKLAE/Signature Entertainment
Pre-Covid, the movie landscape was dramatically different: YouTubers weren’t dominating the box office, video game spin-offs rarely made an impact and Winnie-the-Pooh wasn’t yet the star of a slasher movie. Why such a flurry of innovation – and what will be next?
Cinema has always been a medium of research and development. At any given point, the industry is searching for yet another breakthrough that can drive it into the future. Synchronised sound in the 1920s. Technicolor in the 1930s. The invention of the modern blockbuster in the 1970s.
Conversely, the consensus is that, if the 2020s has a defining trend, then it is one of decline. The theatrical experience is under attack from all angles: streaming, YouTube, a once-in-a-century health crisis that shut cinemas down entirely. And yet, if you look closer, this has actually been one of the most innovative decades that cinema has ever seen. Whether down to technology or desperation, the film industry has spent these last few years figuring out new ways to make films that simply could not have existed even at the turn of the decade.
Currently, the most notable of these is the way that cinema has become a conversation with YouTube. Back in 2005, when Jawed Karim uploaded the first video (the 19-second Me at the Zoo) to the platform, YouTube felt like a novelty. It was cheap and cheerful, a collection of cat videos and people falling over. How things have changed. Not only has it become the largest streaming platform in the world, but the first generation of adults who grew up with YouTube has come of age.
Creepypasta comes good … Chiwetel Ejiofor in Backrooms. Photograph: A24/AP
As we speak, the seventh and eighth biggest films of 2026 have been directed by people who learned their trade making content for YouTube. Obsession (worldwide gross: $442m) was directed by Curry Barker, a 26-year-old who dropped out of film school to make YouTube videos and TikToks. Meanwhile, Backrooms (worldwide gross: $384m) is even more explicitly internet-inspired. Directed by the then 20-year-old Kane Parsons, the film is based on a series of shorts he began uploading to YouTube in 2022, which in turn were inspired by some creepypasta (web-based horror content) that has been floating around online since 2019.
A decade ago, studios would have got this disastrously wrong. Ask them to adapt a YouTube video and they would have hired Michael Bay and Rihanna to make David After Dentist: The Motion Picture; it would have baffled anyone who didn’t watch YouTube – and appalled anyone who did. This is the first time that the industry has trusted natives to make the films they want to make. Clearly, given the enormous financial returns, it will not be the last. Steven Spielberg is now producing Alex Kister’s The Mandela Catalogue, based on a terrifying analogue horror series that has run on YouTube since 2021.
This would also be a good time to mention the rise of the copyright expiry movie. In 1998, the Copyright Term Extension Act was passed in the US, which extended protection to works to 95 years after they were first published. (In the UK, the rules are different; copyright extends to 70 years after the creator’s death.) This effectively meant that two decades went by without anything going out of copyright. When things finally caught up in 2019, freeing up anything made in 1923, there was a goldrush.
Ruining your childhood … Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2. Photograph: Publicity image
Now, let it be said that it wasn’t a particularly good goldrush. First out of the blocks was 2023’s Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, a low-rent slasher movie whose only original thought was to have Winnie-the-Pooh in it. Then came The Mouse Trap and Screamboat (both based on Steamboat Willie, the first element of the Mickey Mouse character to have lost copyright protection), along with Popeye the Slayer Man and Bambi: The Reckoning. Without exception, these films are cheap, exploitative and burn out their premise long before the end credits – but more are to come.
Next year, if you can wait that long, will see the release of something called Poohniverse: Monsters Assemble, which will star – deep breath – Winnie-the-Pooh, Tigger, Bambi, Peter Pan, Tinker Bell, Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty and the Cheshire Cat. It is also worth pointing out that King Kong enters the public domain in 2029, which will be brilliant news for anyone who has been longing to see a low-rent horror movie starring an unusually large gorilla.
Now, here is where I may lose you, because I am about to name Sonic the Hedgehog as the most important movie of the decade. Please bear with me. One of the most pervasive trends of this decade has been the way that, for good or ill, audiences have hijacked movies to their own ends. The biggest example is obviously Barbenheimer, in which Barbie and Oppenheimer were released on the same day, kickstarting a phenomenon where people bought tickets to see one straight after the other. Nobody in the film industry expected this, but the publicity from this grassroots celebration drove receipts of both films through the roof.
Doomed by irony … Morbius. Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy
The flipside to this is Morbius, a terrible film that inspired no end of ironic online mockery – but what was hilarious was that Sony mistook the irony for sincere support, and rereleased the film on 1,000 screens to cash in. It goes without saying that nobody watched it. Also, think of all the extra teenagers who bought tickets for Minions: The Rise of Gru, purely so they could watch dressed in suits and babble nonsense to participate in the Gentleminions trend, or the people who went to see A Minecraft Movie exclusively to scream and chuck stuff about when Jack Black said the words “chicken jockey”.
No film, arguably, has benefited from fan reaction quite like Sonic the Hedgehog. The first we saw of it was a nightmarish trailer featuring an unrecognisable main character. Sonic had bizarrely human proportions, as well as tiny eyes and teeth that looked as if they had been stolen from someone’s mouth while they slept. It was awful, and the internet wasted no time in saying that it was awful. In times gone by, studios would have simply taken the hit and released the film as quietly as possible, writing it off as another godawful video game adaptation destined to die on impact. But this time, producers listened. The trailer was released on Tuesday. By Thursday, the director had tweeted that the character would be completely redesigned. Six months after that, New Sonic was unveiled, and fans were delighted.
‘Teeth stolen from someone’s sleeping mouth’ … a still from the first Sonic the Hedgehog trailer. Photograph: Paramount Pictures
With a character that people could actually stand to look at, Sonic the Hedgehog went on to become the sixth biggest film of 2020. Nobody saw this coming. Until Sonic, video game adaptations were universally written off as the lowest form of cinema. Think of the dismal live action Super Mario Bros movie, or Mark Wahlberg’s baffling Max Payne, or Uwe Boll’s irredeemable Postal. About 46 English language video game adaptations were released between 1993 and 2019, and they made a combined total of $5.4bn. But A Minecraft Movie made close to a $1bn on its own. The animated Super Mario Movie released in 2023 ended the year second only to Barbie. At time of writing, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is the biggest film of 2026 so far worldwide. By demonstrating to other film-makers how to give people what they actually want to see, Sonic has turned the video game adaptation into a licence to print money.
As you will agree, this makes Sonic the Hedgehog by far the most important film of the decade. And the future will only bear this out further, once Mr Beast signs on to direct Sonic the Hedgehog 5 and someone makes a rubbish horror film about a blue hedgehog, as soon as the rights lapse in 2087.
