The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act - Australian YouTube phenomenon just beat Star Wars at the box office

How many of you have heard of The Amazing Digital Circus before this weekend? Maybe if you’re young and cool, or have kids who are young and cool.

The YouTube web series made the leap to the big screen this past weekend and was the fifth highest grossing movie around the world with a global box office of $US35.4 million, according to Deadline.

That put it just ahead of Star Wars flick The Mandalorian and Grogu, which is in its third weekend of release.

Even more remarkable – it’s Australian.

The Amazing Digital Circus was born from an American creator named Gooseworx (real name Cooper Smith Goodwin), and Glitch Productions, which is Australian-based. Glitch, according to its bio, was founded by brothers Kevin and Luke Lerdwichagul out of their bedroom in Sydney.

The series has since October 2023 amassed collectively 1.34 billion views on YouTube across eight half-hour episodes. It’s been dubbed into 15 languages, has eons of merchandise available and has won an Annie Award, which is akin to the Oscars of animation.

The animated series tells the story of humans who have become trapped in the guise of cute cartoon characters in a virtual reality dressed up like a circus. There, they attempt to find a way out while an AI ringmaster subject them to strange scenarios.

The show is an off-beat psychological thriller with dark themes, and is arguably horror-adjacent.

The film, The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act, is a combination of the previously released eighth episode of the series, and the unreleased ninth and final instalment of the story.

The movie is part of this wave of YouTube breakthroughs that have existing online fanbases that mainstream audiences had yet to catch wind of until it rockets up the charts.

In Australia, the film opened at $1.97 million in fifth spot with an impressive screen average of $9109. That’s a lot of bum on seats for a feature that had very little conventional marketing and publicity and is playing only for one week.

It will be released online on June 18 which means that audiences paid to see a film that will be “free” a few days later, reflecting an enthusiasm among its fans to support it with their cash. There had also been an online leak of a Portuguese-dubbed version of the film out of Brazil weeks earlier.

While it had a distribution deal in the US, it doesn’t appear to have had one in Australia and seemed to have been independently booked across 217 screens.

Anecdotally, fans have been individually bombarding cinema programmers to schedule the film, which followed similar activity in the US earlier this year when YouTube gaming personality Markiplier independently distributed his horror film, Iron Lung, which went on to gross $US51.2 million globally.

The commercial success of the film comes in the midst of this remarkable moment in which young YouTube and online creators are dominating the conversation in cinema.

Of the top five movies in Australia this past weekend, three of them came from YouTube creators, the other two being Obsession, directed by Curry Barker, 27, and Backrooms, directed by Kane Parsons, 20. Both are horror movies.

Obsession has become a word-of-mouth phenomenon, grossing $US224 million worldwide from a production budget of under $US1 million. In Australia, it’s made $11 million, starting with an opening of $809,000 before doubling its box office over the next two weekends and settling at $3 million in its fourth window.

Backrooms, which was produced by prestige indie studio A24 and stars Oscar nominees Renate Reinsve and Chiwetel Ejiofor was born out of a creepypasta (a type of online meme), and over two weekends has grossed $US212 million including $9.65 million in Australia. Its production budget was sub-$US10 million.

Hollywood and entertainment circles are reckoning with what this onslaught of YouTube filmmakers mean for the future of the industry.

On the one hand, there’s an optimism in the air that younger audiences, once thought lost to social media and online video platforms, will crowd into physical cinemas when there’s a title that interests them.

Last year’s box office success of Minecraft, adapted from the open-world online game, had seen young fans show up with enthusiasm.

On the other hand, there are questions over if this is a permanent shift in production processes and the talent pipeline, and if the industry will take the correct “lessons” from this success.

After the Barbie movie hit big in 2023, rather than a surge of female-centred stories by female filmmakers, the industry instead rushed into production a bunch of other “based on a toy” movies.

For the moment, Australia’s Glitch Productions can take a well-earnt victory lap.

Chief executive Kevin Lerdwichagul posted to the production company’s Instagram, “To the fans – thank you, deeply. You are the reason we got here. I know it can get noisy online sometimes, but the real-world reality is that you are some of the most genuine, kind people we have ever had the privilege of meeting.

“We saw every cosplay, every discussion circle, every sticker shared outside the theatres. That is what this is all about.

“To the industry – animation and cinema is art. Art is human expression. Digital Circus was a deeply personal story created to express complex feelings. Please let that be the signal you take from all of this.”

Glitch Productions have been contacted for comment.