A Reddit user called GnarlyNet found in mid-July that a Backrooms T-shirt had disappeared from the Redbubble platform. It was a variation on the original yellow photo from which the whole internet phenomenon was born, and it had nothing to do with the film made on the same theme. Yet a complaint nonetheless came on behalf of A24 Films. Within two days the studio withdrew the claim. It was forced to do so by its own director.
What A24 had removed from Redbubble and Google Play
The removal was not limited to GnarlyNet. Similar content disappeared for daisyblue45 too, both on the basis of a complaint filed on behalf of A24 Films on 15 July. The hardest hit were game developers. The studio Davilkus Games described how it woke up to a wave of emails from Google Play. “Back on July 3rd, I woke up to a bunch of emails from Google Play. Some of our Backrooms games were permanently taken down out of nowhere,” the developer said. Three strikes for alleged copyright infringement led to the blocking of his developer account. He had previously renamed his game from “Exit the Backrooms: Level 94” to “Liminal Complex: Level 94” to comply with Google’s rule against imitation, but that did not protect him. According to the developer, at least three other small indie studios received similar claims the same day.
Kane Parsons’s intervention and the withdrawal of the claim
The film’s director Kane Parsons himself responded to the first Reddit thread about the takedowns. “I’m looking into this. Should not be happening,” he wrote. A day later he added that he had contacted the studio. “A24 has confirmed to me that the wallpaper takedowns were an outsourced system error in pursuit of removing camrips,” he said, explaining that it was an automated system strike aimed at pirated copies of the film. “They have been very adamant they have never wanted to touch the community,” he added, noting that he was pushing the studio.
A24 then issued an official statement on 17 July. “A24 makes no claim of ownership over the yellow wallpaper, the original post referencing it, or any of the community works that have since been built around it. We will continue to support the artists who, like Kane, were inspired by it,” it said. The studio described the claim as automated and framed the whole affair by saying that “Backrooms is one part of an infinitely bigger ecosystem, rife with creatives who have every right to tell their own version of the story”. The removed items began to return.
Backrooms began in 2019 on 4chan
The claim did not hold up because of the brand’s origin. Backrooms was created on 12 May 2019 in a thread on the paranormal board /x/ of the 4chan server. One user at the time added a description to a photograph of a yellow room, and the description became canon. “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in,” was the original text. The community traced the origin of the photo itself in May 2024. It was taken in June 2002, during the renovation of a former furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The brand’s foundations were laid by an anonymous community years before any studio entered the picture.
A24’s offer and competition from other studios
Parsons got into this world as a creator performing under the name Kane Pixels. He began uploading the Backrooms video series to YouTube on 7 January 2022, and when it spread, Hollywood studios took an interest. In February 2023, A24, Chernin Entertainment, Atomic Monster and 21 Laps Entertainment announced an adaptation with Parsons as director. It was his feature debut, and he was seventeen when he was hired. The film reached American cinemas on 29 May 2026, grossing $384.4 million worldwide on a budget of over $10 million, and became A24’s highest-grossing film ever. The director was twenty at the time of release.
That is why the creator now holds the upper hand. According to a report by Matthew Belloni in Puck, A24 is offering Parsons a three-year first-look deal worth $65 million across film and television, including a sequel to Backrooms. According to the same source, Warner Bros. and NBCUniversal are also pursuing the director. A studio that has earned more from the brand than any other in its history cannot afford to lose the trust of the audience that Parsons represents. When the leading creator of the community stood up for it, the studio backed down.
Automated claims and the European framework
The whole incident was set off by an automated system connected to copyright enforcement, which reached for content the studio does not own. That is a weakness shared by platforms from Redbubble to Google Play, and it is not limited to Hollywood. European brands and production houses that buy stakes in IP run by creators are facing the same lesson. Owning something on paper does not guarantee control over the community that co-creates the brand, and badly configured automatic enforcement can turn the audience against the rights holder faster than any competitor could.
Ben Odell, CEO of the agency Open Gardens, summed up this shift in a LinkedIn note: “Hollywood is going to need a new playbook for capturing IP in this era”. According to him, the system must adapt to an audience that “doesn’t just consume IP. It participates in it”.
The lever over the brand, from which A24 extracted its largest earnings to date, is not held by the studio. It is held by the author whose YouTube series gave the community its shape. In the end, the franchise is held by the one the community trusts.
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