For most filmmakers, being able to direct a Star Wars movie would be considered a career milestone. It’s the kind of opportunity directors spend years chasing, and Hollywood certainly treats it that way. The industry has spent decades positioning major franchises as the ultimate destination for creative talent. Make an acclaimed indie, deliver a breakout hit, and earn the “right” to play with the biggest toys in the sandbox. That assumption is so deeply ingrained that audiences rarely question it anymore. When a director makes something great, the conversation often turns immediately to what franchise they should tackle next. Success isn’t viewed as an achievement itself, it’s viewed as a stepping stone toward something larger.
Kane Parsons doesn’t seem interested in that path. Fresh off the massive success of Backrooms, the 20-year-old filmmaker was recently asked whether he would ever want to direct a major franchise like Star Wars or Star Trek. His answer was a blunt “No.” In an industry that treats franchise filmmaking as the dream job, Parsons’ response is almost radical.
Hollywood Assumes Every Filmmaker Wants the Same Thing
The most interesting part of Parsons’ answer isn’t that he turned down the idea of directing Star Wars, it’s that Hollywood generally assumes every filmmaker wants to. There’s a tendency to view creative careers as a ladder. Directors start with small, personal projects before moving on to larger and larger productions. Eventually, if everything goes well, they end up steering a major franchise. That’s often presented as the natural endpoint of success. For some filmmakers, it genuinely is. Others are more interested in creating something that belongs entirely to them.
The problem is that those two ambitions are often treated as if they’re the same thing. A filmmaker who chooses to continue pursuing original work can sometimes be viewed as passing on an opportunity rather than pursuing a different goal. The assumption is that everyone wants to arrive at the same destination. Parsons’ comments suggest otherwise. They reveal a filmmaker who doesn’t see franchise work as an automatic promotion, but as a fundamentally different type of creative exercise.
Collider Exclusive · Horror Survival Quiz Which Horror Villain Do You Have the Best Chance of Surviving? Jason Voorhees · Michael Myers · Freddy Krueger · Pennywise · Chucky
Five killers. Five completely different ways to die — if you’re not smart enough, fast enough, or self-aware enough to avoid it. Only one of them is the villain your particular set of instincts gives you a fighting chance against. Eight questions will figure out which one.
Jason
Michael
Freddy
Pennywise
Chucky
01
Something feels wrong. You can’t explain it — you just know. What do you do? First instincts are the difference between the survivor and the first act casualty.
02
Where are you most likely to find yourself when things go wrong? Setting is everything in horror. Where you are determines which rules apply.
03
What is your most reliable survival asset? Every survivor has a quality the villain didn’t account for. What’s yours?
04
What kind of fear is hardest for you to fight through? Knowing your weakness is the first step to not dying because of it.
05
You’re with a group when things start going wrong. What’s your role? Horror movies are brutally clear about who survives group situations and who doesn’t.
06
What’s the horror movie mistake you’re most likely to make? Honest self-assessment is a survival skill. Denial is not.
07
What’s your best weapon against something that can’t be stopped by conventional means? Every horror villain has a weakness. The survivors are always the ones who find it.
08
It’s the final scene. You’re the last one standing. How did you make it? The final survivor always has a reason. What’s yours?
Your Survival Odds Have Been Calculated Your Best Chance Is Against…
Your instincts, your strengths, and your particular way of thinking under pressure point to one villain you actually have a fighting chance against. Everyone else — good luck.
Camp Crystal Lake · Friday the 13th
Jason Voorhees
Jason is relentless, but he is also predictable — and that is the gap you would exploit.
He moves in straight lines toward his target. He doesn’t strategise, doesn’t adapt, doesn’t outsmart. He simply pursues.
Your ability to keep moving, use the environment, and resist the panic that freezes most victims gives you a genuine edge.
The Crystal Lake survivors were always the ones who stopped running in circles and started thinking about terrain, water, and distance.
You think like that. Which means Jason, for all his indestructibility, would face someone who simply refused to be where he expected.
Haddonfield, Illinois · Halloween
Michael Myers
Michael watches before he moves. He is patient, methodical, and almost impossible to detect — until it’s too late for anyone who isn’t paying close enough attention.
But you are paying attention. You notice the shape in the window, the car parked slightly wrong, the silence where there should be sound.
Michael’s power lies in the invisibility of ordinary suburbia — the fact that nothing ever looks wrong until it already is.
Your spatial awareness and instinct to map every room, every exit, and every shadow before you need them is precisely the quality Laurie Strode had.
You are not a victim waiting to happen. You are someone who already suspects something is wrong — and acts on it.
Elm Street · A Nightmare on Elm Street
Freddy Krueger
Freddy wins by getting inside your head — using your own fears, your own memories, your own subconscious as weapons against you. That strategy requires a target who can be destabilised.
You are harder to destabilise than most. You’ve faced uncomfortable truths about yourself and you haven’t looked away.
The survivors on Elm Street were always the ones who understood what was happening and chose to face it rather than flee from it.
Freddy’s greatest weakness is that his power evaporates in the presence of someone who refuses to give him the fear he feeds on.
Your psychological resilience — the ability to stay grounded when reality itself becomes unreliable — is exactly the quality that keeps you alive here.
Derry, Maine · It
Pennywise
Pennywise is ancient, shapeshifting, and feeds on terror — but it has one critical vulnerability: it cannot function against someone who genuinely stops being afraid of it.
The Losers Club didn’t survive because they were braver than everyone else. They survived because they faced their fears together, and faced them honestly.
You ask the questions others avoid. You look directly at what frightens you rather than turning away.
That directness — the refusal to let fear fester in the dark — is Pennywise’s worst nightmare.
It chose the wrong target when it chose you. You are exactly the kind of person whose fear tastes like nothing at all.
Chicago · Child’s Play
Chucky
Chucky’s greatest advantage is that nobody takes him seriously until it’s already too late. He exploits the gap between how something looks and what it actually is.
You don’t have that gap. You take threats seriously regardless of how they present — and you never make the mistake of underestimating something because of its size or appearance.
Chucky relies on surprise, on the delay between recognition and response. You close that delay faster than almost anyone.
Your instinct to treat every unfamiliar thing with appropriate scepticism — rather than dismissing it because it seems absurd — is the exact quality that keeps you breathing.
Against Chucky, not laughing is already winning. You are very good at not laughing.
Parsons Knows Exactly What Made ‘Backrooms’ Work
When explaining his answer, Parsons said that filmmaking is a way of processing life. Art, he argued, becomes less meaningful when you’re forced to step into someone else’s worldview. The thoughtful response gets to the heart of why Backrooms connected with audiences in the first place: people didn’t show up to theaters for Backrooms because it was attached to a beloved brand, they showed up because it was something unusual and different. The movie took a bizarre internet phenomenon and transformed it into something cinematic through Parsons’ own perspective.
That’s the quality Hollywood is actually responding to. Studios may look at Backrooms and see a young filmmaker capable of handling larger projects. Audiences look at it and see a filmmaker with a distinctive voice. Those aren’t the same thing, and Parsons seems aware of that distinction. In the same interview, he also pushed back on reports claiming he was already looking for a writer to help develop a Backrooms sequel. Given the movie’s enormous success, the speculation was understandable. These days, every hit immediately sparks conversations about expansion. His response suggested someone who is less interested in building a brand than continuing to create.
Originality Is Still Hollywood’s Most Valuable Resource
The irony is that Parsons’ success story makes a strong argument for his position. Backrooms became a phenomenon because it offered something audiences hadn’t seen before. The same could be said for movies like Get Out, Talk to Me, and Barbarian, Sinners, and so many more. Their appeal wasn’t familiarity, it was discovery. Audiences still want to be surprised, but that’s easy to forget in an era dominated by existing intellectual property. Studios understandably gravitate toward recognizable brands because they feel safer, yet some of the biggest horror success stories of the past decade have come from original concepts rather than established franchises. Parsons understands that firsthand. The movie that turned him into one of the industry’s most sought-after young directors wasn’t a reboot, sequel, or adaptation of a major studio property. It was something strange, niche, and deeply tied to his own interests.
Perhaps he’ll eventually direct a franchise movie. He even admitted there are one or two childhood properties that might tempt him, such as a Portal adaptation. If that happens, there’s every reason to believe he’d bring something interesting to them. For now, though, his priorities feel refreshingly clear. Hollywood is always searching for the next great voice, and the best thing the industry can do once it finds one is resisting the urge to immediately lend that voice someone else’s story.
