Backrooms Becomes A24’s First-Ever $400 Million Movie, and Backrooms 2 Is Already Locked In
Nearly four months after its surprise Memorial Day release, A24’s horror hit Backrooms has crossed $400 million at the worldwide box office, making it the highest-grossing film in the studio’s history. It’s a stunning outcome for a movie built around an internet meme about empty office hallways, and it’s turned Kane Parsons, the 20-year-old YouTuber who created the viral web series the film is based on, into one of the industry’s most sought-after young directors.
The film’s global total now sits just above $400 million, split roughly evenly between a domestic haul of around $197 million and an international total making up the rest, according to Variety. That’s a remarkable return on a production that reportedly cost under $10 million to make, and Variety notes the film has kept adding to its total thanks to a surprisingly strong late run in Asian markets.
A Record-Breaking Run From Day One
Backrooms opened wide over Memorial Day weekend on May 29 with $81.5 million domestically and $118 million worldwide, both A24 records at the time. It kept climbing from there, overtaking Marty Supreme to become the studio’s highest-grossing release ever within about two weeks of hitting theaters. A24 gave the film a second wind in July with an expanded theatrical rerelease called Backrooms: Everything Must Go, adding roughly 15 minutes of new footage and extending its run well into the fall instead of letting it fade after the summer.
The endless yellow maze at the center of Backrooms is the same imagery that made Kane Parsons’ original web series a viral hit.
What Is Backrooms, Anyway?
For anyone who missed the internet phenomenon behind it, Backrooms adapts Parsons’ own viral YouTube series, released under the channel name Kane Pixels starting in January 2022, along with the wider “Backrooms” creepypasta that inspired it. The film follows a furniture store owner, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, and his therapist, played by Renate Reinsve, after they discover an endless dimension of dull yellow rooms accessible through the store’s basement. Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Avan Jogia round out the cast. One line from the film’s marketing sums up the dread nicely: “This place builds them. Actually, more like it, it remembers them.”
Kane Parsons Breaks a 14-Year-Old Record
Parsons was just 20 years old when Backrooms hit theaters, and its opening made him the youngest director ever to have a debut feature open at number one at the box office, surpassing the record Josh Trank set with Chronicle back in 2012. Critics have largely been won over too, with the film sitting at 87 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 76 on Metacritic, and reviewers repeatedly comparing its unsettling atmosphere to Eraserhead and Skinamarink rather than to typical studio horror fare.
A Sequel Is Already Coming
A24 isn’t wasting any time capitalizing on the win. Multiple outlets reported back in July that the studio was offering Parsons a three-year deal worth roughly $65 million to develop two more features, including a Backrooms sequel, though that figure has never been officially confirmed by either side and reporting at the time suggested the deal wasn’t fully locked in yet. What has since firmed up is the sequel itself: after downplaying sequel talk earlier in the summer, Parsons is now confirmed to be returning as director for Backrooms 2, even though A24 hasn’t made a formal announcement, set a release date, or confirmed a writer or any returning cast. Parsons has previously talked about wanting to grow Backrooms into something bigger than one movie, with a television spinoff and more of his own YouTube content as part of the long-term plan.
Backrooms isn’t the only piece of internet horror folklore A24 is chasing right now. The studio is also turning the collaborative fiction project SCP Foundation into a film, following much the same playbook of mining weird, crowd-sourced internet lore for the big screen.
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Picture Source: A24
