‘Obsession’ vs. ‘Backrooms’: The Box Office Numbers Behind Horror’s Most Stunning Double Act
Two horror films. Two YouTube-trained directors in their twenties. Two studios that just watched their records get shattered in the same weekend. The convergence of ‘Obsession’ and ‘Backrooms’ at the domestic box office is not just a good story, it is arguably the defining movie industry moment of 2026.
The numbers tell a story that Hollywood executives will be studying for years. ‘Obsession‘ and ‘Backrooms‘ are two buzzy non-franchise horror films directed by YouTube-trained Gen Z filmmakers Curry Barker and Kane Parsons. Neither arrived with legacy IP, cinematic universe scaffolding, or a nine-figure marketing campaign, yet together they have redefined what is possible at the theatrical box office for original genre filmmaking.
The Unprecedented Run of ‘Obsession’
To understand just how wild the ‘Obsession’ story is, consider what it cost to make it. ‘Obsession’ was co-produced by Blumhouse Productions and brought to U.S. theaters by Focus Features starting May 15, and in the time since its debut, it has already earned more than 100 times its reported $750,000 budget.
Over the long Memorial Day weekend, the film soared to $23.9 million for the three-day number, a record-smashing increase of 39.4 percent over its opening weekend haul of $17.2 million from 2,615 theaters at the domestic box office. For context, horror movies simply do not do that. At all.
That $23.9 million figure represents a 39% increase from the movie’s opening weekend, something that has never happened for any horror movie that opened on 2,000 or more screens in recorded box office history. The word-of-mouth engine behind this film is unlike anything the genre has seen in modern times.
Current projections suggest a remarkable 19% jump in its third weekend of release, a virtually unheard-of result for a wide release, with an estimated $28 million weekend ahead, meaning ‘Obsession’ should easily cross the $100 million mark domestically. ‘Obsession’ is now the first film in more than 40 years to increase in both its second and third weekends, outside of Christmas.
‘Backrooms’ Shatters A24’s Own Records
If ‘Obsession’ is the slow-burn legend, ‘Backrooms’ arrived like a thunderclap. ‘Backrooms’ mushroomed to an opening between $85 million and $88 million, setting a far-and-away record first day and opening weekend for A24, with numbers higher than ‘Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu’ the prior weekend.
‘Backrooms’ earned an excellent $38.4 million opening day from 3,442 locations, and is now projected by industry estimates for a stunning $90 million opening weekend that ranks as the third highest domestic opening ever for a horror film, behind the $117 million opening of ‘It’ in 2017 and the $91 million of ‘It: Chapter Two’ in 2019. That is an extraordinary comparison for a movie made for a fraction of those productions’ costs.
With just a $10 million production budget, ‘Backrooms’ will be a major financial success for A24 and 20-year-old Parsons, who is making his feature directorial debut. It will also become A24’s top-grossing domestic release of all time in its first week, overtaking ‘Marty Supreme’s’ record of around $95 million.
‘Backrooms’ holds a Certified Fresh 90% score on Rotten Tomatoes, with the critical consensus describing it as a startlingly assured feature debut from director Kane Parsons. The audience CinemaScore, however, tells a slightly different tale. Audiences gave the film a B- on CinemaScore and a 74% audience RT score, which could mean ‘Backrooms’ ends up being more frontloaded than ‘Obsession’.
The Gen Z YouTube Pipeline That Hollywood Ignored
The deeper story behind both films is where these directors came from. ‘Obsession’ hails from 26-year-old content creator Curry Barker, known for his sketch horror and comedy duo “That’s a Bad Idea,” while ‘Backrooms’ is an offshoot of a viral web series overseen by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, who released his first short found-footage tour through those eerie environments in 2022.
Barker’s sketch comedy channel has over 1 million subscribers, and his 2024 hour-long found-footage horror film ‘Milk and Serial’ has nearly 3 million views. Meanwhile, Parsons has over 3 million subscribers on his channel Kane Pixels, where the idea of ‘Backrooms’ originated, with videos ranging from 3 million to as many as 80 million views.
‘Backrooms’ will cap off what has been a spectacular May for the box office, crossing $1 billion in domestic grosses for the first time since 2019 and for the first time ever without the release of a Marvel movie. That is the kind of sentence that should be printed and pinned on every development executive’s wall in Hollywood.
What the Numbers Mean for the Future of Horror
The combined cultural and commercial impact of these two films is hard to overstate. It is extremely rare to see a horror movie have such high ratings backed by an absurd box office haul, but for two movies to do it at the same time to this degree is nearly unprecedented.
Many of the biggest success stories of the year, including ‘Obsession’ and ‘Backrooms,’ are not traditional franchise sequels, and the recent success of original films suggests that audiences are more willing to embrace fresh ideas than many studio executives have assumed.
Barker is already booked and busy, with his next feature film ‘Anything But Ghosts’ starring Aaron Paul already in development, and he has been tapped by A24 to write and direct the upcoming Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot. It was also recently reported that Barker was being offered $10 million for his next movie from an undisclosed studio. The age of the YouTube auteur is not a fluke, it is a pipeline, and the box office receipts are the proof of concept.
Now that both films are in theaters simultaneously and the numbers are in, the real debate begins: is ‘Obsession’ the more impressive achievement for sustaining and growing audience enthusiasm across three weekends, or does ‘Backrooms’ win for its sheer explosive debut, and which of these two Gen Z horror visions actually scared you more?
