‘Backrooms’ Just Crashed the A24 Box Office Hall of Fame — Here’s Where It Ranks Among the Studio’s All-Time Biggest Films
Few studios have managed to turn independent filmmaking into a cultural religion the way A24 has. Since opening its doors in 2012, the New York-based company has built an identity out of taking big swings on unconventional stories, and that philosophy has consistently translated into outsized rewards. Now, with the arrival of ‘Backrooms,’ A24 is rewriting its own record books in real time.
A24’s buzzy horror film, directed by 20-year-old YouTube phenom Kane Parsons, obliterated box office expectations with $81 million domestically and $118 million worldwide in its opening weekend. For a studio whose entire identity was built on arthouse gambles and word-of-mouth champions, those numbers represent something genuinely unprecedented. The question now is exactly where ‘Backrooms’ lands in the wider story of A24’s highest-grossing films ever made, and how far it can still climb.
The ‘Backrooms’ Phenomenon and What It Means for A24 Horror
‘Backrooms’ is based on Parsons’ popular web series about liminal spaces, eerie, seemingly endless rooms and structures that originated on 4chan and gained popularity in online forums like Reddit and TikTok. The story follows a furniture store owner who finds a secret doorway that leads him to a seemingly endless stretch of nondescript rooms. When he disappears, his therapist ventures into the unknown to rescue him.
‘Backrooms’ set several box office benchmarks at once. It delivered the largest opening weekend ever for A24, crushing the record set by Alex Garland’s thriller ‘Civil War’ with $25.5 million. It also ranked as the biggest debut in history for original horror, as well as the best start for a first-time filmmaker on a non-franchise film.
Around 86 percent of the audience is younger than 35 and more than half are under 25, which speaks to how deeply the Backrooms mythology had already embedded itself in the imagination of a generation raised entirely online. A24 has long cultivated that digitally native fanbase, but ‘Backrooms’ showed exactly how explosive the results can be when source material is something Gen Z already treats as folklore.
A24 and Chernin Entertainment co-financed ‘Backrooms’ for roughly $10 million, making it already a wildly profitable hit. That budget-to-gross ratio is the kind of math A24 has quietly been delivering for years, just never at a scale this staggering, and never this fast.
The A24 Highest-Grossing Films Ranked Worldwide
‘Backrooms’ overtook ‘Marty Supreme’ as A24’s highest-grossing movie at the global box office, with a $212 million running cumulative total. To appreciate just how seismic a reshuffling that represents, here is where the studio’s biggest films currently stand worldwide, per the updated Wikipedia rankings for A24:
- ‘Backrooms’ (2026) — $212,657,858
- ‘Marty Supreme’ (2025) — $191,276,083
- ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ (2022) — $147,946,670
- ‘The Drama’ (2026) — $130,774,890
- ‘Civil War’ (2024) — $127,268,065
- ‘Materialists’ (2025) — $105,649,413
- ‘Talk to Me’ (2022) — $92,203,980
- ‘Hereditary’ (2018) — $90,431,327
- ‘Lady Bird’ (2017) — $79,389,383
- ‘Moonlight’ (2016) — $66,953,264
A24 has steadily transitioned from indie niche projects to star-driven movies that resonate broadly with audiences, recognizing a market void left by mainstream Hollywood studios that moved away from mid-budget, character-focused films. The presence of ‘The Drama’ at number four on that worldwide list, with its Zendaya and Robert Pattinson marquee power, is proof of exactly that shift playing out in real dollars.
From YouTube to No. 1: Kane Parsons and the New Wave of A24 Filmmakers
Parsons made his directorial debut with A24 at only 20 years old, making him the youngest person to ever lead an A24 production. That accomplishment alone would be remarkable, but the box office results have elevated it into something the industry will be dissecting for years.
Parsons and his contemporaries are part of a wave of YouTubers making the leap to the mainstream by bringing their enormous online fanbases with them. YouTubers Danny and Michael Philippou achieved a similar feat with A24’s supernatural horror film ‘Talk to Me,’ which earned $92 million against a $4.5 million budget.
The pattern is not accidental. It is a pipeline A24 has been quietly developing, converting internet-born storytellers into theatrical event filmmakers with devoted opening-weekend armies already assembled.
The cast is led by Academy Award nominees Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, joined by Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Avan Jogia. The film is executive-produced by ‘The Conjuring’ creator James Wan, alongside ‘Stranger Things’ producers Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen. The combination of a debut director with a formidable industry support structure is exactly the kind of calculated bet A24 specializes in.
A24’s Trajectory from Arthouse Darling to Box Office Force
‘The Drama,’ starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, became A24’s fifth film to do so after ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once,’ ‘Civil War,’ ‘Materialists,’ and ‘Marty Supreme’ all crossed the $100 million worldwide mark, and now ‘Backrooms‘ has bulldozed past all of them. The speed of that escalation is genuinely astonishing for a studio that spent its first decade celebrating films that cleared $20 million as wins.
The company has recently pivoted, recognizing a market void left by mainstream Hollywood studios that moved away from mid-budget, character-focused films, and by combining critically respected directors with prominent actors seeking to expand their artistic range, A24 has crafted a distinctive brand identity bolstered by innovative marketing efforts. That repositioning has clearly worked, producing a slate where critical darlings and genuine crowd-pleasers increasingly coexist.
A24 became the first independent studio to win Best Picture, Best Director, and all four acting categories in a single year at the 95th Academy Awards, cementing its critical prestige. What ‘Backrooms’ signals is the commercial ceiling has now been raised to a place the studio has never seen before, and the records it just shattered were not old ones, they were set just months ago by ‘Marty Supreme.’
What Comes Next for A24’s Box Office Legacy
In Australia and New Zealand, ‘Backrooms’ passed ‘Marty Supreme’ to become A24’s highest-grossing title in the territory. South Korea posted an impressive hold of only 11 percent down from its first weekend, a sign of exceptional audience legs globally. Those international numbers matter enormously for a film still in active theatrical release with room still to run.
‘Backrooms’ now ranks as A24’s highest-grossing movie at the domestic box office, overtaking the benchmark just established by ‘Marty Supreme’ with $96 million. ‘Marty Supreme,’ starring Timothée Chalamet as a ping-pong phenom, had been the indie studio’s biggest film worldwide, though ‘Backrooms’ has already surpassed that milestone as well.
The speed at which ‘Backrooms’ has reshaped the A24 record books is genuinely difficult to process. A studio that once celebrated a film crossing $50 million globally now has an internet-mythology horror film bearing down on $250 million worldwide, directed by a 20-year-old on his very first feature.
Whether you discovered A24 through ‘Moonlight’ or through late-night Backrooms lore videos on TikTok, this is a watershed moment, and we want to know: does ‘Backrooms’ feel like the arrival of a new A24 era to you, or do you think a film like ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ still represents the studio’s true creative peak?
