A24 Just Beat Warner Bros. and Paramount at Their Own Game This Summer, and ‘Backrooms’ Deserves the Credit

Summer box office season has traditionally belonged to the same handful of major studios year after year, with franchise sequels and known IP dominating theaters while smaller distributors fight for scraps around the edges. That pattern held for decades, making it easy to assume the hierarchy at the top would stay locked in place indefinitely.

This year’s numbers are telling a genuinely different story. According to data reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Universal, Disney, and Sony combined to account for roughly 70% of the entire summer domestic box office, pulling in $1.208 billion, $1.019 billion, and $956 million respectively to firmly dominate the season’s overall totals.

But it’s what happened just below that top tier that’s turning heads across the industry. Warner Bros., which finished the summer at 5% market share, and Paramount, which landed at 4.5%, were both surpassed by A24’s 5.5% share, marking the first time an indie distributor has ended a summer ahead of a Big Five studio.

A24’s surge to $242 million domestically this summer traces directly back to one film. ‘Backrooms,’ directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons and based on his viral web series about eerie, endless liminal spaces, opened to a jaw-dropping $81 million domestically from 3,442 theaters, instantly becoming A24’s largest opening weekend ever and more than tripling the previous studio record set by 2024’s ‘Civil War.’

Made for roughly $10 million alongside co-financier Chernin Entertainment, ‘Backrooms’ went on to become A24’s highest-grossing film of all time both domestically and globally, eventually overtaking Timothée Chalamet’s ‘Marty Supreme’ to claim the title. The film’s success proved enormous relative to its tiny budget, giving A24 a genuinely franchise-caliber hit without the franchise-caliber spending typically required to compete with major studios.

Positioned directly behind A24 on the summer chart, Warner Bros. brought in $234 million domestically while Paramount finished with $204.5 million, a gap of just a few percentage points that nonetheless marked a symbolic shift in how the summer box office landscape breaks down. Rounding out the chart, Lionsgate posted $265 million, Amazon MGM brought in $170 million, and Fathom Entertainment closed with $47.4 million.

A24’s rise wasn’t an isolated fluke tied only to ‘Backrooms’ either. The studio’s success arrived during a summer where micro-budget original films disrupted the traditional formula for box office success more broadly, with Focus Features’ horror hit ‘Obsession’ also posting historic numbers for its own label during the same stretch.

That trend reflects a wider industry conversation about what actually draws audiences into theaters. Rather than relying purely on established franchises backed by massive marketing budgets, smaller, genuinely original concepts from directors with strong online followings managed to punch well above their weight class against studios spending exponentially more per release.

With Paramount’s proposed $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery still looming over the industry’s broader landscape, A24 quietly outperforming two of Hollywood’s most storied studios this summer adds an unexpected wrinkle to conversations about where real box office momentum is coming from heading into the back half of the year.

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