A24’s ‘Backrooms’ Just Became the 13th Highest-Grossing Horror Film in North American History

When Kane Parsons uploaded his first ‘Backrooms’ short to YouTube in 2022, he was a teenager making found footage horror on a shoestring budget, tapping into one of the internet’s most unsettling mythologies.

The video went viral, spawned a cult following, and eventually caught the attention of A24, who handed the then-teenager a feature film deal. Few could have predicted just how far the journey would go from that initial upload to what is happening at the domestic box office right now.

‘Backrooms,’ Parsons’ feature-length adaptation of his viral web series, opened in theaters on May 29 to an $81.4 million domestic debut, instantly shattering A24’s previous opening weekend record and making Parsons, at just 20 years old, the youngest filmmaker in history to top the North American box office. Those ticket sales also delivered the biggest opening weekend ever for an original horror movie, more than tripling the previous A24 record set by Alex Garland’s ‘Civil War’ in 2024. The film’s trajectory since then has been the story of a genuine phenomenon still finding its legs.

By its third weekend, the picture had taken yet another historic step. According to box office analyst Luiz Fernando, ‘Backrooms’ earned an estimated $11.5 million on its third three-day frame, bringing its domestic cumulative total to $160.2 million. That figure was enough to surpass ‘A Quiet Place Part Two’s’ $160.1 million domestic lifetime total, officially making the A24 horror film the 13th highest-grossing horror movie of all time at the North American box office.

The Kane Parsons film collected approximately $11.7 million on its third three-day weekend, declining 56.8% and losing 161 theaters on Friday, resulting in a domestic total that has now hit the $160 million range after just three weekends in theaters. A 56% drop is not especially gentle, but in the context of what ‘Backrooms’ has already accomplished, it remains a remarkable result for a film that cost so little to produce.

The budget figure is what makes the entire story almost surreal. A24 and Chernin Entertainment co-financed ‘Backrooms’ for roughly $10 million, meaning it has already returned its investment many times over and stands as one of the most profitable theatrical releases in recent memory. As Luiz Fernando noted, even if the film stopped playing tomorrow, it has already multiplied its production cost by over 16 times through U.S. box office alone. Projections now point to a final domestic run somewhere between $175 million and $190 million.

The film follows a small-town furniture store owner who discovers a portal to an otherworldly dimension in his showroom, and features a cast that includes Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and Mark Duplass. James Wan, Shawn Levy, and Osgood Perkins serve among the film’s producers, alongside Peter Chernin and Jenno Topping.

Parsons is part of a wave of YouTube creators making the leap to mainstream cinema by bringing their enormous online fanbases with them, following in the footsteps of Markiplier’s ‘Iron Lung’ and Curry Barker’s ‘Obsession,’ another low-budget sensation that has been rewriting box office norms this summer. The pattern is becoming difficult for Hollywood to ignore: three consecutive YouTube filmmakers, three major theatrical hits.

Parsons has addressed sequel speculation directly, saying he is “not sure where that got out” regarding reports of him seeking a sequel writer, and called it “more like a hallucination.” He has, however, described a TV continuation as his “dream scenario.”

Globally, ‘Backrooms’ has now surpassed the worldwide totals of several major horror titles including ‘Get Out,’ ‘Us,’ ‘Annabelle,’ ‘Halloween,’ and ‘A Quiet Place: Day One,’ ranking it among the all-time top 35 highest-grossing horror films worldwide. For a film born from a 4chan post and a teenager’s YouTube channel, that is a sentence that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago.

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