A24’s ‘Backrooms’ Passes ‘Us’ to Claim the 11th Spot in All-Time Domestic Horror History
Few genre films in recent memory have arrived with the kind of cultural groundswell that ‘Backrooms‘ brought to theaters at the end of May. The feature marks the debut of Kane Parsons, the 20-year-old creator known to the internet as Kane Pixels, who first introduced audiences to the unsettling mythology of endless yellow corridors and liminal spaces through a YouTube series that launched in 2022 and collectively garnered over 200 million views before the A24 film was ever announced.
The opening weekend announced ‘Backrooms’ as something genuinely unprecedented, with $81.4 million at the domestic box office and $118 million globally. Those figures represented the largest debut in history for an original horror film and more than tripled A24’s previous record, held by Alex Garland’s ‘Civil War’ from 2024. Parsons simultaneously became the youngest filmmaker ever to open a movie at number one, besting Josh Trank, who was 27 when ‘Chronicle’ launched in first place.
Now, in its fourth weekend, ‘Backrooms’ has crossed into legitimately historic territory. As @Luiz_Fernando_J highlighted on X, the film brought in $7.3 million over the frame despite losing 553 theaters on Friday, a hold of just 36.5 percent from the prior weekend. That pushed the domestic cumulative to $175.2 million, edging past the entire run of Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’ at $175.1 million and placing ‘Backrooms’ at number 11 on the all-time domestic horror chart.
A drop of under 37 percent in a fourth weekend, having shed hundreds of screens, reflects a film that is still genuinely pulling crowds rather than coasting on its earlier wave. The film earned a B minus CinemaScore from its opening weekend audience, and carries an 88 percent critics approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which makes the sustained run all the more convincing. Globally, ‘Backrooms’ has now grossed $272.7 million, making it A24’s highest-grossing release of all time.
The economics of the film are equally staggering. A24 and Chernin Entertainment co-financed the production for roughly $10 million, and the film has already returned that figure more than 16 times through U.S. ticket sales alone, with projections pointing toward a domestic final run near $190 million. Box office analyst Jeff Bock told Variety that the deep mythology of the Backrooms universe was responsible for the Marvel-scale demand that defied even the most optimistic projections heading into opening weekend.
A sequel is already in early development, with Parsons reportedly seeking a screenwriting collaborator and looking to take a more hands-on role in the script this time around. He has also signaled that a television expansion is being actively explored, hinting at developments he is not yet in a position to discuss publicly. For a film born from a teenager’s YouTube channel, ‘Backrooms’ has become one of the more extraordinary origin stories in modern studio filmmaking, and as it creeps closer to the top ten of domestic horror history, the question worth putting to horror fans is which title on that all-time list they think ‘Backrooms’ is most likely to overtake before its theatrical run is done.
