The Director of ‘Backrooms’ Made the Extended Cut’s Extra 15 Minutes on His Laptop in Under Two Weeks

Kane Parsons built his entire filmmaking career on a laptop, and it turns out nothing has changed. The director of ‘Backrooms‘ confirmed in a Discord message that the 15 minutes of new footage included in the film’s extended theatrical release, ‘Backrooms: Everything Must Go Edition,’ was made in Blender on his personal laptop in just under two weeks, using the exact same creative workflow he developed as a YouTube creator.

In his own words, Parsons said he had “a lot of fun making Everything Must Go” and that “the whale thing was made in just under two weeks, all Blender on my laptop,” with the new footage only finished “about three days ago” at the time he posted. He added that it was “super cool being able to follow the YouTube pipeline but have it delivered at such a ludicrously huge scale.”

The extended version runs 2 hours and 6 minutes, up from the original’s 1 hour 51 minutes, with A24 bringing ‘Backrooms: Everything Must Go Edition’ back to theaters on July 3 at Emagine Entertainment, Regal Cinemas, and other venues. The re-release makes clear commercial sense given how the film has performed.

‘Backrooms’ has grossed $331 million worldwide against a production budget of under $10 million, making it A24’s highest-grossing film of all time and Parsons the youngest filmmaker to reach number one at the United States box office. The film opened to $81.4 million domestically in its first weekend, a result that stunned the industry given that early projections had placed it around $20 million.

The tools Parsons used for the extra footage are the same ones that built his entire creative reputation. He had used Blender to pre-visualize 90% of the original ‘Backrooms’ before shooting a single frame, with producer Adam Adelson noting that the approach “allowed us to stress-test everything ahead of time” and kept the production on schedule, with Parsons not going a day over time or budget.

Parsons, born in 2005 and now 20 years old, first began learning Blender at the age of 11 after pirating VFX software to teach himself digital effects techniques. He launched his YouTube channel in 2015 posting Minecraft videos before eventually building the original Backrooms web series into a phenomenon that accumulated 224 million views across 22 videos.

The production route for the extended cut is almost poetically fitting. A film that the internet grew organically before Hollywood ever touched it, made by a director who learned his craft entirely outside the traditional studio system, now delivers theatrical bonus footage the same way it would have appeared on YouTube, quickly assembled by one person working alone with a laptop and an open-source animation program.

Parsons confirmed in May that the Backrooms web series would continue, and in early June reports emerged suggesting he was exploring a sequel, though Parsons publicly denied that the project had advanced to the point of actively searching for a screenwriter. Whatever comes next from the Backrooms universe, this extended cut is proof that the method that made it is still fully intact.

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