A24 has a new box office king, and it got there at breakneck speed.
Backrooms, the Kane Parsons-directed feature adaptation of his viral creepypasta YouTube series, has become the New York studio’s highest-grossing movie ever with a running worldwide cume of $212.6M in just ten days of release, unseating the Josh Safdie-directed, Timothée Chalamet-starring Marty Supreme, which finaled at $191.2M globally. For context, it took Marty Supreme 53 days to unseat A24’s previous record holder, Everything Everywhere All at Once ($147.9M WW). Backrooms did it in under two weeks.
What the Movie Is About
The film follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a furniture store owner, and Mary (Renate Reinsve), his therapist, who discover a dimension of seemingly endless liminal spaces accessed through the basement of the store. Equal parts psychological horror and science fiction, the film leans into the uncanny dread of the original mythology while grounding it in a mental health narrative. Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell round out the supporting cast.
Critics responded warmly, and audiences awarded the film an overwhelmingly positive reception, though the pic skews heavily toward younger viewers: 81% of its second weekend audience was under 35, which helps explain the steep domestic drop this frame.
How We Got Here
The backstory behind Backrooms is as unconventional as the film itself. Kane Parsons was a teenager when he uploaded his first Backrooms video to YouTube in January 2022, a short found-footage style clip that tapped into the existing creepypasta mythology of the Backrooms, an internet urban legend describing an infinite maze of empty office spaces, humming fluorescent lights, and yellowed carpet that one “noclips” into by accident. The video went viral almost immediately, racking up tens of millions of views and spawning a series of follow-up episodes that Parsons continued to develop with remarkable production sophistication for his age.
After the series exploded in popularity, multiple studios came calling. In February 2023, it was officially announced that a feature adaptation was in development with Parsons directing. Roberto Patino was initially attached to write the screenplay but was later replaced by Will Soodik. Filming began in the summer of 2025 and wrapped in August of that year. The film premiered at the Aero Theatre in Los Angeles on May 7, 2026, before its wide theatrical release on May 29 via A24. The production was co-financed with Chernin Entertainment, with Blumhouse-Atomic Monster, 21 Laps, and Phobos also aboard as producers. The budget came in at under $10M, with a domestic P&A in the teen millions.
The Numbers
The Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve-starring film ranked third at the global box office this weekend with a second frame of $50.1M across 52 territories, comprising $25.9M domestic (down 68%, largely a function of its front-loaded fanbase) and $24.1M from offshore. The North American running cume stands at $135M, with international at $77.6M.
The international picture is particularly strong. Latin America leads all territories with $24.2M, making Backrooms A24’s highest-grossing title ever in the region. The UK posted not only the best opening weekend for any A24 title in the territory but also the best horror opening of the year, adding $3M this weekend and ranking third overall for a total cume of $11.6M. Australia and New Zealand have seen the film pass Marty Supreme to become A24’s highest-grossing title in the territory with $7.9M to date. South Korea posted a remarkable 11% hold from its opening weekend for a total of $5.7M, a record for any A24 release in that country. Spain saw Backrooms rank No. 1 by a wide margin with $2M. The film also posted the best-ever opening weekend for an A24 title in both Malaysia and the Philippines.
A Bigger Weekend Picture
Backrooms was not the only record-setter this weekend. Lionsgate’s Michael crossed $888M worldwide, becoming that studio’s highest-grossing title in its history. Focus Features’ Obsession, horror filmmaker Curry Barker’s breakout, surpassed $224.6M worldwide to become the Universal Classic label’s highest-grossing film ever, unseating 2019’s Downton Abbey. The film dropped only 7% this weekend to reach $152M domestic, putting it on track to become only the second film since E.T. in 1982 to post a larger second and third weekend than its first outside the Christmas corridor.
What Comes Next
Hollywood may be moving faster than Parsons is. Speaking on The Town podcast with Matt Belloni, the 29-year-old pushed back on reports that a sequel was already in development with a new writer attached, calling the story “more like a hallucination.” He was equally cool on franchise IP work broadly. “I pretty much want to focus on original projects,” Parsons said. “I do this because it’s my way of processing life, as is art. And I typically find needing to step into someone else’s view of life tends to just kind of damage the initial point for me.”
He did leave a small door open for properties that shaped him personally, citing games like Portal and Half-Life and early 2000s material as the rare exceptions, while noting his creative interests have drifted increasingly toward grounded science fiction. “I have found over time that I’m more interested in the grounded parts of science fiction that I can see and interact with in my actual own life in reality,” he said.
Whether a sequel eventually materializes or not, what is undeniable is that Backrooms has redrawn the map of what an A24 commercial release can look like, and done so on a shoestring budget with a first-time feature director at the helm. The studio, the filmmaker, and the internet mythology that started it all have together pulled off one of the more unlikely blockbuster stories in recent memory.