A $10 Million Film Made by a 20-Year-Old YouTuber Just Entered Horror Box Office Legend
Few stories in recent Hollywood memory feel quite as improbable as the one unfolding around ‘Backrooms.’ The film, rooted in one of the internet’s most enduring pieces of digital folklore, began not in a studio development room but on a YouTube channel run by a teenager from Northern California. Now, barely three weekends into its theatrical run, it has transformed into one of the genre’s most commercially significant achievements in years.
The film follows Clark, a struggling furniture store owner who finds a portal to a hidden world resembling an unused office space, and his therapist Mary, who ventures into the labyrinthine dimension when Clark goes missing. The feature was produced with the backing of James Wan and Osgood Perkins, among others, and co-financed by A24 and Chernin Entertainment for roughly $10 million.
After three weekends in theaters, ‘Backrooms’ surpassed ‘A Quiet Place’s’ $160.1 million domestic total, making it the all-time 13th highest-grossing horror film in North American history. The milestone places Kane Parsons’ debut feature in rarefied company among decades of genre giants, a staggering achievement for a film built on a 2019 creepypasta image and a string of viral YouTube shorts.
The journey to that ranking began with a record-shattering debut. ‘Backrooms’ collected $81 million from 3,442 North American theaters in its opening weekend, more than tripling the previous A24 opening-weekend record held by ‘Civil War.’ The film became A24’s highest-grossing worldwide release and the studio’s first movie to surpass $200 million in ticket sales. By its third weekend, the global haul crossed $250 million, surpassing the worldwide totals of ‘Get Out,’ ‘Us,’ and ‘A Quiet Place: Day One,’ among others.
Much of the conversation has centered on the man behind the camera. On January 7, 2022, Kane Parsons posted a nine-minute short film to YouTube titled ‘The Backrooms (Found Footage),’ depicting a young filmmaker falling into an unsettling dimension of unoccupied office space. He became the youngest director in history to have a film top the box office charts. Speaking to Deadline about his relationship with the platform that launched his career, Parsons said that YouTube “has been how I know how to do any of the stuff I do.” Around 86 percent of the audience is younger than 35, with more than half under the age of 25.
The film holds a 88% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 7.1 out of 10 on IMDb, with critics and audiences identifying Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve as standout contributors whose nuanced portrayals convey the psychological strain of confinement and add emotional weight to the sparse narrative. The film is currently tracking to earn between $300 million and $340 million in its total global run, a figure that would push it even further up the all-time horror rankings.
Whether ‘Backrooms’ can hold its momentum through a competitive summer and keep climbing that all-time domestic chart is exactly the kind of question horror fans are obsessing over right now, so share where you think this liminal nightmare ends up by the time its theatrical run is done.
