Backrooms, a psychological horror film directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, debuted to around $81.4 to $81.5 million at the U.S. box office over its opening weekend.

Produced on a modest $10 million budget, the film set new domestic opening records for original horror films and for independent studio A24. It also earned a record $10.4 million in Thursday preview screenings alone, the highest ever for A24 [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

Parsons became the youngest director to open a number one film at the North American box office, breaking the previous record set by Josh Trank at age 27. Parsons told reporters, "With films like Backrooms that started off as YouTube projects, you have to really reflect on what worked in the first place in order to avoid making something that’s too contrived and dense for newcomers to enjoy." [2, 3, 4, 8, 5, 6, 9, 7]

Backrooms is based on Parsons’ viral YouTube web series that began in 2022, itself inspired by a 2019 4chan meme describing an endless maze of yellow-lit rooms. The film follows a furniture store owner trapped inside an interdimensional maze beneath his store [1, 2, 3, 10, 8, 11, 6, 9, 7].

Critics gave Backrooms moderately positive reviews, with Rotten Tomatoes ratings ranging from 78% to 87% fresh. Some praised its atmospheric and conceptual approach to horror [12, 11]. The film grossed around $118 million worldwide by the end of its opening weekend [3, 4, 5].

Backrooms opened far above early tracking projections of $40 to 50 million. Jeff Bock, Exhibitor Relations analyst, said, "This should empower the industry. There’s a new audience, and they’re waiting for this kind of content... It’s actually competing with the big summer blockbusters." [4, 12, 6]

In the same weekend, Focus Features’ low-budget horror Obsession made $26.4 million domestically in its third weekend, totaling nearly $150 million worldwide. Disney’s Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian and Grogu dropped 70% to $25 million in its second weekend, finishing third behind Backrooms and Obsession [2, 4, 5, 6].

Parsons plans to expand Backrooms into a franchise, stating, "[Sequels are] more than an option — it’s been the intention since 2022. I went as far as I could with the YouTube series. [Making a feature film] became an option — I thought it'd be a much slower road to get to where things are now." He also intends to continue creating content on YouTube despite the film's success [7].