Backrooms has already recorded the highest grossing opening weekend in the history of its studio, A24.
The 4chan-inspired horror movie, directed by 20 year-old Kane Parsons, made $38 million in the United States on Friday.
As Variety reports, that puts the film on course to make somewhere around $85 million to $90 million over its opening weekend.
It has already surpassed A24’s previous record holder, Civil War, which opened to $25.5 million in 2024.
Last year’s Marty Supreme opened to $17.5 million across its first three-day weekend but went on to become the studio’s highest grossing film of all time, making around $191 million globally.
Backrooms, which stars Oscar-nominated actors Renate Reinsve and Chiwetel Ejiofor, is named after a concept that originated in the late 2010s.
It was inspired by an internet meme that took root on the image board 4chan, showing an eerie windowless room.
Kane Parsons was a teenage sci-fi enthusiast who made homemade videos set in the “Backrooms” before A24 tapped him to direct the film adaptation.
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Parsons told The Independent that he “was very paranoid” about choosing a studio before agreeing to work with A24, adding: “I think a big part of why I can now say things went really smoothly and really positively – and why I was able to retain a massive amount of creative control and leverage – is due to the specific people I worked with.”
These included Longlegs director Osgood Perkins, who has become a mentor to Parsons.
The film has been praised by critics, and earned a glowing four-star review from The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey.
“It’s not the scariest, or even quite the smartest, horror you’ll see this year (it lacks the shock factor of the recent Obsession, written and directed by fellow YouTube graduate Curry Barker),” wrote Loughrey.
“Still, it’s mesmeric and wildly unique in a way I suspect will stand the test of time, since nothing else put to film feels this much like watching the collective Gen Z nightmare come to life – a half-confused grief over never having lived in the analogue era, an attraction to and fear of VHS infomercials, sofa stores, and TV dinner trays…
“While the Backrooms, to the non-online and the non-gamer, might seem like a byproduct of Apple TV+’s Severance, their language has been deployed for years by games like Control, The Exit 8, and Lethal Company.
“But the many video game adaptations we’ve seen haven’t really dared to tell their stories in the medium’s minimalist, environment-driven way, where characters learn through the objects around them. Backrooms does. And it’s all the more fascinating for it. We’ll have to see who follows in Parsons’s footsteps, but his film might very well end up defining a generation.”
