Kane Parsons is 20 years old, and as of this weekend he is the director of the biggest opening in A24’s 14-year history. Backrooms, the psychological horror film he adapted from his own viral YouTube series, opened to $81.4 million domestically and $118 million worldwide on its debut weekend of May 29.
Against a production budget of $10 million, co-financed by A24 and Chernin Entertainment, the numbers represent one of the most profitable launches of 2026 and the clearest signal yet that the generation of filmmakers who built audiences on YouTube is now dominating theatrical cinema.
What Backrooms Is About
Backrooms is rooted in one of the internet’s most enduring pieces of folk horror. The concept originated from a single photograph of an empty, fluorescent-lit office corridor posted anonymously online in 2019 — the image sparked a mythology around the idea of “no-clipping” out of reality and finding oneself trapped in an infinite series of liminal spaces.
Parsons, then a teenager, turned that mythology into a found-footage YouTube series that has accumulated 80 million views. The series followed a fictional research group venturing deeper into these spaces, and its combination of genuine dread and DIY filmmaking craft caught the attention of A24, which trusted Parsons to make the feature himself rather than hand the concept to an established director, per Popviewers.
The film, running 105 minutes, stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as a failed architect who stumbles across a strange doorway in the basement of a furniture showroom he manages, with Renate Reinsve in a supporting role. The logline — “a strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom” — is deliberately spare, per the official A24 synopsis.
The Records Backrooms Has Already Broken
Backrooms earned $10.4 million in Thursday night previews alone, which was enough to recover its entire reported production budget before Friday morning, and a new A24 record that surpassed Civil War’s previous preview record of $2.9 million.
By Friday, the film had earned $38.4 million including previews , putting it on course for a weekend that exceeded even the most optimistic industry projections, which had originally tracked the film at $20 million to $50 million, per Deadline.
The final domestic opening weekend figure of $81.4 million is the largest opening in A24’s history, surpassing Civil War’s $25.5 million record by a factor of more than three. It is also the biggest debut in history for original horror and the best opening ever for a first-time filmmaker on a non-franchise film, per Variety.
At 20, Parsons is the youngest director to hold the number one spot at the domestic box office, with the previous record belonging to Josh Trank at 27 for Chronicle in 2011. Variety’s worldwide total report of $118 million makes Backrooms one of the most profitable films of 2026 in terms of return on investment — eleven times its $10 million production cost in a single weekend.
The audience profile is also striking. Deadline said 88% of the opening weekend crowd was under 35, with more than half under 25. Around 62% of the audience was male. Half came because it was an A24 film; the other half came as existing Backrooms fans, according to the report. The film opened against The Mandalorian and Grogu, which earned $81.6 million in its own opening weekend — Backrooms’ $81.4 million domestic debut is one of the smallest margins by which any film has come second to a recent Star Wars release.
Who Is Kane Parsons
Parsons built his audience the same way Obsession director Curry Barker did, through YouTube. His Backrooms web series, which began as a found-footage short film before evolving into a full series, demonstrated the specific skills that translate directly to horror filmmaking, like an understanding of pacing and an ability to generate genuine unease from minimal resources.
The weekend’s results place Parsons and Barker — whose own film is now in its third weekend and making its own history — as the two most talked-about young filmmakers in Hollywood simultaneously. Both came from YouTube. Both made horror. Both were given creative control by studios that could have taken their IP and handed it elsewhere.
What Backrooms Means For A24
For A24, the weekend represents a commercial validation at a scale the studio has not previously achieved (although it’s accumulated critical acclaim in spades). Founded in 2012 and known primarily for prestige awards films and mid-budget genre work, A24 has spent 14 years building one of the most distinctive brand identities in cinema, and Backrooms has now demonstrated that brand carries genuine commercial heft with a mass audience, not just a critical one.
Half the opening weekend audience cited A24 as the reason they showed up, per Deadline, wchih suggests the studio’s name functions as a draw in its own right among younger moviegoers in a way that few studios outside Disney can claim.
Backrooms is in US cinemas now.
