By Tessa Nolan
The number that matters is 272.7. That is, in millions of US dollars, the worldwide box-office gross of Backrooms as of mid-June 2026 – a figure that makes the film A24’s highest-grossing release in the studio’s history, surpassing the entire runs of Civil War, Marty Supreme, and every other title in the indie studio’s catalogue. The film cost $10 million to produce. It was directed by a 20-year-old whose previous credits were YouTube shorts. It began as a creepypasta thread on 4chan.
That is the short version. The longer one is a story about how internet culture stopped knocking on Hollywood’s door and walked straight through it.
From 4chan to the multiplex
The Backrooms mythos first appeared online in 2019, in a post on 4chan’s /x/ board – the forum dedicated to paranormal and unexplained phenomena. The original post was brief and deceptively simple: a photograph of an empty, yellow-walled office space with a caption suggesting that if you “noclip” out of reality, you end up here. The concept tapped into something primal – the dread of liminal spaces, those transitional, depopulated environments that feel simultaneously familiar and wrong. Empty corridors, abandoned shopping centres, fluorescent-lit waiting rooms. Spaces that exist only to be passed through, rendered sinister when encountered alone.
The idea spread. Reddit threads expanded the mythology. TikTok creators filmed themselves in eerily empty buildings. But it was Kane Parsons, a teenager from an unremarkable American suburb, who turned the concept into something with genuine narrative architecture. Beginning in January 2022, Parsons uploaded a series of found-footage shorts to his YouTube channel, Kane Pixels, in which he built the Backrooms’ labyrinthine interiors using the 3D software Blender and explored them on camera. The series accumulated over 200 million views and drew the attention of multiple studios.
By February 2023, A24 had secured the adaptation rights. The deal was announced as a joint production with Chernin Entertainment, Atomic Monster (James Wan’s company), and 21 Laps Entertainment (Shawn Levy’s outfit). Parsons would direct. He had not yet finished school.
The architecture of dread
What makes the Backrooms concept so persistent – and what Parsons understood instinctively – is its refusal to explain itself. The spaces are not haunted in any conventional sense. There are no ghosts, no curses, no backstory requiring a scroll of exposition. The horror is spatial. It is the horror of environments that do not obey the rules of physical architecture: corridors that loop, rooms that overlap, rendering errors in the fabric of reality itself. The yellow wallpaper and buzzing fluorescent lights are not decorative choices. They are the aesthetic of a place that was built by something that does not understand human habitation.
Parsons has cited the Portal video game series, Mr. Robot, and the 1971 pseudo-documentary Punishment Park as influences. Production designer Danny Vermette translated Parsons’ digital designs into physical sets – more than 30,000 square feet of Backrooms environments constructed across four sound stages in Vancouver. Some 37,000 square feet of wallpaper and 29,000 square feet of carpeting were used, much of it sourced locally in Canada to avoid the impact of US tariffs. According to multiple reports, crew members repeatedly got lost on set.
The film’s central spaces were designed to resemble what has been described as an “architectural hell” – a flawed digital sandbox where rendering errors create an unsettling sense of unreality. Misaligned floors, intersecting arches, objects clipping through walls. It is, in essence, what would happen if a video game’s physics engine failed at the level of structural design.
Ejiofor, Reinsve, and the problem of acting in a void
The cast assembled around this minimal concept is deliberately overqualified. Chiwetel Ejiofor – an Oscar nominee for 12 Years a Slave – plays Clark, a failed architect running a failing furniture store in 1990, wrestling with alcoholism and a crumbling marriage. Renate Reinsve, the Norwegian actress who broke through in The Worst Person in the World, plays his therapist, Mary Kline. Mark Duplass rounds out the principal cast as Phil, a researcher with the mysterious Async Institute.
The challenge for the actors, as multiple critics noted, is that the film’s power resides primarily in its spaces rather than its characters. Owen Gleiberman, writing in Variety, compared the approach to Eraserhead and The Shining – films that generate dread through mood, sound design, and eerie visuals rather than conventional narrative mechanics. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian drew parallels to Japanese horror and the television series Severance. Dan Bayer of Next Best Picture praised both leads for “conveying emotion through subtle acting even when the script is sparse.”
The screenplay, by Will Soodik (whose credits include Westworld and Ash vs. Evil Dead), threadsClark and Mary through the Backrooms while layering in subplots about trauma, memory, and the Async Research Institute’s ambiguous motives. It is a structurally tricky film – more interested in accumulating unease than in delivering payoffs – and it relies heavily on Ejiofor and Reinsve to anchor its more abstract passages with genuine human weight.
The numbers: A24’s biggest bet pays off
Initial projections for Backrooms hovered around $20 million for its opening domestic weekend. By the week of release, those estimates had climbed to $40–50 million. The film opened on 29 May 2026 and promptly obliterated every forecast: $81.4 million domestically, $118 million worldwide. It was A24’s largest opening weekend by a factor of more than three, dwarfing the $25.5-million debut of Alex Garland’s Civil War in 2024.
By its sixth day in theatres, Backrooms had crossed $100 million domestically. As of mid-June, the worldwide total stands at $272.7 million – making it the ninth-highest-grossing film of 2026 and the second-highest-grossing horror film of the year. On a $10 million production budget, the return on investment is staggering.
The film also became the vehicle for a record: Parsons, at 20, became the youngest filmmaker to reach number one at the US box office, surpassing the mark set by Josh Trank with Chronicle in 2012, when Trank was 27. (Trank’s film opened to $22 million.) Steven Spielberg was 28 when Jaws opened in 1975.
The YouTube-to-Hollywood pipeline
Backrooms did not arrive in isolation. It is the most prominent example of a trend that has been building throughout 2026: YouTube creators making the leap to theatrical features and finding outsized commercial success. Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach’s self-funded, self-distributed sci-fi horror Iron Lung opened to over $18 million earlier in the year on a $3 million budget. Curry Barker, a 26-year-old with a background in YouTube sketch comedy, directed Obsession for Focus Features – a dark romance horror made for under $1 million that has grossed more than $155 million worldwide.
The pattern is clear, and the implications for the traditional studio system are significant. These are filmmakers who arrived with built-in audiences, an understanding of digital marketing, and a creative sensibility shaped by the internet rather than by film school. They work fast, cheap, and with a direct line to the demographic – Generation Z – that studios have been struggling to reach.
The Hollywood Reporter noted that, following Backrooms‘ success, Reddit is emerging as a destination for agents, executives, and studios seeking new intellectual property, talent, and story ideas from online communities. The implication is that the next wave of Hollywood IP will not come from comic books or existing franchises, but from the same forums and platforms where audiences already congregate.
Critical reception: a B-minus from audiences, an A from critics
Critics were largely enthusiastic. Backrooms holds an 88% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with an average score of 7.5 out of 10, based on 272 reviews. The site’s critical consensus describes it as “a startlingly assured feature debut” that “bends the liminal spaces that have haunted the internet for years into a horror film that’s as mesmerizing as it is terrifying.” Metacritic assigned a score of 77 out of 100, indicating “generally favourable” reviews.
Audiences, however, were cooler. CinemaScore gave the film a B-minus on its A-plus-to-F scale, and PostTrak reported a 68% positive score, with only 53% of respondents saying they would “definitely recommend” the film. The gap between critical acclaim and audience response is telling: Backrooms is a film that rewards patience and atmosphere over visceral payoffs, and mainstream horror audiences – conditioned by decades of jump scares and tidy resolutions – may have found its deliberate pacing and ambiguous ending less satisfying.
This is not necessarily a problem. Films with strong critical receptions and moderate audience scores frequently develop devoted followings over time, particularly in the horror genre, where the most enduring titles are often those that linger rather than those that shock.
What comes next
Parsons has confirmed that he is not finished with the Backrooms. In May 2026, he told interviewers that there were things “in the works right now” and that the YouTube web series would continue. By early June, Deadline Hollywood reported that he was searching for a screenwriting collaborator for a sequel, though Parsons subsequently denied that a writer had been formally engaged, saying he was “not sure where that got out.” He has also expressed interest in developing a Backrooms television series.
The challenge will be preserving what made the original work: its ambiguity, its spatial logic, its refusal to over-explain. The creepypasta that inspired the film succeeded because it was incomplete – a fragment of a larger, unknowable horror. The film succeeded because Parsons understood that the audience did not need answers. They needed to feel lost.
In an industry increasingly reliant on franchises, sequels, and pre-approved intellectual property, Backrooms is a reminder that the most powerful stories are often those that leave the most unsaid. A 20-year-old with a Blender licence and a 4chan thread understood this instinctively. Hollywood, for once, was wise enough to listen.
For more on contemporary culture and the internet’s growing influence on the creative industries, visit Creativitys.UK Culture and Creativitys.UK Internet.
