The Backrooms started as a single image posted to 4chan in 2019. Endless yellow wallpapered rooms, fluorescent hum, the idea that you could “noclip” out of reality and fall into infinite empty space. It was a creepypasta. A piece of anonymous internet folklore.
In 2022, a 16-year-old named Kane Parsons turned it into a found-footage YouTube series under the name Kane Pixels. It racked up hundreds of millions of views and defined the modern Backrooms aesthetic, the liminal-space dread that took over horror corners of the internet.
Four years later he has the biggest opening in A24’s history by a wide margin. The studio’s previous record was Civil War, which opened to $25.5 million domestic in 2024. Backrooms more than tripled it.
Made for under $10 million, it also bodied Disney’s “The Mandalorian & Grogu” over Memorial Day weekend. Jon Favreau’s Star Wars spinoff with Pedro Pascal and Baby Yoda opened at roughly $82 million on a reported $165 million budget, then cratered about 70% in its second weekend to around $25 million and slid to #3. That’s one of the worst second-weekend drops ever for a Star Wars movie. Global total sits near $247 million, a soft number for a tentpole of that size.
Parsons was born June 18, 2005. He turns 21 next month. The previous record for youngest director with a #1 domestic opening belonged to Josh Trank, who was 27 when Chronicle opened in 2012. Steven Spielberg was around 28 when Jaws came out.
Audiences for Backrooms skewed dramatically young: about 85% under 35. The premise expands the creepypasta to feature length: a small-town furniture-store owner discovers a portal to another dimension inside his showroom. The cast includes Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell, from a script by Will Soodik.
A teenager turned the scariest thing on the internet into a feature. It just beat Disney’s biggest brand at the box office on a fraction of the budget.
