A24’s Backrooms sets studio record as YouTuber Kane Parsons breaks out

A24’s Backrooms opened with a studio record, pulling in $38 million domestic from 3,442 theaters on Friday and racing toward an estimated $85 million to $90 million domestic weekend. By Sunday morning, the film was estimated at $81.4 million domestic and $118 million worldwide, a surge that pushed it past Alex Garland’s Civil War, which had held A24’s wide-release mark at $25.5 million.

At the center of that leap is Kane Parsons, now 20, who was 19 when A24 greenlit the project in June 2025. Parsons built Backrooms from a viral YouTube horror universe that first debuted in 2022 and had drawn more than 190 million views by June 2025, a digital following large enough to jump from screen to studio with unusual speed. A24 released the trailer on March 31, 2026, and the film went wide with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve in the lead cast, alongside Mark Duplass, Lukita Maxwell and Avan Jogia. Chernin Entertainment co-financed the film and served as co-studio, with production beginning in Canada.

The scale of the opening points to a larger shift in Hollywood’s talent pipeline. YouTube has become a proving ground where creators can build mythology, audience loyalty and visual identity before ever stepping onto a studio set. Horror is the genre where that model translates fastest: it rewards atmosphere over expensive effects, invites serial lore-building, and lets young filmmakers test ideas in public until a fan base is already in place. Backrooms fits that pattern closely, arriving as an experimental horror film and, in effect, a YouTube-born property that A24 helped turn into a theatrical event.

The movie’s breakout also brought scrutiny, a reminder that internet-native success can still trigger old industry doubts about authorship and legitimacy. Mark Duplass pushed back publicly against social media rumors that Parsons had not actually directed the film, saying Parsons was “100% in control.” The defense underscored how much this release depends on trust in a new kind of director, one who arrives with millions of views instead of a decades-long studio résumé.

Backrooms now stands as more than a box office hit. It marks a moment when the horror lane, more than any other commercial genre, is handing studio power to creators who learned to build fandom first and cinema second. Curry Barker’s Focus Features horror film Obsession has already been cited as part of the same wave, suggesting the next generation of commercially viable directors may be coming less from film school and more from the feed.