A24’s Backrooms shows young audiences will still pack theaters

A $10 million horror movie built from a teenager’s YouTube nightmare has become another reminder that young audiences will still fill theaters when the movie feels made for them. Backrooms, A24’s sci-fi horror film directed by Kane Parsons, opened in 3,400 North American theaters and quickly turned an internet-born concept into a mainstream box-office event.

Parsons was 19 when A24 greenlit the project and 20 when the film reached theaters, making him the youngest director in A24 history. Better known online as Kane Pixels, Parsons first turned the material into The Backrooms: Found Footage, a horror series that debuted in 2022 and had passed 190 million views before the film’s release. The screenplay was written by Will Soodik, and the film drew on a 2019 creepypasta and the wider viral Backrooms universe that already had a built-in audience.

The cast gave the movie more than internet buzz alone. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve led the film, with Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell and Avan Jogia also appearing. A24 co-financed the production with Chernin Entertainment, keeping costs under $10 million while betting on a wide theatrical launch instead of a platform release.

That decision paid off. Estimates put the opening weekend at $81 million domestic and $118 million worldwide, while another tally placed ticket sales at $82 million. However the total is framed, the result was the same: Backrooms blew past A24’s previous opening record, Civil War, which had launched with $25.5 million. It also fit a broader 2026 pattern in which low-budget horror has outperformed expectations, following another breakout title, Obsession.

The bigger takeaway is not just that Backrooms sold tickets. It is that younger viewers will still organize around a theatrical event when the material grows out of the same digital spaces they already inhabit. A film born from YouTube clips, a creepypasta and a 20-year-old filmmaker did what plenty of expensive studio releases have failed to do: make the multiplex feel urgent again.