YouTubers drive Backrooms and Obsession to box office records

Backrooms turned a viral YouTube series into A24’s biggest opening ever, drawing about $81 million domestically and roughly $118 million worldwide in its opening frame on a reported $10 million budget. Obsession, another horror title from a creator who built an audience online, kept climbing too, reaching about $148 million worldwide by May 31 and becoming Focus Features’ highest-grossing film ever.

The two films share a similar path to the multiplex. Kane Parsons, 20, adapted Backrooms from his online series. Curry Barker, 26, came up through YouTube and short films before making Obsession. Both movies were marketed heavily online and pulled especially strong Gen Z audiences, which helped turn internet fandom into theatrical turnout that studios can now measure in real dollars, not just clicks and views.

Backrooms reset A24’s benchmark in a single weekend. The studio’s previous record holder, Civil War, opened to $25.5 million in 2024, a figure Backrooms blew past on its way to a $38 million Friday and a weekend total that landed around $81 million. That performance matters because it showed that a filmmaker with a built-in audience can lower the risk of opening weekend, especially when the production cost is relatively modest compared with the kind of upside the film delivered.

Obsession showed a different version of the same business logic. Reported to have cost about $750,000 to make, the film posted an unusually large second-weekend increase, then passed north of $68 million domestically in under two weeks. For Hollywood, that kind of trajectory is a warning and a blueprint: the audience does not have to be assembled around a legacy franchise if a creator already owns the relationship.

The Memorial Day frame made the contrast sharper. Disney’s The Mandalorian and Grogu opened to about $167 million worldwide and $98 million in the United States, then fell roughly 70% in its second weekend. Against that drop, Backrooms and Obsession looked less like novelty hits than evidence of a shift in power, where studios may value audience ownership, online reach and creator loyalty as much as traditional star power when they decide what to finance next.