The summer of 2026 was already shaping up as a good one for horror, and then along came a film set in an infinite fluorescent hallway that smells faintly of moist carpet. A24's Backrooms opens this weekend with projections ranging from $40 million to $50 million — numbers that, at the high end, would represent the biggest opening in the indie studio's history by a distance that isn't really close.
The director is Kane Parsons, 26, who spent years on YouTube building out the lore of the Backrooms — the internet-born mythology of “noclipped” spaces, those endless, wrongly-lit rooms that exist just outside normal reality. Parsons' channel accumulated tens of millions of views on the back of short horror films that looked, by YouTube standards, almost improbably polished. A24 noticed. The feature deal followed.
That arc — creator economy to studio picture — is not new, but the box-office expectations attached to it are. A24's record opener on a wide release had previously sat in the mid-single-digit millions. A $45 million weekend would move the studio into a commercial register it has never occupied, competing directly with franchise product for the same Friday-night audience.
The horror trend lines support the projection. The genre has consistently punched above its production-budget weight in 2025 and into 2026, with audiences returning to theaters specifically for the communal experience of being frightened in a dark room with strangers. The Backrooms concept, already familiar to anyone under 35 who has spent time in online spaces, arrives pre-loaded with an audience that already knows the rules and is paying to see them broken at scale.
Tracking will firm up through Thursday night previews. A24 has not publicly confirmed a production budget, but industry estimates place it well below the $100 million threshold, meaning even the lower end of the projection range would represent a significant opening-weekend multiple.