A24's 'Backrooms' Smashes Studio Record With $85M–$88M Debut

The internet-born horror property directed by Kane Parsons is tracking to the biggest opening weekend in A24 history, clearing the studio's previous record by a wide margin.

'Backrooms' is projecting an opening weekend of $85M–$88M, per Deadline tracking published May 2026.
The figure shatters A24's prior box office record and outperforms the debut of 'The Mandalorian & Grogu.'
The film is directed by Kane Parsons, whose origin story — a teenager who built a viral Backrooms short on YouTube — became part of the project's mythology.
The Backrooms began as a creepypasta image post in 2019 and grew into one of the internet's most elaborated horror universes before A24 optioned it.
The opening marks a significant proof-of-concept moment for internet-native IP crossing over to mainstream theatrical release.

It started, as these things often do, with a single image on a forum. A yellowed carpet. Fluorescent lighting. The suggestion of a room that goes on forever. That image became a creepypasta, the creepypasta became a YouTube subgenre, and somewhere in the middle of all of it a teenager named Kane Parsons made a short film in his backyard that caught A24's attention. That was the bet. This weekend, the box office is settling the tab.

Backrooms, A24's theatrical adaptation of the internet horror phenomenon, is tracking to an opening weekend of $85M–$88M, according to Deadline reporting from May 2026. That figure would shatter A24's existing box office record and, notably, outstrip the debut of The Mandalorian & Grogu — a Disney tentpole carrying one of the most recognizable character duos in contemporary franchise culture.

For A24, a studio that built its brand on prestige horror and awards-circuit drama, the number represents a different kind of validation. Films like Everything Everywhere All at Once and Midsommar made the studio's reputation. Backrooms is making its balance sheet.

The Backrooms IP itself is a case study in how internet mythology scales. What began as an anonymous 2019 forum post — a single “liminal space” photograph captioned with a description of falling through reality — was expanded by thousands of creators into an elaborate, crowdsourced horror canon. Parsons, who directed the film, was among the most prominent of those creators before A24 came calling.

Whether the opening-weekend number holds or softens into the second frame, the tracking alone has already answered the question the industry was quietly asking: whether an IP with no legacy studio ownership, no novelization, and no pre-existing screen adaptation could open like a franchise tentpole. The early answer, heading into the weekend, is yes — at record levels.