‘Backrooms’ Completely Shattered Opening Weekend Predictions

Backrooms completely shattered its opening weekend box office predictions, giving a glimmer of hope to the movie industry trying to harness the power of the younger generation.

After a couple of Polymarket scenarios predicted high opening weekend numbers for the new horror movie, it went above and beyond even the higher stakes predictions.

In one scenario, Polymarket traders overwhelmingly bet that Backrooms would make more than $35 million its opening weekend. In a higher stakes scenario, traders bet overwhelmingly that it would make more than $61 million. While both proved correct, the actual number comes in much higher.

A24’s creepy new movie debuted to a record opening, making $81.4 million domestically and $118 million worldwide its first weekend. It was expected to make $40 to $50 million, which would have still been considered a major success and would have shattered the record for A24’s biggest debut; that title belonged to Alex Garland’s 2024 thriller Civil War, which made $25.5 million domestically its opening weekend.

With the historic release, director Kane Parsons, 20, became the youngest filmmaker to open a movie at No. 1.

Parsons, a former YouTuber, adapted Backrooms from his hit web series of the same name in which a therapist’s patient (Chiwetel Ejiofor) disappears into a dimension beyond reality. The therapist (Renate Reinsve) ventures into the unknown to rescue him.

Backrooms, as well as Obsession, another horror film on a major theatrical run right now, is being seen as a roadmap to success. Parsons and Obsession director Curry Barker both got their starts on YouTube, using accessible tools like the free computer graphics software Blender to bring their projects to life.

Mark Duplass, who stars in the movie, praised the films for harnessing “democratized access to technology.”

“We now know we have the democratized access to technology. We’ve been wondering where to put these things because the distribution system is so fractured. But we’ve got an example of creators woodshedding things, putting them online, building an audience, and now the people with the purse strings are going to notice probably a little bit sooner because they see what they can do at the box office in the form of these two films that are over-performing,” Duplass said in a video.

“So it helps to double down on what I’ve always believed in, which is we should be woodshedding at home with our friends,” Duplass concluded. “We should be using the tools that we have available to us, our iPhones and Blender and swing the sword that’s in your hand, make your stuff and when it’s really good, start putting it out there. And there’s a path.”

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