• A24’s Backrooms opened to $9M in Thursday night previews — surpassing Scream 7’s $7.8M and John Wick: Chapter 4’s $8.9M, and approaching Eternals’ $9.5M — a stunning result for a horror film based on a viral internet meme directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons
• The film stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as a struggling furniture store owner who discovers an interdimensional labyrinth beneath his shop — adapted from Parsons’ own hit YouTube Backrooms web series that became a cornerstone of internet horror culture
• Critical reception has been strong: Rotten Tomatoes reviews describe the film as “extraordinarily effective” atmospheric horror — Variety’s Owen Gleiberman wrote that “you sit back and settle into the enigmas and the grun[ge]” — and the film has been called one of the most interesting horror releases of the year
• Backrooms is projected to challenge or potentially upset The Mandalorian and Grogu at the box office this weekend — the Star Wars film took $100M over the Memorial Day holiday but was widely considered underwhelming for franchise expectations

The Backrooms were always going to make money. The question was how much — and Thursday night answered it emphatically. A24’s Backrooms opened to $9M in previews beginning at 4 PM, Deadline reported, surpassing Scream 7’s $7.8M and eclipsing John Wick: Chapter 4’s $8.9M. It sits just below Eternals’ $9.5M — a Marvel ensemble film — which makes the comparison all the more striking for what is, on paper, a low-key A24 horror release about a furniture salesman and a labyrinth. The internet meme has officially arrived as a box office force, per Deadline.

The film’s premise stays closer to the source material than you might expect from a mainstream theatrical release. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, a discount furniture store owner living in the store after a messy separation from his wife. While in the basement, Clark passes through a threshold into the Backrooms — an endless, fluorescent-lit labyrinth of identical yellow rooms that, in internet lore, represents the terrifying wrong-turn you can take out of ordinary reality. Renate Reinsve co-stars. The screenplay was written by Will Soodik, based on the web series that director Kane Parsons began making as a teenager and which accumulated hundreds of millions of views before he was old enough to vote, per the Sentinel Colorado.

What Critics Are Saying

The critical reception has matched the presale energy. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman called the film “extraordinarily effective” as atmospheric horror, writing that it generates genuine unease through craft rather than conventional shock. Rolling Out described it as a film that “burrows under the skin and stays there long after the credits roll” — placing it in the rare category of horror that relies on dread rather than cheap mechanics. Pajiba’s critic wrote that Backrooms “gripped me in ways I wasn’t immediately able to shake off,” and that the longer they sat with it, the more its intentions became clear, per Pajiba.

The film’s Rotten Tomatoes score has been described as great news for horror fans — though the Critics Consensus and full Popcornmeter were still pending as of Thursday evening. The reviews that have come in characterize Backrooms as one of the year’s most interesting horror releases: unsettling in a way that lingers, visually distinct, and carrying more thematic weight than its meme origins might suggest. For A24, which built its reputation on exactly this kind of elevated, difficult-to-categorize genre film, it reads as a signature release, per Collider.

The Internet-to-Blockbuster Pipeline

The box office projections heading into the weekend suggest Backrooms could challenge or outright upset The Mandalorian and Grogu, which took approximately $100M over the Memorial Day holiday but left industry observers underwhelmed — the consensus was that for a Star Wars film, that number is closer to Solo: A Star Wars Story territory than a genuine blockbuster. A strong Backrooms opening weekend would reshape the narrative heading into June. JoBlo noted that the comparison isn’t just statistical: Backrooms earned its preview number from a much smaller built-in fanbase than a Star Wars franchise title, making the per-theater performance potentially more impressive, per JoBlo.

What makes the result notable beyond the raw numbers is what it says about how horror audiences have evolved. The Backrooms as an internet phenomenon — creepypasta, YouTube short films, Reddit lore — built its following without any studio machinery. Kane Parsons made his web series on a camera as a teenager and turned it into one of the defining horror aesthetics of the early 2020s: liminal spaces, wrong-turn dread, the particular horror of a world that looks almost normal but isn’t. A24 acquiring and developing it into a theatrical feature with a real cast and a proper production budget was a calculated bet that that aesthetic had crossover potential. Thursday night’s $9M says it was right, per Rolling Stone.

For Parsons — who is 20 years old and making his feature debut — the numbers represent something different: the validation of an approach to filmmaking that began with a camera and an internet connection, not a film school application. The full opening weekend tracking will arrive over the next 48 hours and will give a clearer picture of where Backrooms lands. But the previews alone have already made it one of the most notable openings in A24’s history.

The post A24’s ‘Backrooms’ Opens to $9M in Previews — Beating ‘Scream 7’ and Rivaling ‘John Wick 4’ appeared first on Cream.

• A24 dropped the first teaser trailer for Primetime, in which Robert Pattinson plays To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen — the film is set in 2006, the year the show both peaked and imploded
• Director Lance Oppenheim (Ren Faire, Some Kind of Heaven) makes his narrative feature debut; script by Ajon Singh
• Co-stars include Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Anna Faris, and Phoebe Bridgers; Pattinson is also a producer
• Ari Aster’s producing partner Lars Knudsen is among the producers; the film is an A24 release targeting Fall 2026 — likely awards season
• This is Pattinson’s fifth film of the year: he’s already got The Drama, The Odyssey, Dune: Part Three, and Here Comes the Flood — plus The Batman: Part II in production for 2027

The first thing you notice isn’t the face. It’s the voice.

In the new teaser trailer for Primetime, A24’s upcoming film about To Catch a Predator, Robert Pattinson opens his mouth and what comes out is an uncanny reconstruction of Chris Hansen — the flat Midwestern delivery, the performative gravity, the slight edge of a man who knows the cameras are rolling. Hollywood Reporter described it as Pattinson taking on Hansen’s “vocal patterns and tics with an eerie, off-kilter precision.” That lands. The vocal transformation is the whole show in this teaser, and it suggests something genuinely strange is coming in the fall.

The Film

The logline is short: “In 2006, To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen sets out to make television history.” It tells you almost nothing and everything at the same time.

For anyone who needs the background: To Catch a Predator was a segment on Dateline NBC that ran from 2004 to 2007, eventually spinning off into its own series. The format was ritualistic — Hansen and a camera crew, working with law enforcement and adult decoys posing as minors online, would lure suspected predators to a sting house, then Hansen would walk in and deliver the confrontation. “You see how this looks, right?” Pattinson’s Hansen asks in the trailer. “At the end of the day, a man must be held accountable for the decisions that he makes.” The show ran for 20 episodes and drew millions of viewers per installment before becoming one of the most-watched true crime franchises in early YouTube history.

2006 was its apex and its collapse. In November of that year, Kaufman County assistant district attorney Bill Conradt shot himself as law enforcement and an NBC camera crew approached his home as part of a sting in Murphy, Texas. The operation had already yielded 25 arrests. Conradt’s death prompted the local district attorney to decline prosecution on all cases from the sting, triggered a wrongful death lawsuit from Conradt’s family, and led directly to the show’s cancellation. Deadline noted the trailer’s resemblance in texture to Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler — “Jake Gyllenhaal as a shady, ambulance-chasing L.A. stringer” — and the parallel is sharp. Both films appear to ask what happens when someone optimizes for camera-ready drama regardless of what it costs in the real world.

The point of view of Primetime isn’t explicit in the teaser. But the final line Pattinson delivers — “I’m Chris Hansen with Dateline NBC, and you’re about to be a part of television history” — carries a chill that doesn’t feel like admiration.

The Director

Lance Oppenheim is not a household name yet, but among people who pay attention to documentary filmmaking, he’s been one to watch. His 2020 film Some Kind of Heaven observed the retirees of a Florida retirement community with a mixture of warmth and existential dread that was hard to shake. Ren Faire, his 2024 HBO series, tracked the eccentric king of the Texas Renaissance Festival across a single year and turned into one of the stranger character studies in recent nonfiction television.

Primetime is his first narrative feature. The script is by Ajon Singh. Producers include Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Fred Berger, Pattinson himself, Brighton McCloskey, Lars Knudsen (Ari Aster’s producing partner, who has been attached to some of the more interesting A24 projects in recent years), and Tyler Campellone. TheWrap also noted that Ari Aster is among the producers, which tells you something about the tone this film is apparently going for.

The Cast

Beyond Pattinson as Hansen, the film stars Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Anna Faris, and Phoebe Bridgers. Wever has spent the last several years doing the kind of character work that earns critical attention without always getting mainstream traction; Gisondo has been quietly impressive in supporting roles for years. Bridgers is a notable presence — she’s appeared in a handful of film and TV roles but this is the kind of project that suggests someone is being taken seriously as an actor, not just a musician with a SAG card.

Pattinson’s Year

At this point the list of Robert Pattinson’s 2026 films sounds like something a publicist invented to win a bet.

The Drama, his first A24 collaboration of the year alongside Zendaya, became the studio’s fourth-highest grossing film of all time — behind Marty Supreme, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Civil War. Hollywood Reporter’s review praised his “natural, appealing performance, convincingly playing a relatively normal guy who begins to realize that his comfortable life with his quirky dream girl is not nearly as settled, or normal, as he once thought.”

After that: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey this summer. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three later in the year. Fernando Meirelles’ Here Comes the Flood with Denzel Washington. And now Primetime in the fall, which BroBible pointed out will be Pattinson’s fifth film this year — before he wraps The Batman: Part II for Matt Reeves, which began production earlier this month with a 2027 target.

The man who spent years politely escaping the shadow of Twilight is now, improbably, one of the most in-demand actors working. That he’s doing it by playing a Midwestern TV journalist who made his name catching child predators on camera — and doing it for the same studio that gave him his career renaissance — is the kind of detail that feels too fitting to be coincidence.

Primetime does not yet have an official release date. A24 says fall 2026. Given the company’s history with awards season, that probably means it won’t stay quiet for long.

The post Robert Pattinson Is Unrecognizable as Chris Hansen in the First Trailer for A24’s Primetime — and His 2026 Is Just Getting Started appeared first on Cream.

• A24’s Backrooms is in theaters now, directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons (YouTube: Kane Pixels), whose original web series racked up 78 million views
• Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Clark, a failing furniture store owner who stumbles through a wall and into an endless liminal nightmare; Renate Reinsve plays his therapist
• James Wan and Osgood Perkins are among the producers
• Critical consensus: the atmosphere and dread are genuinely exceptional — the storytelling is where reviewers are split
• Collider called it “near-flawless”; Polygon said it’s “the best horror movie since Weapons“; Hollywood Reporter called it “creepy but underbaked”

In 2019, someone posted a photo to 4chan. Just a photo — a big, carpeted room with fluorescent lights, everything cast in a sickly shade of yellow. A second poster gave it a name and a mythology in a single paragraph:

“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.”

That’s it. That was the whole thing. No author. No story. Just dread in paragraph form.

Five years later, a teenager named Kane Parsons turned it into a YouTube web series that got 78 million views. Now he’s 20, and A24 just released his feature film.

The Movie

Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is not doing well. His furniture store — Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire — has no customers. His wife kicked him out. He’s been sleeping in the shop and seeing a therapist named Mary (Renate Reinsve) to cope. The film is set in 1990 California, and the specificity of the period and setting gives it an anchored, lived-in feel before everything comes apart.

One night, checking the circuit breaker in the store’s basement, Clark walks through a wall.

What’s on the other side is the Backrooms: never-ending chambers lined with yellow wallpaper and fluorescent lighting, like vacant office spaces designed by someone who only half-remembered what offices look like. There are piles of furniture. Shrunken doors. A stop sign. A cardboard cutout with a cassette player saying hello in different languages. Clark eventually describes the place as though it was “made by a bunch of construction workers on acid.”

James Wan and Osgood Perkins are among the producers. The cast is genuinely arthouse-caliber for what started as a meme.

What Critics Are Saying

The reviews are split in an interesting way — not good-vs-bad, but more like: the first two acts versus the third.

Collider was the most effusive, calling it a “near-flawless horror film that demands to be seen” and pointing to the broader wave of YouTuber filmmakers making serious genre work — the Philippou Brothers with Talk to Me, Mark Fishbach’s Iron Lung — as evidence that Parsons isn’t an outlier. He’s the next wave.

Polygon was nearly as enthusiastic, putting it alongside Zach Cregger’s Weapons as the best horror of the year so far: “deeply unnerving… haunting… leaves lingering shivers and ongoing anxieties.” The key observation there is that the film is smart enough to leave mysteries intact — not every corner of the Backrooms needs to be explained, and Parsons knows it.

Hollywood Reporter took the more cautious read. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve are bona fide arthouse stars, the studio is buzzy, the concept is genuinely unnerving — but the storytelling is “underbaked.” The Backrooms, as internet mythology, was always more atmosphere than narrative, and the film has trouble converting that into a satisfying third act.

CBR landed somewhere in the middle: the dread is real, the thread gets lost. MovieWeb used almost the same language — “eerie and atmospheric” but “loses its own message.”

The AP review cut to the core of it: “Where Backrooms came from is more interesting — and potentially meaningful — than the result.” That’s not a dismissal. It’s an acknowledgment that the origin story is genuinely remarkable and the film captures something genuine — it just can’t quite figure out what to do once it has you inside.

Why Kane Parsons Matters

To understand the scale of what Parsons has done, you have to understand where he started. His YouTube channel (Kane Pixels) began posting Backrooms shorts when he was still a teenager. The videos are found-footage fragments — mostly atmospheric, mostly unexplained, almost no conventional narrative. They suggest a larger world without building one. They scared people anyway. The most popular episode hit 78 million views.

CBR noted the context directly: “We’re in a veritable golden age of indie original horror, and 2026 might be its apex.” The year has already produced Iron Lung, Hokum, and Obsession. Backrooms is the one with the most mythology behind it and, now, the most debate in front of it.

Twenty years old. A24. Chiwetel Ejiofor. A 4chan post from 2019.

Whatever you think of how the film sticks its landing, that sentence is still going to need a minute to sink in.

The post A24’s Backrooms Reviews Are In: Kane Parsons Made a Horror Film at 20 That Critics Can’t Stop Arguing About appeared first on Cream.

• Kane Parsons, 20, becomes A24’s youngest feature director with Backrooms, opening in theaters Friday
• Parsons started uploading the viral Backrooms YouTube series as a teenager in early 2022
• He had to choose between college applications and taking the A24 deal — he chose A24
• The film stars Mark Duplass, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell
• Mark Duplass publicly defended Parsons amid speculation about how much creative control the young director actually had

Kane Parsons was born in 2005 — the same year YouTube launched. He is now 20 years old and directing an A24 feature film. Let that sit for a moment.

Backrooms, Parsons’s adaptation of his own viral YouTube series, opens in theaters Friday. The film follows a therapist tracking a missing patient through a bizarre liminal dimension, and it stars Mark Duplass, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell. With those names attached and an A24 stamp, Parsons might direct one of the studio’s highest-grossing films before he can legally order a drink.

“YouTube, really more than just being a cultural reference for me, has been how I know how to do any of the stuff I do,” Parsons told Deadline. For him, the platform wasn’t a side project — it was film school.

College vs. A24

When A24 came calling, Parsons was in the middle of college application season. IndieWire reports he had to make a choice: finish the apps, or take the deal. He took the deal. “It’s hard to think of many people currently living a more interesting life,” IndieWire noted, and it’s difficult to argue.

His Backrooms YouTube series — itself born from a viral creepypasta image of an unsettling empty office space — exploded online and caught the attention of the indie studio that has a habit of turning unconventional projects into cultural moments.

Mark Duplass Has His Back

Not everyone has been immediately convinced that a 20-year-old YouTuber was the right call to helm a studio feature. Mark Duplass — who knows a thing or two about low-budget, high-concept filmmaking — publicly defended Parsons, pushing back on speculation that the young director was more figurehead than creative force. Duplass’s endorsement carries weight in indie film circles, and it suggests that whatever happened on set, Parsons was the real thing.

Backrooms opens Friday. A weird dream come true, as Parsons himself put it.

The post This 20-Year-Old Skipped College Apps for an A24 Deal — and It’s Paying Off appeared first on Cream.

• Hugh Jackman stars as an aged Robin of Locksley in A24’s The Death of Robin Hood
• A new promo features Jackman narrating the full history of the Robin Hood legend
• The film portrays Robin’s legend as “greatly exaggerated” with a much darker past than the folklore suggests
• Jodie Comer co-stars, with new exclusive footage showing tension between their characters
• Written and directed by Michael Sarnoski (Pig, A Quiet Place: Day One)

Hugh Jackman wants you to forget every Robin Hood you’ve ever seen.

In a new promo for A24’s The Death of Robin Hood, the Tony winner serves as narrator, walking audiences through the full history of the folk legend — from his 15th-century origins to his idealized Hollywood depictions — before landing on what this film actually is: a cold, brutal, medieval story about a man whose myth outgrew his reality.

Jackman plays an aged Robin of Locksley who admits that his legend has been “greatly exaggerated” and that his actual past is a lot darker than the ballads suggest. This is not the charming rogue of Errol Flynn or even the conflicted outlaw of Ridley Scott’s 2010 version. This Robin is scarred, tired, and carrying something heavy.

A Brutal World

The film comes from writer-director Michael Sarnoski, whose resume includes the Nicolas Cage film Pig and A Quiet Place: Day One. He’s described the setting as aesthetically inspired by The Virgin Spring and Valhalla Rising — films where silence and violence carry more weight than dialogue.

“That was a very brutal world of violence, it was a hard place to survive in, and it was cold and bleak,” Sarnoski said of his approach.

Jodie Comer co-stars, and exclusive new footage shows the tension between her character and Jackman’s Robin reaching a breaking point. The pairing alone — Jackman’s physical gravitas against Comer’s precision — suggests something more interesting than a standard period piece.

A24 has not yet announced a release date, but the marketing push suggests it’s coming soon. For Jackman, fresh off his return as Wolverine in Deadpool & Wolverine, this is about as far from a superhero movie as you can get. Which might be exactly the point.

The post Hugh Jackman Goes Dark as Robin Hood in A24’s New Film appeared first on Cream.

• Jordan Firstman’s debut feature Club Kid sold to A24 for a reported $17 million at Cannes Film Festival
• The film beat out bids from Netflix, Mubi, Focus Features, and Searchlight in a heated bidding war
• It premiered in the Un Certain Regard section on May 15 to a seven-minute standing ovation
• The film stars Firstman alongside Diego Calva and Cara Delevingne, who was seen tearing up at the premiere
• Critics are calling it a breakout crowdpleaser — and a serious awards contender

Jordan Firstman arrived at Cannes twerking on the red-carpet steps of the Debussy theater and left with a $17 million deal. Not a bad week.

The comedian’s debut feature Club Kid — which Firstman wrote, directed, and stars in — has sold to A24 following a fierce bidding war that drew offers from Netflix, Mubi, Focus Features, and Searchlight, among others. It marks the first major acquisition of the 2026 festival, and the number is a statement: multiple studios were in the eight-figure range before A24 ultimately closed the deal. UTA Independent Film Group handled the domestic sale; Charades is managing international rights.

The film premiered in the prestigious Un Certain Regard section on May 15, and the response was immediate. One studio buyer reportedly called it “the most commercial movie at the festival by far: it works on a number of different levels to different age groups.” A festival regular described it as an awards movie “for sure.”

What ‘Club Kid’ Is Actually About

Club Kid follows Peter Green, a dissolute New York party promoter — played by Firstman with a generous helping of self-deprecating irony — whose carefully curated life of house music, casual sex, and ketamine benders gets upended when a nine-year-old boy shows up on his doorstep. The child, Arlo, turns out to be the son he unknowingly fathered with a British tourist during one hazy night a decade earlier. His mother has since died, leaving Peter as the boy’s legal guardian. Peter, who swears he’s never even been with a woman, has to figure it out anyway.

It’s a story we’ve seen before — think Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid through to Mike Mills’ C’mon C’mon — and Firstman leans into that lineage rather than running from it. Variety’s review calls it “a breakout crowdpleaser” that earns its sentimentality, praising the film’s “relaxed, unexpectedly earnest charm” while noting Firstman isn’t quite as sophisticated a dramatist as he is a comedian. The second act runs long, and the kid character could use more dimension on the page. But the overall verdict is warm: a debut with enough promise to mark Firstman as a genuine next-generation queer filmmaker to watch.

Arlo is played by Reggie Absolom, a young British actor recently seen in The Other Bennet Sister, whose performance critics have singled out as mature and magnetic. Diego Calva — best known for Babylon — plays Oscar, a dreamy social worker who enters Peter’s newly sobered-up life. And Cara Delevingne plays Sophie, Peter’s sharp-edged business partner in the club world.

The film was shot by Adam Newport-Berra and edited by Taylor Levy and Sofía Subercaseaux. Its opening sequence — a sweat-soaked, bass-heavy ten-minute montage that turns out to span a full decade — has been widely cited as one of the film’s cleverest formal moves.

The Cannes Premiere Moment Everyone’s Talking About

The screening itself became a moment. After the film ended, the crowd gave it a seven-minute standing ovation. Delevingne was visibly emotional, tearing up on stage. And Firstman, never one to let a moment pass quietly, picked up young Reggie Absolom and started a chant in his honor — a continuation of the playful energy the two had already shown at the film’s photocall earlier that day.

It was a fitting scene for a film about an unserious man learning to take something seriously. Firstman had introduced the movie by telling the audience how thrilled he was to be “in de bussy” — a joke that landed exactly as intended — before the film proceeded to be something warmer and more vulnerable than anyone in that room expected.

For context on just how significant the sale is: Club Kid is the rare buzzy American film at a festival that has been notably light on Hollywood product this year, with only Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love playing in official competition. That scarcity, combined with the film’s genuine crossover appeal, made it a target the moment word got out that it was available. The deal closed fast.

Firstman first broke through during COVID lockdown with a viral run of absurdist, queer-coded impressions and sketches, and made his feature acting debut in Sébastian Silva’s 2023 meta-comedy Rotting in the Sun, playing a fictionalized version of himself. Club Kid is a different kind of statement — proof that the bit can become something bigger.

A24 now has the film. Release date TBD. The chant continues.

The post Jordan Firstman’s ‘Club Kid’ Sells to A24 for $17M at Cannes appeared first on Cream.

• David Jonsson, fresh off his 2025 BAFTA Rising Star win, has joined A24’s upcoming film Please
• The film marks director Halina Reijn’s third collaboration with A24, following Bodies Bodies Bodies and Babygirl
• Grammy-nominated singer Gracie Abrams makes her acting debut in the project alongside Tom Burke and Connor Storrie
• Plot details are being kept tightly under wraps, but Reijn will once again write and direct
• Jonsson’s upcoming slate also includes Frank Ocean’s debut feature and Colman Domingo’s Scandalous

Halina Reijn is assembling something special. The Babygirl writer-director has added David Jonsson to the cast of Please, her next film with A24 — and the lineup is already one of the more intriguing ensembles in recent memory.

Jonsson, who took home the BAFTA Rising Star award in 2025 on the strength of his work in Rye Lane and Alien: Romulus, joins a cast that already includes Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams making her acting debut, British actor Tom Burke, and Heated Rivalry breakout Connor Storrie. Plot details are being kept firmly under wraps — no logline, no character descriptions, nothing — which, honestly, only makes the whole thing more exciting.

Reijn’s Third Swing with A24

This is Reijn’s third feature with the studio, and her track record there speaks for itself. Bodies Bodies Bodies announced her as a sharp, wickedly funny voice in genre filmmaking. Then came Babygirl — the Nicole Kidman-led erotic thriller that became one of A24’s biggest global hits, earning $64 million worldwide. Whatever Please turns out to be, Reijn has earned the benefit of the doubt.

She’ll write and direct again, producing through her MAN UP Film banner alongside frequent collaborator David Hinojosa, who is re-teaming with her for the third time. A24 is producing and financing, with Zach Nutman executive producing.

A Cast Worth Paying Attention To

Tom Burke brings serious film pedigree to the project. He’s played Orson Welles in David Fincher’s Mank, Praetorian Jack in George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, and has racked up credits with Steven Soderbergh (Black Bag), Sebastián Lelio (The Wonder), and Nicolas Winding Refn (Only God Forgives). On the TV side, he leads the BBC detective series Strike and can currently be seen in Netflix’s Legends. He’s also been announced for Alex Garland’s Elden Ring adaptation — also with A24 — and a recurring role in Amazon Prime Video’s Blade Runner 2099.

Connor Storrie, 26, is having a moment. The Heated Rivalry star is quickly becoming one of the more sought-after young actors working right now. This is actually his second A24 project — he was previously cast in Peaked from directors Molly Gordon and Allie Levitan, and Gordon has been effusive about him. “Connor is a f–king genius and I’m so lucky that he’s in the movie,” she said recently. Beyond Please, Storrie has a guest role in For All Mankind season 5, a part in Criminal Minds season 19, and is circling Craig Zobel’s thriller Turpentine opposite Melissa McCarthy.

And then there’s Gracie Abrams, stepping in front of a camera for the first time. The Grammy nominee has built a devoted following through her music, and landing her acting debut in a Halina Reijn film is no small thing.

Jonsson’s Year Just Keeps Getting Bigger

For Jonsson, Please is just one piece of an extraordinary run. Last year he earned strong notices for The Long Walk, the dystopian survival thriller based on the Stephen King novel, and fronted the Brit indie prison drama Wasteman alongside Tom Blyth, which premiered at Toronto. He also exec produced Wasteman alongside Sophie Glibber through their production company greyarea — a signal that his ambitions extend well beyond acting.

Coming up, he’ll play Sammy Davis Jr. opposite Sydney Sweeney’s Kim Novak in Colman Domingo’s directorial debut Scandalous. He’s reuniting with his The Long Walk co-star Cooper Hoffman in India Donaldson’s Chaperones for Plan B. And he has a lead role in Frank Ocean’s as-yet-untitled debut feature — a project that has had the film world buzzing for years.

No release date has been set for Please, and with the plot still locked down tight, there’s not much more to go on — just a director at the height of her powers, and four actors you genuinely want to watch. That’s usually enough.

The post David Jonsson Joins A24’s ‘Please’ With Gracie Abrams appeared first on Cream.

• A24’s Backrooms hits theaters May 29, 2026, directed by internet horror sensation Kane Parsons
• The film stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve as two people trapped in the eerie, labyrinthine backrooms
• Based on a viral creepypasta that exploded in meme culture starting in 2019
• Early critic reactions after an exclusive press screening are overwhelmingly ecstatic
• The film carries an estimated $10 million budget and is A24’s summer horror tentpole

Horror has a new obsession, and it lives in the fluorescent-lit, yellow-wallpapered void of the backrooms. A24’s upcoming film Backrooms — opening May 29, 2026 — just had its first press screening, and critics are already losing their minds over it in the best possible way.

The early reactions flooding X paint a picture of something genuinely unsettling and surprisingly artful. Joshua Rothkopf of the Los Angeles Times called it “horror stripped to its essentials: a hallway, a door, knowing that you will go through it. Conceptually, it’s a triumph, a nightmare with its own weather.” He also singled out the film’s young director for particular praise, saying Kane Parsons knows exactly how to chill his audience.

Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic Courtney Howard, who has written for both Variety and the AV Club, was equally floored. “A brilliant, frightening vision. Beautifully claustrophobic, pulse-pounding & freaky AF,” she wrote on X, adding that the scares are top-notch and that both lead actors deliver. “Renate Reinsve & Chiwetel Ejiofor are terrific,” Howard said.

So far, it’s been all raves. No mixed takes, no hedging — just critics apparently sitting in the dark, genuinely rattled.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=owH_yrzbNns%3Fv%3DowH_yrzbNns

From Internet Creepypasta to A24 Horror Tentpole

If you’re not chronically online, here’s the backstory: the backrooms concept is a creepypasta — an internet urban legend — that started circulating in 2019. The premise is deceptively simple and deeply unsettling: imagine “noclipping” out of reality and finding yourself alone in an endless maze of empty, liminal rooms. Beige carpet. Fluorescent hum. No exits. No people. Just the creeping certainty that something is wrong.

The concept went massively viral, but it was Kane Parsons — posting as Kane Pixels on YouTube — who turned it into something genuinely cinematic. His found-footage-style short films gave the backrooms a visual language and a mythology, racking up millions of views and catching the attention of A24 in the process. Now, still a remarkably young filmmaker, Parsons is making his feature debut with a reported $10 million budget and one of the most talked-about horror casts of the year.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=mDjVPiwl3Zc%3Fv%3DmDjVPiwl3Zc

What the Movie Is Actually About

The feature-length story centers on two people pulled into the backrooms against their will. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a furniture store owner who simply vanishes one day — there one moment, gone the next. His therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), comes to the store looking for him after he disappears. She doesn’t find Clark. Instead, she finds herself just as lost as he is, trapped in the same disorienting, seemingly infinite maze of disused rooms, desperately searching for a way out and a way back to reality.

It’s a smart narrative frame — two people from the same life, stranded in the same nightmare, hunting for each other without knowing if they’re getting closer or further apart. And with Ejiofor and Reinsve as your leads, you’ve got the kind of grounded, emotionally intelligent performances that can make abstract horror genuinely devastating rather than just visually interesting.

A24 is positioning Backrooms as its summer horror event, and given the early critical response, that bet is looking very good right now. May 29 can’t come soon enough.

The post A24’s Backrooms Movie Has Critics Floored appeared first on Cream.

• A24 has tapped Obsession director Curry Barker to write and direct a new Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot
• Barker says he wants to explore the full Leatherface family dynamic, not just the iconic killer himself
• He cites Marcus Nispel’s 2003 remake — his first-ever horror film as a kid — as his favorite entry in the franchise
• Barker’s upcoming film Obsession already holds a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes ahead of its May 15 release
• No release date has been set for the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Leatherface is getting a new lease on life — and the director A24 has chosen to swing the chainsaw this time around has a clear, genuinely intriguing vision for where the franchise can go next.

Curry Barker, the rising horror filmmaker behind Obsession, has been tapped to write and direct a new Texas Chainsaw Massacre for A24. And in a recent interview with Total Film, he laid out exactly what’s driving his approach: he wants to go deeper into the family at the heart of the story — not just Leatherface, but the whole terrifying household behind him.

“I think of it as respecting the source material,” Barker said. “I absolutely love the original film, but I want to do something that’s different. I’m not going to stray away too far from what we know, but just making it stronger. Really, I want to lean into the uncomfortability of the family. I want to lean into the rawness of what’s going on there. There’s some really messed-up stuff happening at that farm. I genuinely feel there’s so much potential for that concept that has not been realized.”

It’s a smart angle. Leatherface has been the face of this franchise for over 50 years, but the character’s motives have always been rooted in family — he’s less a lone predator and more a product of the deeply disturbed people around him. The Hewitt family has popped up in a handful of installments, most notably in the second and third entries, but no film has ever truly put them front and center as the main event. Barker clearly sees that gap, and he wants to fill it.

“There’s so much that concept hasn’t really leaned into or hasn’t dived into,” he added. “So I actually feel like there’s a lot to explore, and I’m really excited about it.”

Why His Favorite TCM Entry Says a Lot

Here’s a detail that adds useful color to Barker’s thinking: when asked about his history with the franchise, he didn’t name the 1974 Tobe Hooper original as his favorite. He named the 2003 Marcus Nispel remake — the one starring Jessica Biel — as the entry closest to his heart.

“The 2003 reboot was my favorite,” Barker said. “It was like my first horror movie I’d ever seen when I was a kid, and I actually think it’s a decent remake.”

That film — produced by Michael Bay and co-written from the original screenplay by Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel — was a significant financial success that helped trigger a wave of horror franchise reboots in the mid-2000s. Critical reaction was mixed at the time, but it’s held up for a certain generation of horror fans as a genuinely effective, visceral piece of work. Knowing that’s where Barker’s love of the franchise was born makes his instinct to dig deeper into the family dynamic feel even more grounded — the 2003 film did spend real time with the Hewitts, and it clearly left a mark on him.

Who Is Curry Barker?

If you haven’t heard the name yet, you will soon. Barker broke through with Milk & Serial, an acclaimed found-footage horror film that’s available to watch for free on YouTube and has earned serious praise from genre fans. His follow-up, Obsession, hits theaters on May 15 — and it’s already sitting at a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes based on early reviews. That kind of momentum is exactly why A24 came calling.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise has had a rough stretch. The 2022 Netflix sequel was widely dismissed, and before that, the series had been lurching through reboots and sequels with diminishing returns for years. Handing it to a filmmaker with genuine horror credibility and a specific, considered vision feels like the right move — and Barker sounds like someone who’s thought hard about what this story still has to offer rather than just what it can recycle.

No release date has been set yet, but Obsession opens May 15 — and if Barker delivers there, the anticipation for what he does with Leatherface’s family is only going to grow.

The post TCM Reboot Director Wants to Make It a Family Affair appeared first on Cream.

• Zendaya and Robert Pattinson’s A24 film The Drama is now available to rent or buy digitally as of May 5, 2026.
• The film arrived on digital platforms just 32 days after its April 3 theatrical release — well ahead of the typical 45-day window.
• The Drama has crossed $100 million at the worldwide box office, making it only A24’s fifth film ever to hit that milestone.
• The film is expected to land on HBO Max sometime in July or September 2026, per A24’s output deal with Warner Bros. Discovery.
• You can rent for $19.99 or buy for $24.99 on Prime Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.

If you missed The Drama in theaters — or you just need to watch it again now that you know what’s actually going on — Zendaya and Robert Pattinson’s buzzy A24 film is officially available to watch from your couch. As of May 5, the film is live on digital platforms including Prime Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.

That’s a notably fast turnaround. Studios typically hold films for at least 45 days before releasing them digitally — The Drama made the jump in just 32. And it’s not like the film was struggling at the multiplex. According to Box Office Mojo, the film has earned $46.9 million domestically and $69.7 million internationally, crossing the $100 million worldwide mark. That makes it only the fifth film in A24’s history to hit that milestone in over a decade of operation.

What Is ‘The Drama’ Actually About?

Here’s where things get intentionally vague — and for good reason. The marketing has kept the film’s central secret tightly under wraps, and director Kristoffer Borgli wants to keep it that way. “We want the audience to go through the same experience as the characters in the movie, where they get to be surprised by something,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “So we’re trying to hold that reveal sealed to protect the best experience watching the movie.”

What we can tell you: Zendaya plays Emma and Pattinson plays Charlie, a Boston couple in the final week before their wedding. At a food-and-wine tasting with their best friends Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie), the group plays a game where everyone confesses the worst thing they’ve ever done. When Emma takes her turn, what she reveals isn’t just uncomfortable — it throws the entire relationship into question.

Borgli, best known for the 2023 Nicolas Cage film Dream Scenario, described it to THR as “a very chaotic love story” while deliberately avoiding any specific genre label. That’s fair. It’s been marketed as a romantic drama, but the reality is considerably darker and stranger. Think less Four Weddings and a Funeral, more pitch-black dramedy that will have you questioning what you just watched. The film has a 77% critics score and 78% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and New York Post critic Johnny Oleksinski called it “gripping, quite stressfully so” and “sometimes stomach-churning in the topical subjects it touches.”

Mashable’s Kristy Puchko put it well: “Those tired of Hollywood happy endings or whimsical romances might appreciate A24’s latest vision of the rocky road to commitment.” She praised the film’s ambiguity, its hard-hitting ending, and the performances — even while acknowledging it’s not an easy watch. Trigger warnings are worth checking before you dive in.

It’s also worth noting that this is the first of three films Zendaya and Pattinson will appear in together this year, which is a pretty remarkable run for two of the most in-demand actors working right now. The Drama has already outperformed Zendaya’s 2024 hit Challengers at the box office, so the pairing is clearly working.

How to Watch ‘The Drama’ at Home Right Now

You’ve got two options: buy it or rent it. The film is available for $24.99 to purchase or $19.99 to rent across all major digital platforms. If you go the rental route, you’ll have 30 days to start watching, and once you hit play, a 48-hour window kicks in to finish it.

You don’t need an active Amazon Prime subscription to buy or rent through Prime Video — just a free Amazon account will do. The same film is also available on Apple TV and Fandango at Home at identical pricing.

When Will ‘The Drama’ Hit HBO Max?

No official date yet, but the destination is clear. A24 renewed its multi-year output deal with Warner Bros. Discovery in January, locking in HBO Max as the exclusive Pay-1 streaming home for A24 theatrical releases in the U.S. That means The Drama will land there before it goes anywhere else.

Based on how other recent A24 releases have moved, the window is typically three to five months post-theatrical. Marty Supreme, A24’s highest-grossing film of all time, arrived on HBO Max on April 24 — nearly five months after its Christmas Day release. The Smashing Machine made the jump in just over three months. Given that The Drama opened April 3, the smart money is on a July or September 2026 streaming premiere.

HBO Max subscriptions start at $10.99 per month, though an annual plan drops that to $9.17 per month. The Disney+, Hulu, and HBO Max bundle — at $19.99 per month with ads — remains one of the better deals in streaming if you’re not already subscribed.

For now, though, the movie is right there waiting on demand. Go in as blind as possible. That’s the whole point.

The post Zendaya’s ‘The Drama’ Is Now Streaming at Home appeared first on Cream.