• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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