The 20-year-old filmmaker Kane Parsons just became Hollywood’s youngest miracle worker. His horror movie Backrooms opened to an estimated $76 million to $79 million in North America over the Memorial Day weekend, shattering every record for distributor A24. The film, which cost only $10 million to produce, earned $10.4 million from Thursday night previews alone. Now Parsons is telling fans exactly what comes next.
Parsons Says ‘Backrooms Is Not Done’
Hours after the box office numbers came in, Kane Parsons confirmed in an interview with Rolling Stone that he has no plans to walk away from the universe he built. “I think this is a world-building exercise on top of what I’ve already done. I’m well into it, and plan on certainly continuing it,” Parsons said. “Backrooms is not done”.
The young director started making Backrooms videos on YouTube in 2022 using free software called Blender. His first video now has more than 78 million views. That online series caught the attention of A24, James Wan, and Osgood Perkins, leading to a feature film starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve.
A Sequel and a Limited Series Are Both on the Table
Kane Parsons has been talking about expanding the Backrooms story for weeks. Earlier in May, he responded to a fan on social media saying he has ideas for both a limited series and a sequel. The limited series would wrap up the story from his original YouTube videos, while the movie sequel would continue the new storyline from the theatrical release.
“I really was just approaching that with extreme caution, because I loved this project, and I had grown up seeing suits come in and take a chainsaw to so many IPs that I had grown up being a fan of,” Parsons told the Calgary Herald about selling his idea to Hollywood.
Parsons co-wrote the Backrooms screenplay with Will Soodik. The film follows a furniture store owner who finds a hidden portal in his basement and gets stuck in an endless maze of yellow rooms. His therapist goes in to save him. The movie currently holds an 88% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
The Youngest A24 Director Just Made History
Kane Parsons is officially the youngest director ever to make a film for A24. He turned 21 in June 2026. His opening weekend numbers put Backrooms in the top five biggest horror openings of all time, right behind It Chapter Two ($91 million) and ahead of A Quiet Place ($50 million).
The audience for Backrooms is extremely young. 87% of ticket buyers are under 35 years old, with 43% being between 18 and 24. That same young audience also pushed another YouTuber-turned-director’s film Obsession past $100 million domestically the same weekend.
How a Minecraft Player Built a Horror Empire
Kane Parsons started building worlds when he was 10 years old. He played Minecraft and LittleBigPlanet, creating entire realms on his computer. He saw a creepy image on the internet forum 4chan around 2021. The picture showed a yellow office room with fluorescent lights. The caption warned about “no-clipping out of reality” and ending up in the Backrooms.
Parsons taught himself 3D animation using Blender and made his first Backrooms video in January 2022. Hollywood studios started emailing him soon after. He told the Calgary Herald that he received “tons of emails” from companies he never heard of. He almost said no to all of them.
“I bet this is going to fall apart. It won’t last; this will be over. And if I give away anything, then I am left with nothing,” Parsons said about his early conversations with studios.
The Physical Set Was 30,000 Square Meters
For the movie version of Backrooms, Kane Parsons built a real version of the digital world he created online. The production built 30,000 square meters of Backrooms space across four sound stages in Vancouver, Canada. Parsons used Blender to create a 3D blueprint first, then watched construction crews make it real.
“Stepping on [set] for the first time was one of the most surreal experiences I’ve ever had because it has been digital for so long, and now I’m actually able to see it with my own eyes and touch the wall. It was very bizarre,” Parsons told The Age.
The Vancouver producer Chris Ferguson worked with Parsons on the film. Ferguson told the Calgary Herald that the young director is “wildly intelligent and thoughtful” and that “he feels like one of my peers when we’re talking”.
Backrooms Beat Star Wars at the Box Office
The success of Backrooms shocked Hollywood. The film opened the same weekend as Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, a big-budget movie from Disney. Backrooms came in first place, while the Star Wars movie dropped nearly 70% in its second weekend.
In Italy, Backrooms also took the number one spot with almost 400,000 euros on its opening Friday. The movie is playing in 3,442 theaters across North America.
Also Read:
What Parsons Learned From Hollywood’s Mistakes
Kane Parsons watched other internet stories get turned into bad movies before he agreed to make Backrooms. He mentioned Slender Man as an example of Hollywood taking an online legend and breaking it. He wanted to avoid what he calls “lore bloat,” where creators add too many details because fans keep asking questions online.
“A project that’s born online gets so much attention from an answer-seeking audience that sometimes creators get stuck in a feedback loop of over-catering to that set of sensibilities. You then get something that’s way too dense and contrived for a person from the outside to approach,” Parsons explained.
He kept the movie simple. The Backrooms is just endless yellow rooms and buzzing lights. No complicated rules. No over-explaining. Just a scary place you cannot escape.
Also Read: Star City Episode 3 Release Date: When to Watch the Next Chapter on Apple TV Plus
For more updates on rising directors and horror movie news, keep checking back with VvipTimes for the latest stories from Hollywood.
