<\/p>\n
24’s “Backrooms,” the big screen adaptation of a viral YouTube horror series, smashed several box office records with an $81.5 million North American debut, US media reported Sunday.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, who created the “Backrooms” web series as a teenager, the movie’s massive opening weekend haul is the largest ever for an original horror film and more than doubles A24’s previous best domestic opening, according to Variety.<\/p>\n
Parsons also becomes the youngest director ever to debut at number one with a feature film, the entertainment trade publication said.<\/p>\n
Starring Oscar nominees Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, the movie follows a furniture shop owner (Ejiofor) who discovers a mysterious, labyrinthine complex underneath his store.<\/p>\n
When the man goes missing, his therapist (Reinsve) steps inside the liminal space to try and find him.<\/p>\n
Originating as a creepy shared story told online by ordinary internet users, the “Backrooms” universe erupts into American cinemas on Friday.<\/p>\n
“I would have been 13 at the time. I do not recall the first time I saw it exactly, because it was very prevalent as a meme,” Parsons told AFP.<\/p>\n
He watched as posters’ imagination developed the image into a “vaguely nostalgic and vaguely dreamlike but also very tangible science-fiction concept”.<\/p>\n
The original image was accompanied by a short piece of anonymous text, warning readers against stumbling into its disturbing parallel world.<\/p>\n
It quickly became a so-called “creepypasta” — a short horror story reposted and modified around the web, to which other users added details such as monsters and undiscovered dimensions.<\/p>\n
“This project is obviously bigger than me,” feeding on the input of countless other online posters, Parsons acknowledged.<\/p>\n
It was only in 2024 that online sleuths tracked down the original photo to a 2002 renovation of a furniture store in Wisconsin.<\/p>\n
Before that, in 2022, Parsons shared a short film to his YouTube channel that he had made with the 3D software Blender.<\/p>\n
It depicted a young boy wandering lost through the Backrooms’ terrifying corridors.<\/p>\n
Within two weeks, the video had racked up 20 million views.<\/p>\n
“I started getting emails from a whole bunch of different companies,” Parsons remembers.<\/p>\n
“I was 16… it was all very new and I was very sceptical of what it could mean to try and adapt this or to be engaging with suits” from Hollywood, he added — especially on “something that I cared so personally about”.<\/p>\n
Parsons finally reached a deal with two production companies and A24, with filming taking place in summer 2025.<\/p>\n
British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor plays the protagonist in what became Parsons’ first full-length director’s credit.<\/p>\n
“There was no version of this where I wasn’t the one directing that I would personally be open to,” he said. “I’ve always been very stingy about that.”<\/p>\n
On his YouTube channel, Kane Pixels, Parsons today has more than three million subscribers, with more than 215 million views for the 20 or so videos related to “Backrooms” alone.<\/p>\n
Extended universe\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n The film is “in direct continuity with the YouTube series”, Parsons said.<\/p>\n It alternates between “found footage” segments filmed in first person that resemble his web show, and more classic filmic shots.<\/p>\n “It’s going to be weird seeing how much (‘Backrooms’) has dropped into the mainstream… Formerly this has been semi-niche,” he mused.<\/p>\n Parsons’s work is not the only internet-spawned universe to hit cinemas this year.<\/p>\n YouTuber Mark Fischbach, whose channel Markiplier boasts 38 million subscribers, released the horror movie “Iron Lung” in January.<\/p>\n The film was adapted from a video game he helped popularise with online clips.<\/p>\n And in 2018, another “creepypasta” about the gangly, besuited monster “Slender Man” was turned into a feature film that raked in $50 million worldwide.<\/p>\n As for Parsons, “‘Backrooms’ is not done”, he said.<\/p>\n “I wouldn’t rule out film. I wouldn’t rule out even television series. That would be my personal hope.”<\/p>\n He has meanwhile launched another series on YouTube, “The Oldest View”, which follows the exploration of an abandoned subterranean shopping mall.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.thejakartapost.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 24’s “Backrooms,” the big screen adaptation of a viral YouTube horror series, smashed several box office records with an $81.5 million North American debut, US media reported Sunday. Directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, who created the “Backrooms” web series as a teenager, the movie’s massive opening weekend haul is the largest ever for an original […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2440148,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[456853,34204,21799,22860,22232,23844],"class_list":["post-2440147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-backrooms","tag-box-office","tag-film","tag-hollywood","tag-horror","tag-youtube"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Backrooms-based-on-YouTube-horror-series-breaks-box-office-records.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2440147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2440147"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2440147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2440149,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2440147\/revisions\/2440149"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2440148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2440147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2440147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2440147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}