‘Backrooms’ Is First $100 Million Movie For A24 At U.S. Box Office

Who saw this coming? Kane Parson’s Backrooms is crossing $100 million today at the domestic box office, becoming A24‘s first movie ever to do so, and their highest grossing movie stateside, surpassing the Timothée Chalamet period dramedy Marty Supreme ($96M domestic). And Backrooms pulled this off in six days.

On a global basis, with north of $136M, Backrooms is poised to topple A24’s multi-Oscar winner Everything Everywhere All at Once ($148M) as their second highest grossing movie. Marty Supreme currently reigns as A24’s highest grossing movie ever with $191.3M worldwide — but that could ultimately change very soon as Backrooms continues to hoard cash. Backrooms second weekend is expected to be down anywhere from -55% to -60% with $32M-$37M.

Backrooms made $8.7M on Tuesday, which is the second highest grossing Tuesday for a horror film overall at the June box office behind the opening day of 20th Century Fox’s reboot The Omen on June 6, 2006 which did $12.6M. Running domestic cume through yesterday for the Parsons project is $97.8M.

Roughly three weeks ago, the internet born freaky deaky Backrooms looked like it was set to open to $20M in North America, which would have still been great for this under $10M production which Chernin Entertainment co-financed with A24. But then Backrooms mushroomed to an unprecedented $81.4M stateside and $118M WW, A24’s best start in the history of the 14-year old studio. Parsons became the youngest filmmaker ever at 20 years old to notch a No. 1 opening at the box office, particularly one that was north of $100M at the global box office.

Atomic Monster-Blumhouse, 21 Laps, and Odd Fellows are producers on Backrooms. Parsons and the pic’s screenwriter Will Soodik are repped by 3 Arts Entertainment. In A24 internal polls, more than 50% of the crowd came because it’s one of their films, while 30% came for Parsons.

The top reasons over the weekend for attendance were fanship of the Backrooms IP and A24, which mirrors the turnout of other recent A24 pics, The Drama and Marty Supreme, which pulled in 70%+ under-35. The studio has earned this demographic’s trust over the years with auteur-driven original edgy stories, not to mention, A24 knows how to dynamite this crowd to the theater through thrifty digital marketing campaigns, Backrooms costing north of $10M stateside.