‘The Backrooms’ Stuns Canadian Box Office, Overtakes Major Hollywood Franchises
Nobody saw this coming, least of all the studios that spent hundreds of millions betting the opposite. The Backrooms, a horror film made on a US$10 million budget—chicken feed by Hollywood standards—by a 20-year-old YouTube filmmaker, pulled in an estimated US$81.5 million (roughly C$111.7 million) across the U.S. and Canada last weekend. It more than doubled the combined gross of The Mandalorian and Grogu and the Michael Jackson biopic Michael. For A24, it was the distributor’s biggest opening ever. For Canadian multiplexes, it was a jolt of energy they badly needed.
The film’s internet origins
The Backrooms started as a creepypasta (internet-generated folklore) before Parsons, a self-taught animator, turned it into a series of short films using the free 3D software Blender. Those shorts, which looked like an endless maze of soul-draining office cubicles, racked up over 200 million views. The built-in fanbase was real. A24 and Chernin Entertainment co-financed the feature for US$10 million (about C$13.7 million). The movie recouped that on opening day. Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as a furniture store owner who stumbles into a purgatorial alternate dimension. The global gross has already passed US$144 million, the studio said.
Young audiences pack Canadian theatres
A24’s exit polling put 86% of the audience under 35, nearly half under 21. That pattern held in Canadian multiplexes, where Cineplex reported sellouts in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal all weekend. One downtown Toronto manager described the atmosphere as concert-like, with groups of teens and twenty-somethings filling the seats. The R rating forced staff to check IDs at the door, the same rule U.S. chains applied. But the demand wasn’t just in big cities. Theatres in Winnipeg, Halifax, and Victoria also had walk-up business, with Saturday evening shows gone by mid-afternoon. For an exhibition industry that’s been anxious about Gen Z’s return, the weekend looked less like a trend and more like a rebuke. Whether that appetite sticks around is another matter.
The box office top five
Here’s how the chart broke down, according to Comscore:
1. The Backrooms — US$81.5 million (C$111.7 million)
2. Obsession — US$26.4 million (C$36.1 million)
3. Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu — US$25 million (C$34.2 million)
4. Michael — US$11.7 million (C$16.0 million)
5. The Breadwinner — US$7.5 million (C$10.3 million)
The Mandalorian and Grogu fell 69% from its debut and now fights for third. Obsession, another shoestring horror from a 26-year-old YouTuber, actually ticked up 10% in its third weekend. Paul Dergarabedian of Comscore told the Associated Press: “Everyone’s asking what’s the next big thing in Hollywood for movies, and what can bring people back to the movie theatre? And this may be it.” The real surprise wasn’t the grosses but where they came from. Nobody in a Hollywood boardroom predicted this.
The YouTube-to-theatre pipeline
Blumhouse-Atomic Monster produced both The Backrooms and Obsession, and its president Abhijay Prakash called the weekend “staggering,” a validation of the company’s bet on internet-born directors. “With some distance, we’ll probably look back at this as a real turning point,” he said, adding that the pitch calls haven’t stopped. The irony is that creators like Parsons and Barker built millions of followers without a theatre. Yet they still pushed for a theatrical release, and audiences showed up, because the material felt like it belonged on the platforms where they already lived. That’s a lesson the legacy studios keep failing to learn. Cineplex, which has spent quarters worrying about younger demographics staying home, saw the kind of walk-up business that programming execs couldn’t have scripted. A single hit won’t fix a broken model. But it does suggest the audience was never gone. They were just waiting for something that didn’t insult them.
What comes next
Parsons is now the youngest director ever to top the global box office. A24 has promised more bets on creators who grew up online. The test is whether any of them can repeat the magic without a pre-existing meme to fuel it. The next big challenger arrives in July, a new Illumination cartoon that’ll almost certainly open north of US$100 million. But it’s not cartoons that keep theatre owners up at night. It’s the thought that maybe young audiences really do prefer horror shot on a laptop to another tired franchise installment. And there’s the uncomfortable question nobody in a boardroom wants to voice: What if the next hit doesn’t need a studio at all?
