LOS ANGELES – The summer of 2026 has already delivered its share of surprises, but none quite so strange, or so fitting, as this one: a horror film born from a fluorescent-lit internet nightmare is poised to beat Star Wars at the box office.
A24’s Backrooms, directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, is projected to open between $40 million and $55 million in its domestic debut this weekend, a performance that would not only unseat Disney’s The Mandalorian and Grogu from the top spot but set an all-time opening record for the arthouse studio. For context, A24’s previous best debut was Civil War in 2024, which launched to $25.5 million.
The numbers feel almost as disorienting as the film itself.
Parsons, known online as Kane Pixels, built the Backrooms mythology over several years through a 22-episode YouTube series that accumulated an estimated 337 million views. The series, set in an endless yellow-walled dimension that looks like an office park designed by someone who has never seen natural light, became a cornerstone of internet horror culture, a modern creepypasta elevated by Parsons’ meticulous found-footage filmmaking. He was 19 years old when he signed with A24. He is now the youngest filmmaker to direct a feature for the studio in its history.
The film, which opened wide on Friday, May 29, stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, a furniture store owner and failed architect whose life is quietly unraveling. His therapist, played by Renate Reinsve, watches as her patient stumbles through a hidden doorway in the store’s basement and disappears into the titular dimension. What follows, critics have agreed, is less a conventional horror ride than a shivery, disorienting descent into something that resists easy category. Variety called it a film of suggestion and down-the-rabbit-hole darkness, while The Hollywood Reporter noted that the film’s production design was undeniable even where its storytelling faltered, and Deadline praised it as a work of cinematic sophistication capable of igniting a franchise.
The film was produced by James Wan, Shawn Levy, Osgood Perkins, Peter Chernin and Jenno Topping, among others, a heavyweight assembly that gave Parsons the kind of institutional backing that most directors spend a decade earning. It was shot in Vancouver under the working title Effigy in the summer of 2025, distributed by A24 alongside Chernin Entertainment and Blumhouse-Atomic Monster.
Meanwhile, The Mandalorian and Grogu is tracking for roughly $40 million in its second domestic weekend, a standard 50 percent decline from its Memorial Day debut. The Jon Favreau-directed film launched to $81 million over the traditional three-day frame and $102 million through Monday, alongside $163 million globally, respectable numbers that nonetheless failed to put the debate about Star Wars’ theatrical viability fully to rest. Box office analysts noted that its opening tracked closely with Solo: A Star Wars Story, the 2018 Memorial Day release widely considered the franchise’s most commercially damaging stumble in recent memory.
The question that has followed The Mandalorian and Grogu since opening weekend is whether the film appeals only to the show’s existing fanbase, or whether it carries the cross-generational pull that major Star Wars theatrical releases have historically required. Its second-weekend performance will go some way toward answering that, though the arrival of Backrooms, which holds significant IMAX competition for the frame, will complicate any clean read of the holdover.
For A24, the stakes are straightforward. Backrooms is a thrifty-budgeted production that, if it opens anywhere near the top of projections, will return multiples on its investment and confirm a pattern the studio and its rivals have been watching closely all year: low-budget horror films built on pre-existing internet fandoms are outperforming franchise tentpoles. Focus Features’ Obsession, which opened to $17.19 million earlier this month and surged 39 percent in its second weekend, as reported, has already demonstrated the durability of that model. Industry observers expect it to challenge its own opening in its third frame.
Backrooms targets a somewhat different crowd: the Gen Z audience that grew up inside the mythology, that has spent years watching Parsons extend the lore in real time, that understands what it means to no-clip into a dimension and why the hum of fluorescent lights is the sound that precedes something terrible. Whether that crowd alone can sustain a $50 million opening is a question the weekend will answer. Whether it can cross over into a general audience, families, older moviegoers, the curious non-initiated, will determine whether the film simply breaks an A24 record or becomes something rarer: a genuine cultural phenomenon, the kind that reshapes how studios think about where their next franchises come from.
The answer, it turns out, may already be in the walls.
