After its $38M Thursday and Friday, I was ready to call a $90M weekend for Kane Parsons’ “Backrooms,” but the film seems to have been slightly front-loaded, with noticeable dips on Saturday and Sunday. An $81M weekend and $118M worldwide is still phenomenal for a film budgeted at under $10M—an indie in every sense of the term.
What caused the dip? I would point to those audience scores, which aren’t great: a “B−” CinemaScore, 73% on Rotten Tomatoes, a 52% definite recommendation rate, and a 67% positive score on PostTrak. Word of mouth could prove to be a burden and translate into a significant drop in its second weekend.
Regardless, “Backrooms” is now the biggest opening for an A24 film, and it’s not even close. The film has more than tripled the domestic opening of previous champion “Civil War” ($25.7M).
With all that in mind, Parsons is now telling Variety, in an article published yesterday, that he’s already under contract for a “Backrooms” sequel at A24.
In another interview, this one with Polygon, Parsons goes a step further, implying that this is only the first chapter in a larger story, with multiple future installments needed to fully explore what he sees as the core of “Backrooms”:
[Sequels are] more than an option — it's been the intention since 2022 […] This film is the first part in what I would desire to be several narrative steps, in terms of approaching what I consider to be the true heart of the idea. I just don't think you could get to it in the time you have for a single movie.
Hey, I liked the film. Its first half was much better than its second, but it’s still a visually striking debut for Parsons. He doesn’t reshape cinema in any fundamental way here—he’s essentially made a film that relies heavily on production design, especially its impossible architecture and disorienting hallways—but what he has reshaped is how Hollywood may now greenlight projects.
That said, building a franchise out of “Backrooms” is probably not something you want to let define you. I’m sure he has other non-“Backrooms” ideas percolating in his head, and we’ll no doubt eventually get to see them.
Festival press conferences have turned into landmines of political questioning, to the point where some artists would probably prefer to turn down being a juror at Cannes, Venice, or Berlin.