Kane Parsons' Backrooms is about to become A24's highest-grossing movie worldwide, and it may do it this weekend. If the current pace holds, the viral-born film will pass $191.2 million and unseat Marty Supreme as the studio's top global earner either by Sunday or Monday.
That is a striking finish for a movie that cost under $10 million, was co-financed with Chernin Entertainment and was backed by a domestic P&A spend in the teen millions. It stars Oscar nominees Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, but the box office story is really about speed: Backrooms became A24's biggest domestic release in its first six days and is now set to reach the worldwide mark in only 10 days, or 11 at most.
The numbers behind that climb are already large enough to explain why theater owners and rival studios are watching. Backrooms earned an estimated $25.7 million in its second weekend in North America, bringing its domestic total to an expected $134.8 million by tomorrow. Overseas, the film had reached $50.3 million by yesterday, putting its global total on track to finish Sunday north of $185 million before the final push toward the A24 record.
That rise has come even with a steep 68% drop in North America in its second weekend, a fall that would normally cool the headlines around a release. Instead, Backrooms is behaving like a fan-front-loaded IP title, with an audience that was 81% under 35 in its second frame and spent heavily in the opening days before the rush eased. The pattern is familiar to anyone who watched other sharp week-two slides, including Disney's The Mandalorian and Grogu and Ridley Scott's The Martian still standing as a sci-fi box office giant, except here the scale is smaller and the speed to a studio record is faster.
What Backrooms is doing is also a reminder of how far A24's top line has moved in a short time. Everything Everywhere All at Once once held the studio's worldwide record at $147.9 million, and Marty Supreme later took the domestic crown with $96 million before now being overtaken globally. Backrooms is set to clear the old benchmark in a fraction of the time Marty Supreme needed to rise, and the next question is not whether A24 has a new leader, but how high the film can finish after it gets there.
Steven Spielberg has already been quoted praising the company with a simple, “I just applaud them.” That sentiment fits the moment. A low-budget release with a front-loaded audience and a heavy early surge is about to give A24 a new worldwide champion, and by this weekend or Monday the studio should know whether Backrooms has merely set its record or started stretching it even further.
