Obsession just crossed the $400 million mark, and the year’s other big horror breakout isn’t far behind. Backrooms, which opened two weeks after Obsession and reached $100 million in just a week, has now made more than $350 million worldwide. This comes on the heels of the Backrooms: Everything Must Go Edition, which added 15 minutes of new footage into the theatrical release.
This is great news for studio A24, which would surely prefer the spotlight shift back to its highest-grossing film of all time and away from its controversial Google AI deal. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Kane Parsons’ feature expansion of his viral YouTube shorts has earned $357 million globally. That haul has made it the top-earning A24 film in a number of countries, including China, France, Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Poland, and Thailand.
It has also pulled in crowds in Germany and Taiwan, as well as Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.
All this is to say that Backrooms—about a man (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who discovers an unsettling liminal zone adjacent to his furniture store—has a universal appeal that might’ve seemed obvious given Parsons’ millions of YouTube fans, but who could have guessed how much it would resonate with audiences?
While Obession‘s Curry Barker has several projects already on his slate, including a new Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie, it’s not certain yet what Parsons might be working on next. In early June, Deadline suggested he might expand Backrooms into a “feature anthology,” meaning this may not be the last we’ve seen of those sickly yellow spaces.
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