Backrooms Made Over $400 Million on a Budget Under $10 Million. Critics Loved It, Audiences Gave It a B-Minus, and Today It Streams on HBO Max.

Four months ago, a 20-year-old whose previous credits were a series of YouTube shorts opened a movie to $81.4 million. Today that movie, Backrooms, starts streaming on HBO Max, and it arrives carrying two report cards that do not agree with each other.

Critics gave it 86 percent on Rotten Tomatoes across more than 300 reviews and a 76 on Metacritic. Opening-night audiences gave it a B-minus CinemaScore. Both groups saw the same film. The gap between them is the most useful thing to understand before you press play.

How a YouTube channel became A24's biggest movie

Kane Parsons started posting Backrooms videos to his Kane Pixels channel as a teenager in January 2022, building on an internet creepypasta about an endless maze of yellow, fluorescent-lit office rooms. The shorts went viral. A year later A24 announced a feature with Parsons directing, backed by Chernin Entertainment, Shawn Levy's 21 Laps, and James Wan's Atomic Monster. Will Soodik wrote the script, and the film shot in Vancouver in the summer of 2025 under the working title Effigy.

The result cost under $10 million. It more than tripled A24's previous opening record, held by Civil War, and made Parsons the youngest director ever to have a number one movie, breaking the record Josh Trank set at 27 with Chronicle in 2012. It overtook Marty Supreme as A24's highest-grossing release in its second weekend, finished at $197.5 million domestic, and crossed $400 million worldwide this month. We tracked the run in our summer 2026 box office scorecard.

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What it actually is

Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, a failed architect who now runs a furniture store and finds a doorway in its basement that opens onto seemingly endless liminal space. Renate Reinsve plays Mary, his therapist, who goes in after him. Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Avan Jogia fill out the cast. It is rated R and runs just under two hours.

That is close to everything you need to know about the plot, and it is also close to everything the movie is willing to tell you. Backrooms is not a monster movie with rules. It is a mood piece about grief and dread that happens to have one of the most recognizable settings on the internet.

Why critics went for it

The praise clusters around craft. Variety's Owen Gleiberman called Parsons a wizard of mood who shares early David Lynch's love of industrial cosmic sound design, and reviewers kept reaching for Eraserhead, The Shining, and Skinamarink as reference points. Slashfilm's BJ Colangelo called it, when it works, one of the strongest debut features in years. IndieWire's Ryan Lattanzio went further:

Remember the first horror movie that changed who you were? This will be that for many people.Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire

Several critics singled out the opening minutes and a long sequence between the second and third acts as the film at its most frightening. Nearly all of them credit Ejiofor and Reinsve with grounding a story that deliberately withholds explanation.

Why audiences were colder

Look at who bought tickets opening weekend: 86 percent were under 35, and 44 percent were under 21. That is the YouTube audience, and many of them arrived expecting a feature-length version of the shorts, with lore and answers. The most common critical complaint lines up with the audience grade. The longer the film spends in the maze, the more its oddities feel random, and it becomes clear no tidy explanation is coming.

A B-minus is not a failing grade, and $400 million says plenty of people came back or told friends to go. But it is a warning label. If you want a haunted house ride with a clean mythology, this is not that movie.

How to watch it at home

This is a movie that lives in its sound design and its sickly yellow light, which means your setup matters more than it does for most streaming releases.

• Watch it at night with the lights off. The whole film is built on fluorescent glare against darkness. A bright living room flattens it.
• Use headphones or real speakers. The hum is the monster. TV speakers will cost you half the dread.
• Do not scroll during the slow stretches. The film earns its biggest scares by making you wait, and a phone screen breaks the spell.
• Know there is more. A24 released an Everything Must Go Edition in theaters on July 3 with 15 extra minutes, and Parsons posted the bonus footage free on his YouTube channel on August 19.

It is streaming on HBO Max as of today, and it airs on HBO on Saturday, September 26, at 8 p.m. ET. It has also been available to rent or buy digitally since July 14. If you are building a weekend around it, our what to watch this weekend guide has the theatrical picks, including Primetime and Forgotten Island.

What comes next

Parsons is returning to direct Backrooms 2 for A24, according to reports earlier this month, though the sequel has no production start or release date yet. He has also said the YouTube series will continue and has talked about a television version. For a director who is still 20, that is a lot of maze left to build.

In the meantime, the fun part is deciding where this one sits. Is it scarier than James Wan's work on the Conjuring movies? Better than the franchise horror that outgrossed it? Put it on your movie tier list, rank it head to head against the horror films that shaped you on Shortlist, and see if Lattanzio was right about what it does to a first-time viewer.

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