A24 is handing the sequel to the biggest movie in its history back to the 21-year-old who made the first one.
According to a new exclusive from Dread Central’s Brad Miska, Kane Parsons has officially signed on to direct Backrooms 2 for A24, with sources telling the outlet that a formal announcement is imminent. Dread Central also reports that the sequel will be Parsons’ immediate next project, leapfrogging the original film he had been developing with producer and mentor Osgood Perkins.
In other words: the kid isn’t handing off the keys. He’s driving.
Why ‘Backrooms 2’ Isn’t Your Average Sequel Greenlight
Let’s be clear about the size of what Parsons pulled off in May, because it is genuinely one of the wildest success stories the genre has produced this decade.
Backrooms opened over Memorial Day weekend to $81.5 million domestic and $118 million worldwide, obliterating A24’s previous opening-weekend record and making Parsons, then 20, the youngest filmmaker in history to land a No. 1 movie at the box office. He took that record from Josh Trank, who set it with Chronicle back in 2012.
It didn’t stop there. The film has since climbed to roughly $197.5 million domestic and $394.1 million worldwide against a budget reported at under $10 million. That is A24’s highest-grossing release ever, the second-biggest horror movie of 2026, and one of the five highest-grossing independent films of all time.
Critics came along for the ride, too: 87% on Rotten Tomatoes across 308 reviews and a 76 on Metacritic, with plenty of ink spilled comparing Parsons’ compositions to Eraserhead and The Shining. Audiences were more divided. That B- CinemaScore is exactly the grade a slow-burn, deeply weird arthouse nightmare tends to pull from a holiday-weekend crowd. It didn’t matter. The movie had legs for months.
Handing the follow-up to a hired gun would have been the studio-brained move. A24 didn’t do that.
Parsons Always Said the Backrooms Was Bigger Than One Movie
None of this should be a shock if you were paying attention this spring. Parsons told Variety around release that he saw Backrooms as a series that goes outside the confines of this film, and he has spoken openly about wanting to keep expanding the mythology, including a possible television series and continued installments of the original YouTube run.
That YouTube run is where all of this started. Parsons uploaded The Backrooms (Found Footage) in January 2022 at 16 years old. Studios were circling within a month. A24 hired him at 17. His channel has since racked up more than 400 million views across projects like The Oldest View and People Still Live Here.
The $65 Million Question
There is also the small matter of the deal. Back in July, multiple outlets reported that A24 had offered Parsons a three-year pact worth a reported $65 million, with Warner Bros., Universal and Sony all circling, structured with bonuses tied to delivering two features inside the window.
Those figures have never been officially confirmed and are worth treating as reporting rather than gospel. But if they hold up, Backrooms 2 is presumably film one of two.
What We Still Don’t Know About ‘Backrooms 2’
Just about everything else.
There is no release date, no confirmed writer (Will Soodik scripted the first film) and no word on who is coming back in front of the camera. That last one is the interesting question. The original starred Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, the failed architect turned furniture store owner who finds the doorway in his basement, alongside Renate Reinsve as his therapist Dr. Mary Kline, plus Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell and Avan Jogia.
Given where that ending leaves things, and given Parsons’ stated interest in a sprawling, interconnected Backrooms universe rather than a straight continuation, we would caution against assuming this is a simple everybody-comes-back sequel. An anthology-adjacent expansion feels just as likely.
And honestly, that is the fun of it. The whole appeal of the Backrooms as a piece of internet folklore is that it is infinite by design. There is no map. There is just more hallway.
We’ll update as A24 makes it official.
Source: Dread Central broke the news on Kane Parsons returning for Backrooms 2. Box office figures via Deadline, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.
