Okay so we have to talk about what just happened at the box office because it is bonkers.
A 20 year old who built a following making liminal space videos on YouTube just had the biggest opening weekend in A24 history. A 27 year old who shot his first horror movie for $800 and uploaded it to YouTube after nobody would distribute it just crossed $148 million worldwide on a budget that wouldn’t cover a single day of craft services on a Marvel film. And while all of this was happening, a Star Wars movie fell 70% in its second weekend and basically disappeared into a hole in the ground.
Horror did that. Original horror. Not a sequel, not a remake, not chapter nine of a franchise with a dedicated subreddit. Two new ideas from two filmmakers who spent years making things on the internet because no one was going to hand them anything.
The Backrooms Opens the Floodgates
The Backrooms made $81.4 million domestically in its opening weekend. $118 million worldwide. From a movie directed by a kid who, not very long ago, was posting videos about those unsettling, fluorescent lit hallways that live rent free in the brains of anyone who’s ever spent too much time online. You know the ones. Wrong proportions. The hum. That feeling that you’ve seen this place before.
Kane Parsons understood that feeling better than almost anyone, turned it into a YouTube web series, and A24 came calling. They gave him $10 million and Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, and whatever he did with that combination apparently destroyed every expectation anyone had. The film’s opening more than tripled the previous A24 record, which was Alex Garland’s Civil War at $25.5 million. It beat Hereditary. It beat Midsommar. The movie beat the studio’s biggest awards darlings and its biggest critical hits. In one weekend.
Parsons is also now the youngest director to ever have a number one movie at the box office. The previous record holder was Josh Trank at 27 when Chronicle opened in 2012. Parsons did it at 20. He is younger than a lot of the people reading this article.
Obsession Refuses to Slow Down
Before Parsons shattered every record in sight, Curry Barker had already been quietly doing something kind of insane for three weeks.
Obsession opened to $17.2 million in mid May, which was already more than double what anyone projected ($8-9 million was the industry expectation). A supernatural psychological horror about a shy music store employee who makes a wish that goes very, very wrong, made for under a million dollars, earned an A- on CinemaScore. Horror movies do not get A- CinemaScores. The genre is practically designed to produce divided reactions. An A- means a huge chunk of people walked out genuinely happy, which for horror is rarer than a ghost that actually shows up on camera.
Then the second weekend happened. Instead of dropping, which is what movies do, Obsession went up 39% to $23.9 million over the Memorial Day four day frame. That’s the biggest second weekend increase for a wide release horror film in modern times outside of Christmas season. By week three, $148 million worldwide. On a budget that Barker has been transparent about. Under a million dollars. He’s discussed the $800 found footage film Milk & Serial that preceded this one, the film he spent a year trying to get distributed before just putting it on YouTube, where it went viral and got him signed to UTA, which eventually led to Obsession being acquired out of TIFF.
That’s not a shortcut. That’s a decade of work that nobody saw, followed by a moment everyone’s seeing now.
The Paranormal Activity comparison is obvious, and I’m going to make it anyway because it’s the right one. Oren Peli shot that film in his own house for $15,000 and released it wide in 2009. It made nearly $200 million worldwide. It announced to the industry that the audience for genuine, low budget, screw with your head horror was enormous and largely being ignored. Obsession is doing that again, twenty years later, except now we can add The Blair Witch Project and Saw and Get Out and Skinamarink and Terrifier 3 to the long list of films that were supposed to be too weird or too cheap or too something to matter, and then proceeded to matter enormously.
The Records That Fell
Let me just stack them up quickly. The Backrooms set the all time A24 opening weekend record. It set the record for the biggest opening weekend for an original horror movie. Kane Parsons became the youngest filmmaker to have a number one box office debut. Obsession posted the largest second weekend increase for a wide release horror film in modern times outside of the holiday corridor. Then it went up again in its third weekend. According to Focus Features, it’s the first film since E.T. in 1982 to increase in both its second and third weekends outside of the holiday season. E.T. Two films, five records, and a combined budget that is genuinely embarrassing when you put it next to what Disney spent on the movie that got crushed by them.
The Mandalorian and Grogu dropped 70% in weekend two. For comparison, Solo: A Star Wars Story, widely considered one of the franchise’s most painful stumbles, dropped 65% in its second weekend. Grogu somehow did worse. Meanwhile, Obsession went up. And then up again.
Final Thoughts
Curry Barker is already attached to write and direct a Texas Chain Saw Massacre reimagining for A24. Kane Parsons is, I would imagine, not taking many of the calls he’s currently receiving. Both of them are going to be making movies for a long time.
But what sticks with me about this particular weekend is not the records or the dollar figures. It’s that two people who started by making things in their bedrooms and posting them online for free, who had no institutional backing, just proved that the path to making a movie that genuinely gets under people’s skin doesn’t run through any of the places the industry thought it did. It runs through caring about the material more than about the business of the material.
Horror figured that out a long time ago. The rest of Hollywood is still catching up.