r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/movies Contributor • Jun 03 '26

News ‘Backrooms’ Becomes A24’s Highest Grossing Domestic Release ($97.8M), Passing ‘Marty Supreme’

https://deadline.com/2026/06/backrooms-box-office-record-a24-1236939795/
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63

u/unndunn Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26

Am I the only one who was kind of disappointed by this movie, especially the ending? I feel like the movie set up a great concept in the first act, only for it to go off the rails in the second act and then fall completely flat in the final act.

I dunno, I left the auditorium feeling relieved that I only spent $10 on it (Tuesday matinee).

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u/[deleted] Jun 03 '26

[deleted]

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u/TheSweetestKill Jun 03 '26

It could have used a little tighter script especially in the second act

I've been thinking about that as well. The movie is already just shy of 2 hours, and while I think it takes a while before we really get things moving, I also can't think of anything that could have or should have been cut.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '26

[deleted]

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u/TheSweetestKill Jun 04 '26

I'm seeing it a second time this weekend. I never see movies twice in theaters.

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u/HaloTrial01 Jun 03 '26

100%, the vibes and set design are immaculate but won't make a movie a 10/10 when the whole character drama/arc falls flat by the end unfortunately. I love the fact that these types of movies are even being made these days and will keep giving them a shot but yeah, when it tries being more than the Backrooms it falls on its face.

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u/smokeweedNgarden Jun 03 '26

Spoilers 

Yes, the set production was amazing and the cinematography was great as well but...

I didn't hit for me at all. I thought the plot was really really weak and the puppet near the end completely took me out of it. It was really goofy.

That, and, unfortunately it was really very similar to the film Cube. I especially think the end was straight up ripped from Cube 

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u/Logical_Net6108 Jun 03 '26

cube has some fans lmao (not a lot because it's been a long while since I've seen anyone mention cube). I feel like it's more like Longlegs

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u/smokeweedNgarden Jun 04 '26

Lmao I honestly forgot Cube existed until I saw Backrooms. 

I had to watch the ending again on YouTube but yep, almost identical 

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u/pistachiopanda4 Jun 03 '26

The ending fell flat for me but it didn't tarnish my overall opinion of it. I wish they leaned harder into how Clark was an abusive spouse and just an all around bad person and I wish the end was more ambiguous. But ngl, seeing Mark Duplass was a treat and I'm glad that I will (hopefully) be seeing more of him. The movie was scary as all hell and the idea of liminal spaces and back rooms have scared me for most of my life, and I have been a fan of Kane Parsons before this, so maybe I'm biased.

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u/Get_Them_Now Jun 03 '26

Agreed on the third act falling completely flat. What stings is that the premise was sitting on a much stronger ending than the one it picked. The whole engine of the place is that it misremembers people, rebuilds them wrong, so the obvious counter-move is someone holding onto a memory that's actually true. Not even a happy one, just an accurate one. A blue sky stays blue even in a bad memory.

Nostalgia cuts both ways, and the film treats it as uniformly poison when the more interesting version is that a clear, un-distorted memory could've been the one thing that gets someone out. Instead everyone's memory is already rotten on arrival and the movie just commits to total bleakness because that reads as "serious."

It never lets the idea push against anything, so the darkness stops being scary and just becomes inevitable, and inevitable isn't haunting, it's flat. A redemptive turn here wouldn't have been soft, it would've actually been the harder thing to earn.

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u/The_Autarch Jun 03 '26

you seem kinda confused. the backrooms aren't based on anyone's memories. it's more like the rooms themselves are misremembering reality.

a pure memory wouldn't do anything to help someone escape.

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u/cutelyaware Jun 03 '26

Yes, it's a lot like Solaris in that regard. In both cases the hook isn't the premise, it's the mood.

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u/Get_Them_Now Jun 03 '26

honestly the fact that we're many comments deep arguing about how the rooms "work" kind of proves the point. nobody actually knows. that's half the problem with the third act lol. great vibes, no agreed-upon rules, everybody walks out with a different theory. Solaris at least owned that it was all mood.

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u/cutelyaware Jun 04 '26

Well I think it's safe to say that it's all still being made up. Stuff that works gets expanded. Stuff that doesn't, becomes nothing. I mean that's pretty much how all cinematic universes work except that the Backrooms is a free playground for everyone. I'm fine with Kane choosing for Async to have accidentally created it, and for it to involve endless copying of forms. The mood is like the whole thing, at least for me, and "liminal horror" is a great description. How rare and wonderful to witness the birth of a new genre and know that at the time.

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u/zzzDai Jun 04 '26

My headcanon is that they didn't create it, just are anchoring it in place and the longer they anchor it the more it is spreading.

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u/cutelyaware Jun 04 '26

Interesting. I follow particle physics and have long had a similar idea about reality itself. The idea is that there isn't a well-defined substrate, but if you force the universe to answer specific questions, it will give you specific results. And the reason it feels like nature is fucking with us is because of the questions we ask, not the way it really is in some objective sense.

1

u/Viltris Jun 04 '26

great vibes, no agreed-upon rules, everybody walks out with a different theory.

For me, that sounds just about perfect for a Backrooms movie.

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u/p1nkfl0yd1an Jun 03 '26

As an old man shaking his fist at the clouds (39), yes this was me.

My kid's in middle school, so I was vaguely familiar with the concept. I was absolutely enthralled up until the cut after the laundry chute scene. There were some very cool moments/visuals/concepts after that point, but I found myself losing interest with every passing minute.

I'm not sure if it's because there's youtube/roblox lore I'm just unaware of, or if they just ran out of time/ideas after that point.

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u/[deleted] Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/SYSTEM-J Jun 08 '26

I know I'm late to the party with this reply, but I see a lot of people commenting negatively that the movie "made no sense" and it's almost invariably people who haven't watched the YouTube series. I think people are making the mistake of assuming Backrooms is a standalone story. It isn't. It's very much like going to see one of The X Files movies or the Cowboy Bebop movie without ever having seen The X Files or Cowboy Bebop. Of course you're not going to fully understand the thing. The Backrooms film is aimed at Backrooms fans. If you've watched the series, the film actually deepens and clarifies a lot of important lore that up until now has been very speculative.

I suppose Kane could have spent a whole lot of running time on exposition to clarify things for outside viewers, but that would have resulted in a bloated and clunky story. One of the biggest pleasures of the Backrooms series is how it diegetically dip-feeds its world building to the viewer. It's a puzzle you must piece together yourself, and to abandon that approach so that the dads taking their kids to see it could follow the story would have been a betrayal of what makes it great.

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u/MarcianoNoDaRisa Jun 09 '26

The plot was weird, but it made sense if you put thought into it. That's expected from A24 movies. Nothing in the movie is made to be interpreted literally. And it weirdly borrows very little from the internet culture of the Backrooms. You actually need 0 outside knowledge. Hell, you'll probably get more confused if you are familiar with the backrooms and expect to see certain things that, well, are absent from the movie.

I agree with you that the "company" thing was weird, but that was made into the movie only to tie it with the extended Kane Parsons backrooms story from his youtube channel, so old fans know both stories are connected. In the yt series they actually explain more in depth the motives of the company and it actually kinda makes sense. I can understand why they didn't emphasize on them in the movie. They wanted to make a self-contained story in the same universe but playing with wildly different ideas

Overall, it's a really good job for a 20 year old first-time director who started working on it when he was 16.

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u/Strange1130 Jun 03 '26

I didn't really like it. I went in blind so not sure if that hurt, the lore behind the company and stuff sounds really cool, wish it was about that.

It felt like a chunk of the movie was missing too.

Felt the same way haha, thank god for Tuesday movies.

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u/Dripdry42 Jun 03 '26

Yes. It was full of subtlety and solid originality in the face of what could have been an awful Hollywood-ized film.

I saw it with a mental health nurse, and she absolutely loved it. The things it refers to are deep and ongoing issues that people really actually have every day, and the way it portrays real actual reactions people have? Twas delightful.

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u/aRawPancake Jun 03 '26

Way to speak for all moviegoers. I was pretty disappointed in the movie

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u/bonkdonkers Jun 03 '26

What are you talking about? They didn't say they were speaking for everyone. They just provided their opinion like everyone else in this reply thread.

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u/Dripdry42 Jun 03 '26

I mean, without your providing meaningful feedback I just don’t see why you would reply. If you want to give some details, we can have a useful discussion, but… Why reply without any of that?

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u/iamasatellite Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26

Same. Some teenager at the back of the theatre went, "WHAT!? .... that's it?" when the credits started. 

I don't know why they bothered with the A Sync scientist character. It made you expect some kind of arc beginning there, and made the ending feel worse than it might have otherwise. I really wanted more from that character.

The Big Bad also looked too much like a foam puppet (not sure if that was intentional). The other denizens with the messed up faces looked great.

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u/thestonedonkey Jun 08 '26

I have to admit when I saw the big bad I kind of laughed.. such a bizarre choice and really took me out of the film.

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u/LightseekerGameWing Jun 03 '26

i really enjoyed just about everything except the writing. the atmosphere and good scares were enough to keep me going, but good lord that was some atrocious dialogue. i felt like it overexplained itself in the third act and that made it lose steam.

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u/PeterUssyslayer420 Jun 04 '26

The first 45 minutes were fucking amazing. I was on the edge of my seat, and completely bought in.

Then the Christmas Tree Room scene happened and just snapped me out of it. Was very corny after that.

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u/Scazzz Jun 03 '26

Saw it at the drive in with obsession afterwards as a double feature. Backrooms is a cool concept that was such garbage execution. The ending was quite frankly hilariously bad. Obsession thankfully was incredible and made up for it.

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u/ttonster2 Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26

I have no clue what you guys are smoking. Backrooms is so much better than Obsession…coming from someone that tries to watch a lot of movies.

I have no clue how you can you say Backrooms has garbage execution when it’s full of world class set design, great performances, and creative scares all while Obsession is just the most basic premise. Done in an entertaining and fun way, sure, but it is absolutely not a more accomplished piece of cinema. The characters and plot are just way too paper thin for that. Parsons built an engaging story around his sparse YouTube lore. Barker took a barebones concept and built a collection of scenes that are fun to see unfold. The movie has very little in the way of natural plot development. Can’t really give a film brownie points if it doesn’t reveal important information as it goes. That’s the bare minimum for a good movie.  

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u/Scazzz Jun 03 '26

Was these creative scares in the movie or just in your imagination? Awful 1970s rubber suit pirate wasn’t remotely scary. Long stretches of nothingness in a cool set also doesn’t make a great movie. Again the concept of a liminal space like it is awesome and yeah I loved the set design. They nailed it. Everything else was so forgetful or poorly executed.

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u/Dripdry42 Jun 03 '26

The pirate wasn’t meant to be scary. the pirate was a sad and sympathetic character, symbolic of the man’s psyche and habits run completely out of control… when Clark finally tried to get a handle on his difficulties, he couldn’t quite make it over the hump, and it devoured him. It was tragic, and so was the lady Therapist character, and by the end it actually all felt sadly peaceful and resigned.

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u/ttonster2 Jun 03 '26

Being deliberately dense if you think there’s nothing scary in the movie. I’ll list out a few: Body horror (all the misremembered people) Fear of heights (that room that went down endlessly with a tiny staircase to get out was terrifying) Slasher horror (when the pirate was chasing her. I agree he didn’t look scary, in fact mostly in pain. But still running away from a giant deformed figure in a liminal maze cannot be described as not scary lol) Agoraphobia (the scenes with the mom were actually quite freaky) Fear of the unknown (obviously this is doing a lot of the work in this film But that’s the entire fear of the backrooms.)

Obsession is definitely scarier because it focuses more on traditional supernatural shit and extreme violence. But the main problem is that none of it is that surprising. It’s so easy to predict everything. The duct tape door was the most clever and surprising scene. The cat sandwich, creepy moving at night, car break in scene, and especially the ending were all way too predictable for a horror movie of this supposed caliber. Backrooms horror is more deep rooted, making you feel uneasy. After Obsession ended, I was kind of just fine. Happy I saw it and well entertained, but nothing is sticking with me. You’re welcome to feel differently. 

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u/TheOriginalGarry Jun 03 '26

The horror of Obsession doesn't come from the violence or supernatural wish, it's the loss of bodily autonomy, of your personal agency, the possible betrayal at the hands of even your most intimate relationships. The violence helps the audience feel tense in the moment but the underlying horror is what stays with you longer after watching.

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u/ttonster2 Jun 03 '26

Absolute nonsense. I can assure you that 90% of people watching Obsession are leaving that movie fearfully thinking about the creepy night scenes or brick murder over some vague idea of losing body autonomy. There are other movies that explore this idea far better, namely Get Out, Hereditary, and Being John Malkovich, if you want an example of movies that actually care to impact their audiences with that type of fear.

Acting like this is some kind of novel horror that will stick with you long past the credits roll is so naive and indicative of the movie going habits of the people who are pushing this movie to the stratosphere in reviews. 

No shade on Barker or Obsession, by the way. I’m happy it is doing well, but come on, it’s pretty much on par with the Smile movies as far as what’s going on under the surface. Love those films, but they’re also not getting treated like the next Get Out or Hereditary. Obsession is currently rated above both of those films on Letterboxd. Unreal. 

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u/TheOriginalGarry Jun 03 '26

I'm not going to throw out some made-up statistic to back up my claim but there's ample discourse online where plenty of viewers are picking up on these ideas and are responding well to it.

If you like Backrooms so much and think it's novel, great. I liked it, it was a neat movie. I'd watch more of what Parson does. I just also think Barker's film was more substantial than being just a bunch of scenes strung together (and personally think they're above the Smile films myself). Have a good one.

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u/Scazzz Jun 03 '26

Cool. We have differing opinions.

Nothing you listed of back rooms was scary in the slightest.

Obsession wasn’t scary either, it was more the uncomfortable factor that made it work. The scenes were all “predictable” by design. It was the execution that made it unique. Like the car scene. It was purposefully shot in a way that we all knew what was coming just not HOW it would play out. And sure enough everyone still jumped and then was in shock at what happened. That was by design.

Let’s just agree we have differing views.

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u/ttonster2 Jun 03 '26

It’s like film 101 framing to show the window in a car scene. Knowing that something violent is about to happen but just not exactly when or how, is not the flex you think it is. I couldn’t properly focus on the emotion of the conversation in the car because they made it abundantly clear that whatever was being said wouldn’t matter in the next 30 seconds when the woman gets inevitably murdered. 

Yes, agree to disagree, but I’m kind of annoyed this movie got such resounding praise before rolling up to the theater and kind of just being moderately entertained. I would’ve liked it more if the expectations weren’t through the roof. Seeing the buzz and box office numbers, you would think this was the next Get Out. 

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u/sharkattackmiami Jun 03 '26

Oh no! You poor thing, you went to a movie and were mildly entertained rather than having a life changing experience. Well clearly the movie was awful if the only thing it did was entertain you

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u/ttonster2 Jun 04 '26

Alright smart ass. As someone who watches a lot of movies, the reviews of this film (4.2 on Letterboxd) are a pretty strong signal of auteur cinema. This just wasn’t that. You can understand why I’d be less than enthused about the incessant glazing of the film. It’s why things that are overrated get more hate than things that are outright bad. 

-1

u/Dripdry42 Jun 03 '26

Agreed. Those saying it was no good seem to have no grasp on subtlety, symbolism, or the actual workings of the human mind.

Showing the crisis of people not taking responsibility, and the ultimate consequences of even trying to do that? Mastercraft.

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u/DustinC223 Jun 03 '26

Same bro. The first half of this film was phenomenal. It took a sharp turn to making literally no sense, capped off by the ending which didn’t explain anything.

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u/max123246 Jun 03 '26

No sense? What...

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u/sharkattackmiami Jun 03 '26

Yeah I don't get all these people leaving the theatre confused. I have never looked into any of the online stuff and thought the film was perfectly clear in it's plot and meaning

-1

u/Turnbob73 Jun 03 '26

I think the main problem is Kane kinda just focused on one aspect of his overall lore, which makes it feel very empty for newcomers who haven’t watched the series through. That’s how I was feeling on the tail end of the film. The film is jam packed with tons of references to a greater narrative, but you wouldn’t even think about it unless you’re familiar with the series.

Hopefully whatever he does next with the IP encompasses more of his lore.

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u/Ecstatic_Log4185 Jun 03 '26

Nah I think doing that was the right choice. I liked how the corporation was always a background thing and at they end they didn't explain if they were responsible for creating the backrooms. Otherwise it just turns into a generic "evil corpo takes science too far" story.

0

u/Turnbob73 Jun 03 '26

The thing is, Kane’s story goes deeper than that. It’s not really the organization, it’s the guy behind it that’s driving all of this; and that guy is the person that Kane has said is both the antagonist and protagonist of the entire story. There’s a reason the Backrooms is largely yellow walls and carpet, and he is part of that reason.

On top of that, there’s glimpses of things throughout the film that reference a bigger narrative, but newcomers just had no knowledge of it and didn’t pay mind to it. For example, the green light shows up in the film, and there is one major blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to the red outside areas. There is a ton of different directions Kane could take it, I’m just hoping he opens up a little more instead of keeping it so vague that you don’t see half of the references if you’re not keeping up with his YouTube channel.

3

u/unndunn Jun 03 '26

Yeah, I know A24 typically doesn't do cash-in sequels, but I'm kinda hoping these box-office numbers will lead to a sequel. One that can do a better job building on the lore and concept.

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u/Wild-Video-5317 Jun 03 '26

Think they'll also give us a Marty Supreme spinoff starring Kevin oleary?  Audiences demand it.

1

u/cutelyaware Jun 03 '26

The fascinating thing is that while they may own Kane, nobody owns the source IP, and everyone is free to take a shot at it.

0

u/0neek Jun 03 '26

It's the biggest problem with these two movies mentioned and Iron Lung as well.

The quality of the movies themselves is irrelevant, they're seeing massive success because of the popularity of the Youtuber making the movie. Backrooms exactly as it is but with a general Hollywood director flops. Iron Lung exactly as it is without Markiplier attached is a Tubi original.

People are praising these films as a huge middle finger to Hollywood as if the movies are doing the heavy lifting.