A 4chan horror image turned YouTube series has become A24's biggest film ever, grossing $402 million

It began with a skewed image of a hallway, its carpet and wallpaper both yellow. A creepypasta posted on 4chan in 2019 paired the photograph with a warning about “approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms.”

In 2022, Kane Parsons, then 20, turned that premise into the YouTube web series ‘Backrooms (Found Footage)’, releasing it under the name Kane Pixels and expanding its world through YouTube shorts.

The idea then made its way to cinemas. ‘Backrooms’ debuted on May 29, the weekend after Memorial Day, a point that generally marks the start of the US summer blockbuster season. It opened with $81.5 million in North America and $118 million worldwide.

The film delivered the biggest opening in A24’s history and reached number one domestically and globally. Parsons became the youngest director to debut a film at number one in both markets.

Made on a reported budget of $10 million, ‘Backrooms’ had reached $394.1 million worldwide by the end of the summer. After 12 weeks in theatres, it passed $400 million worldwide, finishing at $402 million. It is now A24’s highest-grossing film of all time and has helped propel the company to an upset at the domestic box office.

There has been no official announcement of a ‘Backrooms’ sequel or series.

The original post and Parsons’s web series offer a blunt demonstration of how online horror can move from a niche community into wide theatrical release. Demonstrable audience evidence can move a film’s valuation from five figures into six figures very quickly in North America.

Lionsgate has made a similar bet on ‘Portrait of God’, a feature adaptation of Dylan Clark’s viral horror short. Clark created the original short, and Chase Infiniti is set to star in the feature.

Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert are producing through Ghost House Pictures. Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld are producing through Monkeypaw Productions. It will be the first film produced jointly by Raimi and Peele.

For studios seeking material beyond established franchises, the route is becoming clearer: an image, a short film or a web series can arrive with an audience already attached. For the creators who make those works, the commercial path is now visible too.