A24's 'Backrooms' hits digital today after a $368 million theatrical run

A24 put Backrooms on digital rental and purchase platforms today, 46 days after it opened in theaters on May 29. That is a routine window for the studio, which usually waits about a month before sending a film home. What is not routine is the film it is sending home: the biggest release in A24's history, by a wide margin, directed by a kid who built the whole thing on YouTube first.

The numbers

Kane Parsons' film cleared $100 million domestic in six days. Arthouse titles usually spend an entire run trying to get there, if they get there at all. The previous A24 domestic record belonged to Marty Supreme, which finished with $96 million last December. The previous A24 opening-weekend record belonged to Civil War, at $25.5 million. Backrooms more than tripled it on a Friday-to-Sunday.

Parsons also took a record that had stood since 2012. He is now the youngest filmmaker with a No. 1 movie at the domestic box office, passing Josh Trank, who was 27 when Chronicle opened to $22 million.

The movie A24 is selling you at home

Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, a furniture store owner who finds a door in his shop that opens onto a stretch of empty yellow rooms that does not end. When he vanishes into it, his therapist (Renate Reinsve) goes in after him. Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell and Avan Jogia fill out the cast. Will Soodik wrote the script from the web series Parsons started uploading to his Kane Pixels channel in January 2022, when he was still in high school.

The production built more than 30,000 square feet of the place. Parsons told The Hollywood Reporter the team ran 50 wallpaper tests to land on the right shade of yellow, which is the sort of detail that tells you why the movie works. The scare in Backrooms is not a creature. It is carpet.

One catch on the timing

The digital release lands while a longer version of the film is still exclusive to theaters. Over the July 4th weekend, A24 put out an "Everything Must Go" edition with about 15 minutes of unseen footage, and it held the No. 7 spot on its way past $190 million domestic. So the version you can buy today is not the version currently playing down the street. A24 has not said when or whether the extended cut comes home.

Streaming is the next question. A24's output goes to HBO Max, and the studio's usual gap between digital and streaming runs about two months, which puts Backrooms on the service around September. Nothing has been announced.

A24 has never released digital performance figures for any of its films, so we are unlikely to get a number out of this. A sequel has not been announced either, though Parsons has floated the idea of building the Backrooms out into more movies. On a $10 million budget that returned $368 million, that conversation is already over. Someone is just waiting for a good day to announce it.