What director Kane Parsons accomplished with Backrooms this summer is nothing shy of extraordinary. A first-time feature from a man who just turned 21 years old, it became one of the most shocking box office hits of the summer, rivaled only by another low-budget horror sensation in the form of Obsession. But it’s been out of the top ten for several weeks so the conversation has largely moved on. However, Parsons’ buzzy A24 feature has, somewhat quietly, overtaken a massive blockbuster featuring none other than the King of the Monsters.
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To date, Backrooms has pulled in $390.2 million worldwide, including $197.2 million domestically and $192.9 million overseas. All of that against a reported $10 million production budget no less. That was enough to overtake 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Directed by Michael Dougherty as a sequel to 2014’s Godzilla, directed by Gareth Edwards, it made $387.3 million globally during its run seven years ago.
At the time, that was somewhat disappointing, not only because it was quite a bit less than Godzilla ($524.9 million), but because of its whopping $170 million production budget. The movie also featured the likes of King Ghidorah, Rodan and Mothra, making it a big deal for longtime fans of the franchise. All the same, it wasn’t met with a great deal of enthusiasm and came up well short of expectations.
In Backrooms, a strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom. Horror ensues. The cast is led by Chiwetel Ejiofor (The Martian, The Life of Chuck) and Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World, Sentimental Value).
This isn’t really about lowering one to raise the other. It’s really about demonstrating just how massive Parsons’ movie really is. The fact that it’s even in the same ballpark as a movie within the MonsterVerse is frankly astonishing. King of the Monsters still got multiple sequels, after all, in the form of 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong and 2024’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. A24 would have been beyond thrilled with less than half of this movie's $390 million haul.
What they got was an unexpected, mainstream smash hit that did numbers on par with big-budget blockbusters. It’s insane. It should be celebrated. While there’s no official word, Parsons will undoubtedly be making at least one sequel, if not a whole expansive franchise in light of how well his movie based on his YouTube series performed.
Backrooms is in theaters and on VOD now.
