Backrooms Box Office Forecasts Keep Climbing, Setting Up a Breakout Hit

Every once in a while, a movie that started as some late-night internet fever dream manages to scare up serious hype in the real world. Case in point: A24's Backrooms. If you have no idea what a 'backroom' is, first of all, congratulations on not being chronically online. But for the rest of us who know our way around a 'creepypasta,' this is the film adaptation of that bizarre internet meme about endless, yellow-fluorescent hallways. It's being pitched as a psychological horror movie where Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a furniture store guy who literally vanishes into an aggressively 1992-looking office labyrinth, leaving his therapist (Renate Reinsve) to go find him. The result? Suddenly, all the box office forecasters are getting way more bullish on its chances.

So How Big Could Backrooms Get?

As of mid-May, industry sites are putting Backrooms on track to earn somewhere between $20 million and $30 million in its opening weekend alone (that's May 29-31 for those keeping score). That projection is up from earlier, way more cautious estimates, which had it maybe struggling thanks to some pretty heavy competition around its release date—think blockbusters and other horror movies all crammed into the same couple of weeks.

But now? The movie's got momentum. For a film based on a meme about getting stuck in old office carpeting, that's a pretty impressive campaign.

Why is This Blowing Up?

• Kane Parsons (yes, that Kane Pixels from YouTube) is directing. If you know his viral Backrooms short films, you know he can wring maximum dread out of moody lighting and bland architecture.
• The target audience—Gen Z horror fans who grew up on this kind of internet lore—are fired up. More than a few teasers went viral on Instagram: one February post racked up 1.5 million likes, and just the trailer itself pulled in 1.2 million in March.
• It's legit based on a "creepypasta" (translation: an online urban legend that mutates the more people tell it), so its meme value is literally built in.

Industry trackers like BoxOffice Pro and BoxOfficeTheory are jacking up their estimates week by week. BoxOfficeTheory's got the movie at $21 million for opening weekend, with a possible range from $18 million to as high as $27 million. Just to compare, six weeks ago that same site had the floor at $14.5 million, so they're clearly seeing massive interest as the premiere gets closer.

How Does It Stack Up Against the Competition?

It isn't just horror fans that Backrooms has to fend off. Two other films dropping the same weekend: Nate Bargatze's family-friendly comedy The Breadwinner (projected $8-10 million opening), and Brendan Fraser's war movie Pressure (expected to do $4-6 million). Even Amazon MGM's Masters of the Universe—the probable popcorn crowd-pleaser opening the week after—has an opening projection of just $25-35 million, basically the same as Backrooms.

Its big horror rival? That would be Obsession, which is already packing theaters but will be on its third weekend by the time Backrooms drops. Translation: its biggest competitor will already be losing steam.

The Budget Math (AKA, Why This Is Almost Guaranteed to Make Money)

This is where it gets interesting. The Directors Guild of Canada labeled Backrooms a 'Low Budget Feature,' which means it probably landed somewhere between $6.6 million and $11 million to make (or $9 to $15 million in Canadian dollars, for the curious). Deadline recently confirmed it cost under $10 million, which, in movie industry terms, is basically couch-cushion money.

Here's the real inside scoop: wide release movies are generally considered 'profitable' if they earn 2.5 times their budget. So Backrooms only needs to top about $25 million to start delivering profit, and the current opening weekend estimates have it leaps and bounds above that. If you add international box office on top of the domestic numbers, this thing could be A24's next microbudget gold mine.

'Since the film is based on the prolific Backrooms meme, it has built a high level of hype from Gen Z moviegoers eager to thrill to one of their favorite creepypastas in a communal setting.'

Bottom line: what started as a niche internet legend looks like it's about to become a box office story studios will absolutely try to copy. And not to sound like a cynic, but that means you might want to get ready for a wave of movies about haunted parking garages, liminal airports, or whatever else people are memeing about this year.