Young moviegoers power Backrooms, based on YouTube series, to $105 million in ticket sales

LOS ANGELES – Will young people ever come back to the movies? That question has shadowed Hollywood since the Covid-19 pandemic, with sceptics saying theatres have become relics for a generation raised on streaming.

The answer came, resoundingly, over the weekend.

Backrooms, a psychological horror flick from a 20-year-old YouTube creator-turned-director, collected an astounding US$82 million (S$105 million) in North America from May 28 to 31 – with roughly 86 per cent of the audience younger than 35, according to PostTrak, a film industry research service. About 44 per cent were younger than 21.

Starring Oscar nominees Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, the movie follows a furniture shop owner (Ejiofor) who discovers a mysterious, labyrinthine complex underneath his store. When he goes missing, his therapist (Reinsve) steps inside the liminal space to try and find him.

Backrooms cost A24 and Chernin Entertainment about US$10 million to make, not including marketing. It was marketed mostly with an inexpensive online campaign.

The movie was No. 1 at the box office, making its US director Kane Parsons the youngest film-maker in Hollywood history to achieve that ranking, according to A24. The previous record-holder Josh Trank was 27 when his sci-fi thriller Chronicle topped the box office in 2012.

Backrooms is the big-screen adaptation of Parsons’ viral YouTube horror series which began in 2022, and became part of a phenomenon known as “creepypasta” – a short horror story reposted and modified around the web, to which other users added details such as monsters and undiscovered dimensions.

The colossal turnout for Backrooms – the biggest debut for an A24 film in its 14-year history – adds to evidence that teenagers and young adults will gladly go to theatres for the right offering.

Second place went to Obsession, a comedy-horror-thriller mash-up about the perils of romantic fixation by Focus Features, which has sold about US$105 million in tickets since its May 15 release.

About 78 per cent of the opening-weekend audience was younger than 35, according to PostTrak.

Notably, Obsession – which cost US$750,000 to make – also came from a first-time film-maker, 26-year-old Curry Barker, who honed his instincts on YouTube rather than inside the Hollywood ecosystem.

Inde Navarrette has earned particular plaudits for her role as a young woman who becomes dangerously infatuated with a man (Michael Johnston) after he makes a magical wish for her affection.

“Since Covid, there’s been this lethargic feeling around theatrical – is it relevant any more and is it going to survive?” said American producer Jason Blum, whose production company Blumhouse-Atomic Monster had a hand in both Obsession and Backrooms, at a conference on May 30.

He added: “To me, there’s almost this feeling of the 1970s, of this new generation of young people who are making edgy movies that are connecting in theatres in a crazy way.” NYTIMES