A24’s Backroooms continues to impress with stronger and stronger box office forecasts. The psychological horror film follows furniture store owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who discovers and then vanishes in a labyrinthine extradimensional space comprised of yellow, office-like rooms and hallways, compelling his therapist Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) to find him. When tracking first started for Backrooms, the first feature from Kane Parsons (who is known better as Kane Pixels on YouTube), it had an optimistic outlook for its domestic debut on May 29. But partly due to intense competition from films that are releasing around the same time, including several blockbusters and other horror flicks, its box office predictions were cautiously muted. As we head closer to its release, though, Backrooms is steadily emerging as an instant hit that its competition needs to fear.
A24’s Backrooms could be a box office success in a single weekend
Backrooms is predicted to earn $20 million to $30 million in its domestic opening weekend from May 29 to May 31.
This new forecast comes from a May 15 report from BoxOffice Pro, which previously called attention to Kane Parson’s popular Backrooms series on YouTube and his ability to produce a sense of dread based simply on the inherent creepiness of liminal spaces. 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 (i.e. internet-born horror stories and urban legends) in a communal setting.” Promotional teasers for Backrooms have received a tremendous amount of attention on Instagram, with one post in late February getting 1.5 million likes and another post in March featuring the movie’s trailer earning 1.2 million likes.
The higher range is close to the box office prediction from BoxOfficeTheory, whose May 8 report projects that Backrooms will earn $21 million, or somewhere between $18 million and $27 million, for its domestic opener. This is an increase from an earlier prediction that had it earning only $14.5 million for its lower bound. For its full theatrical run in the US and Canada, it believes the film will earn $40 million, or within the range of $34 million to $57 million.
For comparison, BoxOfficePro projects that two other films also releasing on May 29 will have lower domestic openers. This includes the Nate Bargatze family-friendly comedy The Breadwinner that has a prediction of $8 million to $10 million, and the Brendan Fraser-led war film Pressure that has a prediction of $4 million to $6 million. The Amazon MGM Studios blockbuster Masters of the Universe, which releases a week after on June 5, has a similar forecast of $25 million to $35 million. One of its main competitors in the horror genre is Obsession, which is already looking like a box office hit right out of the gate, but that film will be in its third weekend when Backrooms comes out.
As for the movie’s budget, it was initially reported that The Directors Guild of Canada labelled the A24 production as a “Low Budget Feature,” which indicates that its budget fell between $6.6 million and $11 million (or $9 million to $15 million in Canadian dollars). A new report from Deadline corroborates this, stating that the film cost under $10 million to produce. So if we conservatively take this number and follow the general rule that wide-release movies have to bring in 2.5 times its budget to be profitable, then Backrooms only needs to pass the $25 million mark to break even. This means that the film will likely be a box office success in its opening weekend once we add its international haul to the total.
