This Summer Horror Movie Is Getting Some Scarily Impressive Box Office Predictions

The upcoming psychological horror film Backrooms has received a shockingly strong box office forecast. This A24 production is an adaptation of the popular Backrooms series on YouTube by Kane Parsons, also known online as Kane Pixels, who serves as the director for the movie. Both are based on an infamous creepypasta that involves a secret extradimensional space made out of empty, yellow, office-like rooms and hallways, accentuating the fear of liminal spaces. Several trailers for Backrooms have made their way onto YouTube’s top trending videos, showing strong momentum for the movie as we inch closer to the movie’s debut on May 29, 2026 in the United States.

A24’s Backrooms is already looking like a box office success

An early box office prediction for A24’s Backrooms has it earning somewhere between $14.5 million and $27 million in its domestic opening weekend from May 29 to May 31.

This projection comes from a May 1 report from BoxOfficeTheory, which is optimistic about “the niche fan base of the online sensation” created by Kane Parsons and the strong marketing push from A24 on social media. It compares the presale trends for the film to those for Iron Lung, a sci-fi horror film from the popular YouTuber Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach that released in late January this year. Iron Lung earned an impressive $51 million on a mere $3 million production budget, making it one of the best box office successes in 2026, so this a great sign for Backrooms.

While we don’t know what the exact budget is for Backrooms yet, we do have a solid range. As noted by user thebackrooms.online on Instagram, The Directors Guild of Canada in 2025 labelled the film (which was codenamed “Effigy”) as a “Low Budget Feature” that has a budget range somewhere between $9 million and $15 million Canadian dollars, or between $6.6 million and $11 million US dollars.

If we conservatively take the high end of this estimate and follow the general rule that a film needs to make 2.5 times its budget to be profitable, Backrooms will need to make roughly $28 million to break even. So if the early box office forecast for the film holds, it will earn at least half of this $28 million benchmark in just its first opening weekend.

In addition, the report highlights the Backrooms trailer that released on YouTube at the end of March and has amassed over 27 million views so far (and at the time of writing, it still ranks seventh on the platform’s top trending chart for movies). The film is also leveraging social media fans who follow the viral Backrooms creepypasta.

The Backrooms film adaptation is coming out during a time that has some competitors in the horror genre. It will mainly need to contend with several action flicks, Masters of the Universe on June 5 and Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu on May 22. However, it faces direct competition from Obsession on May 15, Passenger on May 22, and Scary Movie on June 5. In particular, Obsession comes from another YouTube star, Curry Barker, and is looking like a box office hit as well. If Backrooms and Obsession both live up to the hype, they will join Iron Lung as proof that horror films from YouTube stars can be very lucrative.

The film adaptation of Backrooms is written by Will Soodik and follows furniture store owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) as he discovers the Backrooms dimension. The trailer and story description for the film reveal that Clark tries to convince his therapist about what he saw, and though skeptical, she also finds herself venturing to the otherworldly dimension after her patient goes missing. Other cast members include Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Avan Jogia.