As reported by Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter, Backrooms is big. How big? Bigger than Jesus The Beatles The Mandalorian and Grogu. Backrooms grossed $38.4 million with its opening day and previews, leaving it on track for an $85-$88 million opening weekend.
A24’s previous top dog, Civil War, managed $25 million across its entire opening weekend, while Mando netted a $33.7 million opening day and $81.6 million opening weekend—it’s also a better movie than people are giving it credit for. The Tippett Studios stop-motion stuff in there is really good. Grogu did nothing wrong.
That’s a lot of numbers, but basically: An adaptation of an internet meme just beat out Star Wars, at least according to Mr. Market. However you slice it, that’s impressive, and it rhymes with what we’ve seen from games in the 2020s. Big franchises and sure bets aren’t so sure anymore, while stuff you wouldn’t necessarily expect will break out and take the world by storm. See also how publisher Playstack only found Balatro because one of its employees was checking the new releases section of Steam whenever he could.
Backrooms isn’t a videogame movie, but the phenomenon it’s adapting feels like it has a close kinship with zoomer gaming culture online—and director Kane Parsons dreams in Portals. In addition to explicit Backrooms-homaging games on Steam, I’ve seen these surreal office environments crop up as referential maps in FPSes—the one in Straftat is quite good—while I don’t even want to know how many Backrooms-coded experiences you’re liable to stumble across in Roblox.
PCG senior editor Chris Livingston dug Backrooms, particularly the mazelike set created for the film, but found it less inspired in the second half as it traded atmosphere and mystery for more climactic horror. “But it’s still a good movie and I’d easily be down for a sequel,” Chris concluded, noting that it makes for a great double feature with the similarly “mundane made horrifying” Exit 8.
I don’t know how Backrooms in particular managed to find itself such a box office critical hit, but I’m willing to bet Hollywood will take the wrong lesson from it no matter what. The age of the videogame movie has ended, let a thousand meme movie adaptations bloom.
Resurrect the Michael Bay Skibidi Toilet project and see where that takes us. I want to see the lowest-rent SCP movie you can possibly imagine. They’re going to come out with a Bad Luck Brian movie in time for the Steam Deck OLED (512 GB) to hit an MSRP of one million dollars.