YouTube to US$400 million: Backrooms team takes the Zurich stage
Kane Parsons does not think he made a horror film. Yet his Backrooms has sold US$400 million in tickets worldwide for A24, as reported by Variety on 26 September 2026.
Parsons made the remark to industry insiders at the Zurich Summit on Saturday. He spoke on a panel with Robbie Brenner, president and chief content officer at Mattel Studios, Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, and Bill Kramer, chief executive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
The line-up brought together specialty cinema, awards and toys. Barker runs Sony Pictures Classics, the arthouse releasing arm, while Brenner leads the Mattel screen business and Kramer leads the organisation behind the Oscars-season campaign circuit.
Parsons and Curry Barker, the director of Obsession, are film-makers in their 20s who came from YouTube. Parsons directed Backrooms as an adaptation of his own YouTube analog web series, meaning a story told through grainy, fake-found footage in the style of old video tapes.
The numbers explain why a summit wanted them. Backrooms was produced on a US$10 million budget, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter on 17 July 2026, before going on to become A24's highest-grossing release on record. That is a forty-to-one return on production cost, before theatres take their share and marketing is counted.
He is already making another one. Parsons is working on a sequel to Backrooms, which gives A24 a returning property built not from comics or books but from a free online audience.
He is not selling it as straight horror. Parsons told the Zurich room he did not direct Backrooms as a horror film. The empty offices and humming lights play as suspense for many viewers, but he sees the journey differently.
The panel produced a second headline. Brenner said a sequel to Greta Gerwig's Barbie will likely happen at some point. She gave no date, director or cast. The first film was a huge theatrical success for Mattel and Warner Bros., so any talk of a return carries weight on the release calendar.
Hollywood has been watching the YouTube arrivals closely. Sony executive Tom Rothman has praised the success of Obsession and Backrooms as a "great opportunity" for the traditional business, according to Yahoo Entertainment on 22 June 2026. Writer Peter Bart has compared the two films to the youthful spirit of Hollywood in the 1960s, in Deadline on 25 June 2026.
What makes this stand out is the route to the screen. Two young creators built followings online, then carried those viewers into cinemas without an established franchise behind them. For fans, this means more of the Backrooms world is already on the way.
