Big Hollywood Studios Are Reportedly Fighting to Sign BACKROOMS Director Kane Parsons After His Massive Breakout Hit
Hollywood has found its latest young filmmaker to chase, and the bidding war is already heating up.
After shocking the industry with the box office success of Backrooms, 21-year-old Kane Parsons is suddenly one of the hottest directors in Hollywood. Studios are lining up to work with him, and while A24 appears to be leading the race, several major players are hoping to pull him away before any deal is finalized.
According to Puck News, Parsons is currently negotiating a three-year first-look deal with A24 that could reportedly be worth more than $65 million. Nothing has been signed yet, though, and that has opened the door for Warner Bros., Universal, and Sony, all of which have reportedly set up meetings with the filmmaker in hopes of landing him.
It's a pretty incredible rise for someone who was making horror shorts on YouTube just a few years ago. Parsons turned his viral Backrooms videos into one of 2026's biggest surprise theatrical hits.
Released in May, Backrooms pulled in an incredible $374 million worldwide against a production budget of only $10 million. That's the kind of return that is obviously going to grab attention in Hollywood.
The film expanded on the eerie internet creepypasta that first appeared on 4chan, exploring the unsettling maze of endless yellow rooms and strange entities that Parsons helped popularize through his YouTube series that launched in 2022.
His success also fits into a much larger trend that's been developing across Hollywood. Original genre movies made on relatively tiny budgets have been outperforming some of the industry's biggest franchise releases.
Earlier this year, fellow YouTuber turned filmmaker Curry Barker delivered one of the year's biggest success stories with Obsession, which earned an astonishing $428 million worldwide after being made for less than $1 million.
Parsons and Barker may have opened the floodgates because more internet creators are already making the jump to feature films. Twenty-two-year-old YouTuber Alex Kister has signed on to direct a film adaptation of his hit web series The Mandela Catalogue for Amazon's United Artists label and Amblin. Warner Bros. is also developing a movie based on artist Trevor Henderson's creepy creation Siren Head.
As for Parsons' future, he has previously expressed interest in adapting the video game Portal, but it sounds like audiences may be heading back into those endless yellow hallways first. As part of the reported negotiations, A24 wants Parsons to direct at least two more films under its banner, and one of those projects could end up being a Backrooms sequel.
I have to admit, I wasn't the biggest fan of Backrooms. While I completely understand why it connected with a lot of people, especially fans of the original internet mythology, the movie didn't really work for me. I found it surprisingly boring, and despite its creepy atmosphere, I don't think it's an especially well-made film. It ended up feeling more mediocre than memorable for me.
That said, box office numbers don't lie. When a $10 million horror movie brings in $374 million worldwide, studios aren't going to spend much time debating critical opinions.
They're going to back up the money truck, and that's exactly what's happening here. Whether you're a fan of Backrooms or not, Parsons has shown he can get audiences into theaters, and in today's Hollywood, that's about as valuable as it gets.
Now it'll be interesting to see whether he sticks with A24, jumps to one of the traditional studios courting him, or uses all of this leverage to build an even bigger career on his own terms. Either way, don't expect Kane Parsons to disappear from Hollywood's radar anytime soon.