Online content creators are delivering a horrific one-two punch this weekend.
Deadline has reported that Kane Parsons and Focus Features’ BACKROOMS (reviewed here) is estimated to open with a gross between $76-79 million this weekend, including $10.4 million from Thursday-night showings. (Note: All figures discussed here are for the U.S./Canada.) That means it’s vying with I AM LEGEND ($77.2 million) for fourth-biggest opening weekend ever for a horror film, after IT ($123.4 million), IT: CHAPTER TWO ($91 million) and THE CONJURING: LAST RITES ($84 million)—and in any case, it’s the only one in the top five not released by Warner Bros. BACKROOMS, which Parsons based on his YouTube shorts, has also easily set the opening-weekend record for distributor A24 (beating CIVIL WAR’s $25.5 million).
Even more remarkably, OBSESSION (reviewed here)—another fright film from a moviemaker with a YouTube background, Curry Barker—actually improved its weekend figure again in the face of its BACKROOMS competition. After opening with $17.2 million two weeks ago, it improved to $23.9 million in its second weekend ($32 million for the four-day Memorial Day frame), and is now estimated to jump again to $25 million. If that estimate holds, the total will be over $103 million with no end in sight; next week, it will succeed the $116.9 million grossed by CORALINE over several releases to become Focus Features’ highest-grossing film in North America ever. Notably, although it hasn’t held the number-one spot for a weekend, OBSESSION did top the charts on weekdays over MICHAEL in its first week and THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU in its second.
Again, if the estimates hold, both of these low-budget horror films will outdo the second weekend of the megabudget MANDALORIAN, which is currently forecast to make $24 million. And this will be the first weekend in which two new fright films topped the box office since October 14-16, 2022, when the debuting HALLOWEEN ENDS and the third weekend of SMILE led the list.
