By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Online content creators are delivering a horrific one-two punch this weekend.
Deadline has reported that Kane Parsons and Focus Features’ BACKROOMS (reviewed here) has an estimated opening-weekend gross of $81.4 million, including $10.4 million from Thursday-night showings. (Note: All figures discussed here are for the U.S./Canada; final numbers will be reported tomorrow.) That means it has passed 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 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 has now jumped again to $26.4 million. If that estimate holds, the total will be over $104.7 million with no end in sight; it is now Focus Features’ highest-grossing film in North America, surpassing DOWNTON ABBEY’s $97 million (CORALINE did $116.9 million through a combination of Focus’ initial release and Fathom Events rereleases, though BACKROOMS will pass that next weekend). 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 $25 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.
