A24 Just Out-Earned Warner Bros. and Paramount This Summer. A 20-Year-Old's YouTube Series Did Most of the Work.

In January 2022, an 18-year-old in Northern California named Kane Parsons uploaded a nine-minute video of a camcorder wandering empty, fluorescent-lit office hallways with no exit. He was not signed to anyone. The short went from 1 million to 7 million views in 48 hours, according to [Dazed](https://www.dazeddigital.com/film-tv/article/62125/1/a24-youngest-ever-director-kane-parsons-the-backrooms-creepypasta-into-cinema). Four years later, the horror movie A24 built out of that idea has done something no independent studio has done before: out-earned two of Hollywood's five major distributors over a single summer.

Parsons kept making installments after that first short, eventually posting around a dozen, and the series passed 190 million views combined. A24 optioned it, paired him with screenwriter Robert Patino, and made him, at 19, the youngest director in the studio's history. The resulting film, Backrooms, cost about $10 million to produce.

The number that actually moved

Backrooms opened to roughly $81 million domestically, A24's biggest debut ever for a film the studio has never released with a cast built around a marketable star. It has since crossed $400 million worldwide. A second A24 horror title backed the summer further: Obsession, directed by 26-year-old Curry Barker on a $750,000 budget, brought in $263.4 million domestically and more than $516 million worldwide. Two cheap horror movies, both from directors in their twenties working outside the traditional studio pipeline, did more for A24's summer than any single film did for Paramount's.

The rest of the summer was still franchise business

A24 finishing ahead of Warner Bros. and Paramount does not mean the season belonged to small films generally. Universal led the summer with $1.23 billion domestically, Disney followed with $1.034 billion, and Sony crossed $1 billion, driven in large part by Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey, which together brought in more than $1.5 billion domestically. Warner Bros. itself was down 76 percent from summer 2025, and Paramount's strongest release, Scream 7, brought in about $122 million domestically, a fraction of what a single blockbuster franchise entry used to guarantee a major studio.

“Audiences showed up for an eclectic mix of films.”

That framing matters more than it sounds. The record $4.76 billion domestic summer total was not built on the old formula of one studio's tentpole carrying the season. It was built on Universal and Disney's biggest bets landing at the same time two mid-size studios had a quiet summer, and on two ultra-cheap horror films at A24 outperforming their budgets by a factor of 40 or more. A24's win is real, but it is also a symptom of Warner Bros. and Paramount having an unusually thin summer, not proof that big studios can no longer compete with a fraction of A24's marketing spend.

Parsons has already signed to direct Backrooms 2, his first project since the original. The version of him that posted a camcorder video alone in January 2022 is gone. What is left is the clearest data point yet that a viral video with no studio attached to it can still out-earn films with nine-figure marketing budgets behind them, if the underlying idea is strange enough that 7 million people wanted to see where it went in the first two days.