Backrooms' director Kane Parsons confirms plans for a sequel

Backrooms just grossed $118 million worldwide during its opening weekend, which is the highest opening weekend for any A24 film to date. Perhaps, then, it should come as no surprise that director Kane Parsons has confirmed plans for a sequel and possibly more than one sequel.

Backrooms is based on a fictional location invented in a 2019 thread on the website 4chan. The Backrooms are usually portrayed as large, extradimensional empty rooms, accessed by exiting reality. In 2022, Parsons published his first installment of his Backrooms short films on his YouTube channel, and they went viral. His movie is based on that series and follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect turned furniture store employee, who accesses the Backrooms in the basement of the store. This leads his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), to also enter the Backrooms in an attempt to find her missing patient. In the Backrooms, reality bends and Dr. Kline has to follow a series of twisty and narrow yellow hallways to find Clark.

In an interview with Variety, published over the weekend, the 20-year-old Parsons confirmed he has a contract with A24 for sequels. He said, "For people who are into it, I’ve got a contract, and I got a hold at my end, and that means I am definitely not done with 'Backrooms.' I’ve got very specific things that I’m working on, things are in the works right now that I am eager to be able to talk about, but, currently, it’s still in a secret mystery world."

The director also reiterated that he's not done with YouTube and has no plans to leave it behind, despite the huge box office success of his debut film. "I immensely enjoy the work I’ve done there, and I feel creatively fulfilled by it in a way that’s proportional to what I’ve done with this film. I personally think there’s merits, because there’s a lot of projects that I just could never do outside of YouTube, or outside of a more free-form internet multimedia container," he told Variety.

Just days prior to Parsons' interview with Variety, he gave another interview to Polygon, in which he stated that the intention has been since 2022 to create a series of films as a means to tell the full narrative. Further, A24 will likely want to create additional films, considering the runaway success Backrooms has been for them. Simply put, money talks.

Also, anyone who has seen the film will likely agree that there's a lot more story to tell and the film very much feels like an opening chapter in a much larger narrative. It'll be interesting to see what Parsons does with the story next and how soon A24 will greenlight a sequel. Most likely, it won't be that long.

For now, catch Backrooms in theaters.

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