Published Jun 1, 2026, 12:03 PM EDT
In over three years at Collider, senior author Jake has now penned over 3000 articles covering a wide range of TV and film for the resources, lists, utilities, news, and interview teams. Alongside interviewing stars such as Selin Hizli, Rose Ayling-Ellis, Harlan Coben, and Chelsea Peretti, Jake was lucky enough to visit the set of Aardman and Netflix’s Wallace and Gromit: A Vengeance Most Fowl in 2024, getting the chance to chat with four-time Academy Award winner Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham. Jake has also worked for other publications, including Agents of Fandom. You can also hear Jake every week as the resident film and TV journalist on Track Radio.
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The Mandalorian and Grogu was heavily touted to be the spiritual opening of a big summer of cinema, expected to achieve mammoth success at the box office. After a disappointing opening week, things have gone from bad to worse for Pedro Pascal’s titular bounty hunter, as a 69% drop in domestic ticket sales in its second weekend saw the film fall to third in the U.S. box office ranks. However, this paved the way for the horror renaissance to continue with a record-breaking new arrival.
A24’s Backrooms, led by Renate Reinsve and Chiwetel Ejiofor, was predicted to perform well during its opening weekend. However, it has exceeded those optimistic expectations with one of the year’s most impressive debuts. Directed by Kane Parsons, who has now broken the record for the youngest director to hold the #1 spot at the North American box office, the film has rocketed straight to success, catapulted by the viral fame of its source material.
At the time of writing, Backrooms has haunted its way to a** $118 million global haul**, split between $81 million in domestic revenue and a further $37 million from overseas markets. The film also now holds the highest-grossing opening for any A24 movie, and it’s not even close, with Civil War in second place with a comparatively feeble $25 million. It is also already the distributor’s fifth-highest-grossing movie ever, and has delivered the biggest start in box office history for an original horror movie. To put this into even more perspective, Backrooms has demolished the opening weekend haul of the big-budget 2026 video game sequel Mortal Kombat II, despite many praising the Karl Urban movie for outperforming expectations.
Your instincts, your strengths, and your particular way of thinking under pressure point to one villain you actually have a fighting chance against. Everyone else — good luck.
Jason is relentless, but he is also predictable — and that is the gap you would exploit.
Michael watches before he moves. He is patient, methodical, and almost impossible to detect — until it’s too late for anyone who isn’t paying close enough attention.
Freddy wins by getting inside your head — using your own fears, your own memories, your own subconscious as weapons against you. That strategy requires a target who can be destabilised.
Pennywise is ancient, shapeshifting, and feeds on terror — but it has one critical vulnerability: it cannot function against someone who genuinely stops being afraid of it.
Chucky’s greatest advantage is that nobody takes him seriously until it’s already too late. He exploits the gap between how something looks and what it actually is.
So, Backrooms is a major commercial hit, but has it impressed critics? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer to that is yes, with the film boasting a strong 89% score on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, at the time of writing. Much of the praise is being thrown the way of Parsons, with some big-name comparisons made by critics. “The slow burn of Alfred Hitchcock, the surreal visuals of David Lynch, and the human stakes of Stanley Kubrick are all on full display here,” said Aidan Kelley in his review for Collider, with others liking this debut to some of the best in modern horror.
The Backrooms are ready to be explored in theaters now. Stay tuned to Collider for more box office updates.
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