What ‘Backrooms’ and ‘Obsession’ Blowing Up the Box Office Actually Tells Us About the Future of Movies

The $80-million-plus debut of Backrooms, from 20-year-old first-time director Kane Parsons, coupled with Curry Barker’s low-budget hit Obsession increasing its take for the second weekend in a row, is essentially without precedent. As box office analysts sort through the data from this past weekend—the youngest director ever to top the box office; the first non-Christmas wide release to grow across three consecutive weekends since E.T.—excitement is building over the reality that not only is Gen Z going to the movies, they’re making their preferences known. The apparent generational shift provides an answer to what had seemed like a generational crisis: with Boomers and Millennials falling out of the moviegoing habit, Gen Z is more excited about going to the movies than ever.

But there’s another, broader story to be told about the box office. Two horror movies chasing the same cohort of young people, both selling out theaters at the same time. Welcome back, Barbenheimer. Back in 2023, months and months of memes ballooned into an organic, audience-driven marketing campaign, turning the head-to-head counter-programming of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie into a dual triumph.

The story there, beyond easy excitement that cinema had been saved post-COVID, was centered on the specifics of the phenomenon. Polar-opposite films, whose audiences didn’t really overlap, had boosted each others’ fortunes in a fun contrast. No surprise, then, that the next year, when Gladiator II and Wicked released on the same day, marketing departments tried seeding a Glicked weekend. Both movies made money, but it wasn’t a phenomenon.

Barbenheimer, it seemed, was a unique event. It’s no surprise when the wrong lessons are taken from business success. In Hollywood, the truth is, nobody knows 100% of the time what will work, or how, or why. The excitement around Barbie and Oppenheimer would never have augured Backrooms and Obsession, not least because the two horror movies didn’t even release the same weekend.

Perhaps their success was foreshadowed more directly by hits like the very Gen Z-coded video game adaptation Five Nights at Freddy’s, which also shocked onlookers by debuting to about $80 million, or YouTuber Markiplier’s Iron Lung, a self-funded, self-released video game adaptation that grossed over $50 million earlier this year. The kids, they love horror, they love video games, they love memes, they love YouTubers. Both Parsons and Barker had also emerged on YouTube, after all. The pattern fits.

What fits less is Backrooms and Obsession succeeding simultaneously, literally on the same weekend. Normally, we would have seen the former cannibalize the latter, as young horror fans picked the new film over the older one. It was one thing for Obsession to beat expectations in weekend one, and then grow by 40% in its second weekend. Weekend three, by any reasonable expectations, should have taken a big hit at the hands of Backrooms.

Instead, Obsession increased its weekend box office take again, by about 10%, even with a diminished screen count. Not only was there room enough for both Parsons and Barkers’ debut features—on a purely vibes basis, it’s hard not to feel like each film’s success boosted the other. Even in online discussions, they two are frequently paired despite not being much alike in style or subject. This is where Barbenheimer begins to feel like a good comp.

The scales are no doubt different. Big as they may be, Backrooms and Obsession aren't about to earn a billion dollars like their antecedents. Rather, the key insight here is the way in which two films can fuel each other, even when they should in theory be direct competition. There’s no easy portmanteau in the current case—Backsession?

Gross—but the signal it sends is that when new movies are good and exciting and catch a wave of interest, that interest is broader than a single film. In fact, the excitement around one movie can swell to encompass two movies, or even moviegoing in general. Look no further than a picture of May 2026 at the box office. This was the first May to reach over $1 billion at the domestic box office since 2019, pre-pandemic, coming in under $20 million shy of that year’s total.

And May 2019 had Avengers: Endgame, which took in a massive $382.7 that month. By comparison, the top grosser at the US and Canadian box office this May was the biopic Michael, with just over $210 million, while The Devil Wears Prada 2 was right on its heels with $209 million. Without Marvel’s biggest movie ever taking up space, the money was spread across more films. In fact, breaking it down further, May 2026 had the highest average per-film gross at the box office since 1998, when Deep Impact and Godzilla were smashing their way through cinemas.

And what’s more, this year there were more than double the films. So it was Backrooms and Obsession, and Michael and The Devil Wears Prada 2.

But it was also The Mandalorian and Grogu, and Mortal Kombat II, and The Sheep Detectives, and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, and Project Hail Mary, and Hokum, and more. It’s been a month of options. Movies to see. Some might be better than others, but there’s little question that audiences found movies to be excited about, and several of them, all at once.

Instead of falling into the mindset typical of the Marvel domination era, in which only one, or maybe two movies could matter at once, all these films are mattering together. Gen Z might be getting all the attention because they represent the literal future of culture, but Michael hit big with older viewers. As did the Millennial-bait of a Devil Wears Prada sequel. The Sheep Detectives, while still a far cry from making back its sizable budget, has ridden great acclaim and word-of-mouth to a leggy run attracting audiences of all ages.

Project Hail Mary was similarly a four-quadrant, family-style hit. Throw in some kids movies, plenty of horror, some indie attention-grabbers like I Love Boosters and even a re-release of Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick, and what you’ve got is a well-rounded set of offerings, all of which are attracting audiences, and all of them, cumulatively, driving excitement around the very idea of moviegoing. During the real box office lows of the post-pandemic period, it was reasonable to wonder whether moviegoing would ever return in a big way. A few bright spots, Barbenheimer included, suggested the interest was there, but only for certain movies, and only if they felt like massive events.

The event-ization of movies hasn’t exactly subsided—what are we talking about with Backrooms and Obsession, if not an event?—yet this month, and this year in general, we’ve witnessed something more potentially durable emerging. A broader interest in moviegoing is building back up, spurred by a diverse assortment of movies in the shape of both IP plays and original material. The fun of seeing good movies with a crowd is obvious to the people experiencing them, and they’re searching out more of those experiences, venturing to the cinemas to check out a word-of-mouth hit like Obsession with the same excitement usually reserved for a superhero blockbuster or a Star Wars. Even Disney must be feeling good about the overall picture.

The Mandalorian and Grogu may have had its lunch eaten by two YouTubers in their twenties, but the studio was also behind The Devil Wears Prada 2. In July, Disney and Sony are releasing Spider-Man: Brand New Day just two weeks after Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which will be monopolizing valuable IMAX screens.

But with both films extremely highly anticipated—and both starring Tom Holland and Zendaya!—there’s no reason to think they’ll hurt each other’s box office earnings when, given recent trends, they’re more likely to boost each other if anything. Looking ahead to the end of the year, there has been much hand-wringing over the game of chicken Disney and Warner Bros. are playing by releasing Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three on the same day. Common wisdom held that this was something you could not do. One of the studios would have to blink.

Instead, they’re each holding fast, and the internet is already calling the simultaneous release “Dunesday,” building a fever around the two movies just like Barbenheimer, even though the audience overlap is expected to be much larger. Audience overlap didn’t hurt Backrooms or Obsession, though and there’s no reason to think the Christmas season can’t accommodate two huge blockbusters. As this year is proving, there’s plenty of success to go around. After a few years of apocalyptic angst in the industry, audiences are finally rediscovering their love of going out to the cinema.

Old moviegoing habits are returning in new ways. Folks, movies are back.