{"id":676560,"date":"2026-05-31T19:59:33","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T19:59:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/676560\/"},"modified":"2026-05-31T19:59:33","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T19:59:33","slug":"young-moviegoers-power-backrooms-to-82-million-in-ticket-sales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/676560\/","title":{"rendered":"Young Moviegoers Power \u2018Backrooms\u2019 to $82 Million in Ticket Sales"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the 1960s, Hollywood tried to compete with a booming new medium \u2014 television \u2014 by rolling out bloated spectacles like \u201cCleopatra,\u201d \u201cThe Greatest Story Ever Told\u201d and \u201cPaint Your Wagon.\u201d (The equivalent today would be the manner in which studios, panicked by the skyrocketing popularity of Netflix, TikTok and Fortnite, have churned out big-budget sequels with marathon run times.)<\/p>\n

Young audiences in the \u201960s were unmoved. But a new generation of filmmakers revived Hollywood with pictures that spoke more directly to the counterculture and its anxieties. Examples include \u201cEasy Rider\u201d (1969), \u201cMean Streets\u201d (1973) and \u201cAmerican Graffiti\u201d (1973).<\/p>\n

No studio has pushed harder<\/a> to court young audiences by fostering young directors \u2014 movies for us, by us \u2014 than A24, which was founded in 2012 in New York. A24 started to court Mr. Parsons three years ago, when he was 17, after noticing how his horror-based YouTube videos were resonating among teenagers.<\/p>\n

Other young directing talents that A24 has discovered or greatly amplified include Barry Jenkins (\u201cMoonlight\u201d), Ari Aster (\u201cHereditary\u201d), Benny and Josh Safdie (\u201cGood Time\u201d), Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (\u201cEverything Everywhere All at Once\u201d), Alex Garland (\u201cEx Machina\u201d), Sean Baker (\u201cThe Florida Project\u201d) and Celine Song (\u201cPast Lives\u201d).<\/p>\n

More than 50 percent of \u201cBackrooms\u201d ticket buyers cited A24 as a main reason for going out to see it, according to PostTrak. The movie, which stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, received strong reviews<\/a>. The plot involves a furniture store owner who discovers a portal into a strange, labyrinthine realm and disappears into it.<\/p>\n

For the weekend in North America, \u201cObsession\u201d was No. 2. \u201cStar Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu\u201d (Disney) fell off sharply from its opening weekend, landing in a disappointing third place, with about $25 million in ticket sales, for a new domestic total of roughly $137.4 million, according to Comscore, a data firm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the 1960s, Hollywood tried to compete with a booming new medium \u2014 television \u2014 by rolling out…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":676561,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[295040,295039,88,154234,206,4265,154427,8464,295041],"class_list":["post-676560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-a24-films-llc","tag-box-office-sales","tag-entertainment","tag-kane","tag-movies","tag-north-america","tag-parsons","tag-youth","tag-youtube-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=676560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676560\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/676561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=676560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=676560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=676560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}