Box office reports are proving that one genre is reigning supreme for 2026, with internet-based word-of-mouth creating a storm for the most recent horror releases made by former YouTubers, prompting online film discourse to anticipate and advocate for a new era of horror filmmaking.
The star of this week, Backrooms, is a Surrealist horror film based on the internet phenomenon of the backrooms, a liminal space where reality ceases to exist. The film was directed by newcomer Kane Parsons, a former YouTuber who created a 24-episode-long series on the phenomenon, which has accumulated nearly 200 million hits, and stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve as two people who venture into the backrooms with intense results.
Additional cast members include Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell.
The film opened last weekend to a gross of $81 million domestically, combined with an international gross of $36 million, to come to a global gross of $118 million and earn $108 million more than its initial budget. This marks A24’s biggest opening weekend and, most impressively, makes a 20-year-old Parsons officially the youngest director to achieve the box office’s number one spot.
Curry Barker, another YouTuber-turned-horror-filmmaker, is seeing immense success with his supernatural horror film, Obsession, which stars Michael Johnston as a love-sick music store worker who unknowingly wishes for his co-worker, played by Inde Navarrette, to fall in love with him via a supernatural toy and prompts his love to become an obsessive, unstable, cursed entity.
Barker’s film opened to $17.2 million, coming third behind other box office hits Michael ($846 million) and The Devil Wears Prada 2 ($666 million), and has now hit a domestic gross of $100 million thanks to an increase of $26.4 million. With an official worldwide gross of $148 million, Obsession is the 16th highest-grossing 2026 release, in between Dhurandhar: The Revenge ($152 million) and Efes’in Sirri ($146 million).
It seems that 2026 is a year of horror success and domination, coming off a six-year build-up of the 2020s, implying horror may be in a new era of originality, creativity, social relevance and creation by new blood, seen in previous releases such as Longlegs.
“We knew indie horror was hot, but we didn’t know how hot,” Jeff Bock, the analyst for Exhibitor Relations, stated as shared in Variety. “It’s actually competing with the big summer blockbusters.”
Horror is coming in hot this year and leaving other genres in the dust, even long-running and cinematically significant sci-fi franchises, such as Lucasfilm’s Star Wars, whose latest feature release, Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, oversaw the poorest box office opening weekend for the franchise with $165 million.
It seems that things aren’t picking up, as Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu’s second weekend saw an upsetting 70% drop ($25 million), yet it currently ranks as the 7th highest-grossing flick of 2026 from a worldwide gross of $246 million.
Obsession, Backrooms and Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu are in cinemas now.
Discover more from
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
