Over the last week, there has been a lot of conversation about A24 striking an AI research partnership with Google to develop new AI-powered technologies for filmmakers, but now A24 is working to turn the focus back to their movies by announcing that they will be re-releasing director Kane Parsons‘ hit horror film Backrooms on July 3rd – but this isn’t just the same thing all over again. Variety reports that this re-release is called Backrooms: Everything Must Go Edition and it adds 15 minutes of bonus footage into the mix. This bonus footage, a “theatrically exclusive post-credit,” will boost the film’s running time to 126 minutes.
Who’s in Backrooms?
Backrooms went into production around twelve months ago with Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave) and Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World) heading up the cast. They’re joined by Mark Duplass (Creep), Finn Bennett (True Detective), Lukita Maxwell (Shrinking), and Avan Jogia (Zombieland: Double Tap).
A24 and Chernin Entertainment are co-financing Backrooms. Patino is producing the film alongside Shawn Levy and Dan Levine of 21 Laps and James Wan and Michael Clear of Atomic Monster. Alayna Glasthal is overseeing the project for Atomic Monster, while the company’s Judson Scott executive produces.
Produced for $10 million, Backrooms has earned more than $330 million worldwide since it was released on May 29th, making it the highest grossing film in A24’s history,
What is Backrooms about?
Backrooms is based on a series of viral videos Parsons released through his YouTube channel Kane Pixels. Deadline previously noted that in the original short, a young filmmaker’s fall into another dimension leaves him wandering through an unsettlingly yellow, empty and labyrinthine office space, which may or may not be home to otherworldly beings. The film’s title and setting draw inspiration from the imagery of a creepypasta (or internet urban legend) published to the website 4chan in 2019. An interview with Parsons on ABC provided the information that his series tells the story of a shadowy organization, called ASYNC, which in the late 1980s opens a portal connecting the real world to The Backrooms.
If you were to splice those videos together they would reach feature length, but the feature version of Backrooms is something entirely new. The screenplay for the feature was written by Will Soodik (Westworld). The film follows a furniture store operator who discovers an endless array of liminal spaces in the store’s basement.
Will you be heading out to see Backrooms: Everything Must Go Edition and its 15 minutes of bonus footage? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
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