ScreamWire Daily

Backrooms has topped $81M in its opening weekend to give A24 its best launch ever and make Kane Parsons, 20, the youngest domestic No. 1 filmmaker on record; Obsession is simultaneously heading to $104.7M domestic and Focus’s biggest North American title.

After Backrooms opened to an estimated $81 million, creator Kane Parsons told Variety he never saw the film as a standalone adaptation but as a “foot in the door” to a larger Backrooms series. He says he’s contractually set to make more, with sequels or other projects still in the works.

A24-backed Backrooms and self-distributed horror breakout Obsession are being framed as proof that YouTube-native creators can convert fandom into theatrical heat. The piece argues creator audiences, brand partnerships and direct-to-fan discovery are becoming the new indie financing and distribution engine.

Backrooms and Obsession are giving horror fresh box office leverage, with Duplass framing the pair as proof that creator-built, low-cost genre hits can still break through a fractured distribution market. The two films’ outsized grosses and online-born origins are sharpening the case for indie horror as a scalable theatrical bet.

Focus has scrapped Obsession’s June 2 digital date and is holding the Curry Barker shocker in a 45-day exclusive theatrical window after a $148M worldwide run and a $105M domestic haul. The $750K TIFF Midnight Madness title is now playing like a blockbuster, not a day-and-date streamer candidate.

Tubi breakout At Death’s Door is getting a sequel push, with Frank Palangi launching production and a GoFundMe campaign for At Death’s Door 2 through Cinema Epoch.

Eric Roberts boards Witchcraft: The Lanterne of Light as the franchise shifts into found-footage occult horror; Carissa Pierson is directing, Andrew Pierson is writing and production is already underway in North Carolina.

At Hollywood’s Produced By Conference, Jason Blum, James Wan and Warner Bros. co-chair Mike De Luca said YouTube creators are reinvigorating theatrical filmgoing; Blumhouse-Atomic Monster cited Backrooms and Obsession, with Obsession topping $100m in North America after three weekends.

Rediance has landed international sales rights to Zhong Kaifeng’s feature debut Atlantic Rhapsody ahead of its Shanghai main-competition premiere. The fantasy drama follows a supermarket clerk pulled into a surreal history-memory spiral and gives the title immediate market positioning out of SIFF.

Backrooms and Obsession’s breakout is fueling James Wan and Jason Blum’s pitch that horror is propping up theatrical; Blumhouse-Atomic Monster wants to scale into a ‘Disney of horror’ across film, TV, gaming and live events.

$111 billion Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger needs a close antitrust review; the combined HBO Max/Paramount+ stack could create a stronger streaming and production rival to Netflix, Amazon and Disney.

June 21 Father’s Day weekend slot for Studio Dome’s 89-minute TV-MA survival thriller; David Chokachi stars in Benjamin Reisman’s father-son rescue pic, with a counterprogramming release push in North America.

First-of-its-kind Bell Media/TELUS pact opens live linear ad replacement across TELUS TV+ in Alberta and B.C.; Bell’s programmatic CTV inventory now spans Canada coast to coast.

Australian-Canadian co-production is gearing up to shoot early next year, with Chukwudi Iwuji boarded for dual roles and Louise Schultz producing. Kyle Portbury is packaging a New Orleans-set family adventure that underscores how cross-border financing and global talent are shaping smaller productions.

SXSW London bows Jason James’ Canadian neo-noir thriller-rom-com, pairing Zach Cherry and Maria Bakalova as a blind date spirals into a dead-body, stolen-car caper with a killer in pursuit. Resonance Films, Telefilm Canada, Voltage Pictures, Mongrel Media and other backers are on the package; Jason Filiatrault wrote.

Yeon Sang-ho’s zombie thriller Colony surges past 3.4 million Korean admissions and $24.8M domestic, becoming the year’s No. 2 local hit behind The King’s Warden. Showbox is selling the film into 120+ territories, with Well Go USA taking North America.

Falcon Pictures has locked Indonesia rights to 12 Cannes Competition titles and will funnel the slate through Jakarta World Cinema before deciding which plays theatrically and which lands on KlikFilm. The acquisition mix leans prestige, but the move shows Falcon using festival heat to drive both local distribution and platform value.

Obsession has reached Rs 9.39 crore in India by day 4 and $108.8M worldwide on a reported $750K-$1M budget; Focus Features’ TIFF Midnight Madness pickup is now one of the year’s most efficient theatrical wins.

Signal, a techno-horror short shot on an iPhone, played the Cannes Marché du Film alongside Hooked, a tech-dependence short from Indian filmmaker Suresh B Pandey. No sales, financing or distribution deal was announced.

Jordan Peele’s Nope lands on Netflix and cracked the streamer’s top 10 in its first week on the service. The sci-fi horror hit grossed $171.2 million worldwide in theaters and is getting a fresh discovery window on SVOD.

Ti West’s Widow’s Bay episode was built around an Alexa 265, a 1.43:1 frame and rebuilt Todd-AO museum glass; Hiro Murai and Christian Sprenger locked the visual plan months before prep.

Lionsgate teams with Ghost House on Damien Leone’s original follow-up to Terrifier; Leone writes, directs and produces Tortures of the Damned, with Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert aboard as producers as Terrifier 4 heads into pre-production to close the franchise.

Jordan Peele-produced short ‘Spilled Milk’ took the HBO Short Film Award at ABFF 2026, while ‘Three Colors: Pan-African’ and ‘Girl Dad’ each landed multiple U.S. Narrative Feature wins. No sale activity is attached, but the awards give the projects fresh heat with reps, buyers, and festival programmers.

IDW Dark launches Fatal Fest, a new survival-horror comic from Hannah Rose May and Andrea Scalmazzi about filmmakers trapped in a murderous festival run by horror impresario Frank Finch; another original IP push for the imprint after The Exorcism at 1600 Penn.

Dragon Studios has kicked off filming on The Bat in the UK, using the WWI gothic horror epic to launch a new Dark Universe built around literary monsters and occult villains.