‘Backrooms’ Turns an Online Obsession Into Box-Office Gold

**Jessica Mendoza** (0:05)
All Spring, our colleague Ben Fritz's 14-year-old son has been bugging him to see one particular movie.

**Ben Fritz** (0:12)
My son knows that I sometimes can snag tickets to premieres or early screenings.

**Jessica Mendoza** (0:17)
Ben covers the entertainment industry, and the movie in question was a horror film called Backrooms.

**Ben Fritz** (0:24)
That's how I first learned this film existed, was he started asking me if I could get him into the earliest possible screening, ideally into the premiere.

**Jessica Mendoza** (0:34)
Backrooms started as an idea on the Internet, and along with millions of other teenagers, Ben's son had closely tracked Backrooms' evolution online.

**Ben Fritz** (0:44)
This wasn't just like, oh, this is a cool movie. This is like a big screen expansion of this whole mythology that has been really meaningful to him for several years.

**Jessica Mendoza** (0:55)
Ben actually did get tickets to the premiere, and he was amazed by how much his son had to say about the film.

**Ben Fritz** (1:03)
He was like, oh, well, you have to understand that in this scene, like what this image represents is X, and it's kind of similar to his videos, but it's different in this way.

**Jessica Mendoza** (1:12)
So was he talking to you the entire time this thing was happening?

**Ben Fritz** (1:16)
No. We've raised him in Los Angeles. He knows you have to keep your mouth shut in a movie theater.

**Jessica Mendoza** (1:20)
Okay, good.

**Ben Fritz** (1:21)
But afterwards, he could not keep his mouth shut. He couldn't stop talking to me.

**Jessica Mendoza** (1:26)
Ben was struck by all this excitement. His son's a member of Gen Z, a demographic that Hollywood has been struggling to crack for years. Gen Z just doesn't go to the movies the way previous generations have. That might be changing, though. Backrooms wasn't expected to be a major hit. But in just a few weeks, Gen Zers have turned out in droves to make it one of the most profitable movies of the year.
How significant is that for Hollywood in this moment?

**Ben Fritz** (1:59)
It's really significant.
A lot of people believed that the only movies that get people into theaters these days are franchises. People just want to see the tenth iteration of their favorite superhero, or robot, or toy adaptation, or remake, or whatever. To see something that's highly original and gets young people into theaters is a huge deal for the movie business.

**Jessica Mendoza** (2:26)
Are we watching kind of the dawn of the Gen Z movie era?

**Ben Fritz** (2:30)
Yes, we definitely are watching the dawn of the Gen Z movie era.

**Jessica Mendoza** (2:36)
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Friday, June 12th.
Coming up on the show, Gen Z goes to the movies, finally.

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**Jessica Mendoza** (4:13)
Backrooms is a psychological horror film. It's about a furniture store owner who discovers a mysterious portal in his shop's basement that leads to another world.

**SPEAKER_7** (4:25)
I found something in the store. Okay.

**Jessica Mendoza** (4:31)
That world is a series of abandoned rooms and hallways that are hung with yellow wallpaper and flooded with fluorescent light. It looks a lot like reality, but it's off-kilter, uncanny.

**SPEAKER_7** (4:44)
All these places and buildings, rooms, misremembering themselves.

**Jessica Mendoza** (4:52)
I saw the movie myself last week, and it doesn't have as much gore or as many jump scares as a lot of horror films do, but there was a pervasive sense of creepiness and being trapped. How did Backrooms come about?

**Ben Fritz** (5:05)
Backrooms started with a single photograph of a fluorescent lit room that was posted on the message board for Chan back in 2019, and people started latching onto it.