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Mark Duplass pushed back on social media rumors that A24’s youngest feature director, 20-year-old Kane Parsons, didn’t actually direct Backrooms, opening Friday.
Mark Duplass took to X on Tuesday to defend Kane Parsons, the 20-year-old YouTube creator who directed A24’s upcoming horror film Backrooms, after a viral post questioned whether the young filmmaker actually helmed the project.
The rumor started small. An X user posted that we all know Kane Parsons absolutely didn’t direct this movie, citing studios’ general risk-aversion as reason a 19-year-old (Parsons’s age during production) couldn’t have run the show. Duplass, who stars in the film, was unimpressed.
“Hmmm, with all due respect I don’t remember seeing you on set,” Duplass replied. “When I was there, Kane was 100% in control. More so than many directors 3x his age.”
The Hollywood Reporter’s writeup of Duplass’s tweet and the broader producer team behind Backrooms notes that the film’s credits list James Wan, Shawn Levy, and Osgood Perkins among its producers, lending visible adult supervision to the project. That cast list became part of why some viewers questioned how much was Parsons.
Parsons earned the seat. He created the Backrooms YouTube series in early 2022 as a teenager, working from a 4chan creepypasta about an infinite maze of liminal rooms. The first installment of his web series passed 78 million views, and he now has over 3 million subscribers.
A24 acquired the film rights roughly a year after the first short went viral. Parsons signed on as director, his first feature credit. ScreenRant’s breakdown of the social media rumor and the film’s full cast and crew includes the box office tracking, which has moved from a $20 million opening projection earlier this month to a current $40 to $50 million range.
The cast is heavy for a YouTube adaptation. Duplass leads opposite Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve (fresh off the Palme d’Or-winning Fjord), Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell. The plot follows a therapist tracking down a missing patient through the dimensional weirdness of the Backrooms universe.
Production scale matched the ambition. The team built 30,000 square feet of physical Backrooms sets, with Parsons telling CCXP Mexico that the film uses the existing online lore as a jumping-off point to examine the lonely interior lives of characters trapped in the space. He described it as a pretty lonely film.
Parsons isn’t the only young director facing these rumors. The X post that triggered Duplass’s response also targeted Curry Barker, the 26-year-old who directed Focus Features’ Obsession. IMDb’s running coverage of the Backrooms film and its director’s online presence aggregates the broader conversation around young filmmaker credentials.
A larger industry context sits underneath. Earlier this year, YouTuber Markiplier self-distributed his video-game adaptation Iron Lung after studios passed; it grossed over $43 million globally. Markiplier described the situation at the time as the stigma against YouTube needing to be toppled and then toppled again, until it becomes normalized.
Backrooms is its own toppling test. Parsons becomes A24’s youngest feature director with the project.
The film opens nationwide Friday, May 29. The early tracking suggests Duplass’s defense isn’t going to be the last word on Parsons’s youth this weekend.
