Kane Parsons on Backrooms 2: New Faces and Endgame

Kane Parsons didn’t set out to manufacture a franchise. He opened a door and people rushed the hallway. Backrooms became A24’s biggest hit, a viral spark that helped turn YouTube-born horror into Hollywood currency. Parsons, still only 21, found himself at the center of a phenomenon. Fame followed. Questions followed faster.

Will he keep making sequels just because the crowd asks for more? Not exactly. He’s candid about that. Parsons wants to expand—yes—but to do so on his own terms: new characters to meet, new corners of the mythos to explore, and an actual plan for how the story should end. Surprise matters to him. Mystery matters more.

On The Kyle Buchanan Show he shrugged off detailed spoilers, preferring the thrill of letting audiences discover things themselves. Yet his tone pulled back a curtain just enough to reveal a creative map: sharpen what worked in the first film, abandon or rework scenes that missed the emotional core, and double down on the unnerving logic that makes Backrooms feel alive and unknowable.

Some moments in the original, Parsons admits, didn't quite capture the cultural heartbeat of the Backrooms. He wants to correct that. Shorter experiments and small-scale sequences in his past work already hinted at the broader ideas he plans to bring forward. Now, with clearer taste and more confidence, those fragments can be refashioned into fuller pieces of the world.

There are specific characters he’s eager to introduce—figures who have been waiting in the wings. They won't be cameo curiosities. They’re tools to widen the story’s emotional and conceptual reach. Parsons treats the franchise less like a straight line from A to B and more like a spreading tree: branches that can be slim and short, or broad and intertwining.

That branching approach explains why Parsons sees different formats as complementary. Short YouTube projects can keep the mythology active for years—small vignettes that tease and inhabit single rooms of the maze. But the main narrative, the cinematic arc he’s most invested in, he imagines with closure in mind. His dream ending? A miniseries that ties threads together and makes sense of the world’s accumulating strangeness.

He believes the Backrooms has a limited set of truths to reveal, and that an infinite number of sequels would dilute rather than deepen the idea.

Parsons is realistic about how franchises evolve. Intellectual property drifts, spin-offs bloom, and fan-made tales multiply. Yet he remains focused on the version of the story he can control—one that respects tone and purposeful mystery. He plans to return to A24 for a second film but the studio has not formally announced it, nor set a release date. Given the first film’s box office, a sequel is hardly a surprise; the question is what shape that sequel will take.

How long can a maze hold its mystery if its corridors are endlessly rebuilt? Parsons seems intent on answering that question before the lights go out.