The Shocking Success of ‘Backrooms’ and ‘Obsession’ Should Be a Memo to Hollywood: You Need What’s Outside the Box
The recent success of the horror films 'Backrooms' and 'Obsession' highlights a shift in Hollywood towards more innovative storytelling. Both films have defied traditional box office expectations, suggesting a growing audience for unconventional narratives. This trend indicates that Hollywood may benefit from embracing creativity and originality in filmmaking.
- ▪'Backrooms' is projected to earn $85 million this weekend, a remarkable figure for an experimental horror film.
- ▪'Obsession' saw an increase in box office earnings from $17 million to $24 million in its second weekend.
- ▪The success of these films suggests that filmmakers with strong online followings can attract significant audiences.
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| Original publisher | Variety |
| Canonical URL | https://variety.com/2026/film/columns/backrooms-obsession-hollywood-needs-whats-outside-the-box-1236762844/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 30 May 2026 18:04:19 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-30T18:29:43.105Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-30T18:29:43.105Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | akY7cMXDATVF · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
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| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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Home Film Columns May 30, 2026 11:04am PT The Shocking Success of ‘Backrooms’ and ‘Obsession’ Should Be a Memo to Hollywood: You Need What’s Outside the Box By Owen Gleiberman Plus Icon Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic @OwenGleiberman Latest ‘Atonement’ Review: Boyd Holbrook and Hiam Abbass in a Different Kind of War Movie — an Affecting Drama of Survivor Anguish and Combat Guilt 1 day ago ‘Backrooms’ Review: Experimental Horror Comes Out of the Margins in Kane Parsons’ YouTube-Gone-A24 Head Trip 3 days ago Best of Cannes 2026: 20 Critics’ Picks From This Year’s Festival 1 week ago See All ©Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection “Thinking outside the box” is a phrase that tends to be used by those who are stuck inside the box.
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