Four hundred million on a ten-million film

The cheapest film in the conversation won the summer. Backrooms, made for about $10m and released at the end of May, has taken roughly $402m worldwide, which is A24's biggest picture ever and a return that no studio tentpole came close to matching.

The consequence shows up in the distributor table. Citing Variety's figures, A24 finished the summer fourth in the domestic market with about $237m, ahead of Paramount at $192m and Warner Bros. at $165m, behind only Universal, Sony and Disney.

Hold those numbers side by side. A24 outgrossed two of the six major studios domestically while spending a fraction of what either of them spends on a single franchise instalment, and it did so with a film whose director, Kane Parsons, is twenty-one and came out of making videos on the internet.

Horror has always been the genre where the arithmetic favours the small. The audience turns up on the opening weekend regardless of stars, the production costs are bounded by the fact that darkness is cheap, and a concept that travels needs no translation.

What is new is where the concept came from. The Backrooms began as an internet creepypasta — endless empty office corridors under fluorescent light — and was built into a following by a teenager posting short films, which is a development pipeline no studio owns and none can easily buy.

The casting of Chiwetel Ejiofor is the detail that shows how the model has matured. An established actor taking the lead in a film by a first-time director working from internet folklore is not a stunt; it is a signal that the route is now legitimate.

For the majors the lesson is uncomfortable, because it is not new. Every decade produces a cheap film that outperforms the slate, and every decade the response is to option the property rather than to change the cost base. A sequel is already in development.

Paramount is currently negotiating a commitment to release thirty films a year as part of an antitrust settlement, which is a promise about volume made by a company whose summer was beaten by one picture costing $10m.

The caution is that A24's summer was not all Backrooms. The Invite took $55.7m worldwide, Tony $18.3m and The Death of Robin Hood $5.3m — a normal spread of modest results around one enormous outlier, which is what an independent's year usually looks like.

That is the honest version of the story. Nobody has found a repeatable way to make $400m from $10m; what A24 has is a cost base low enough that one such film changes the year, and a relationship with an audience that the studios keep trying to buy rather than build.