Okay, so I wasn’t planning on writing about Backrooms again. I thought we were done. The movie came out, it made a genuinely absurd amount of money, I already told you what I thought of it, and I figured that was that.
Then A24 decided “that was that” wasn’t good enough.
Starting July 3, Backrooms is heading back into theaters under a new name — Backrooms: Everything Must Go Edition — with somewhere between 15 and 16 minutes of brand new, theatrically exclusive footage tacked on after the credits. Runtime jumps from 1 hour 51 to right around 2 hours 6. That’s not a trim, that’s not a director’s cut with three extra seconds of a hallway. That’s a real chunk of new material, and A24 is being weirdly disciplined about not showing any of it in the trailer.
Here’s what we actually know – Kane Parsons himself hopped on Discord and ruled out the two obvious guesses. It’s not behind-the-scenes content, and it’s not a re-edit of the film you already saw. Beyond that, he said something interesting — that people hoping for more of the original YouTube web series episodes would probably be into it. So yeah, it sounds like it is more from the original web/youtube series potentially?
If you know Parsons’ history, that’s actually a bigger tell than it sounds like. The guy built his entire following on 24 found-footage-style episodes about a corporation called Async trying to chart the Backrooms and getting chewed up by whatever lives down there. The feature film gave us Clark and Mary’s version of that story. But Async itself — the organization, the “why” behind the expedition — got mostly left in the margins. And for what it’s worth, the (admittedly tiny) trailer for this extended edition leans hard on Mark Duplass’s character and that opening Async expedition sequence. Make of that what you will. I’m not saying that’s confirmed. I’m saying it’s the one breadcrumb we’ve got.
What I love about this whole rollout is that A24 clearly understands their audience. This isn’t a “buy a ticket to see three extra minutes of Chiwetel Ejiofor walking down a hallway” re-release. This is a studio and a 20-year-old director who came up making internet horror for internet people, betting that the same crowd that turned Backrooms into a $300+ million phenomenon will show up again for something that sounds a lot more like lore than filler.
And honestly? They’re probably right. I’ve watched this fanbase for weeks now, and “more Async” is exactly the kind of thing that gets people back in a theater seat over a holiday weekend they’d otherwise spend at a barbecue.
I’m not going to pretend to know what’s actually in those 15 minutes — anyone telling you they do right now is guessing, same as me. (I did find this interesting article conjecturing what might be in those 15 minutes.)
But I’ll be tracking this one closely, and the second real reactions start hitting the internet after July 3rd, I’ll have a full breakdown up. If you’ve already seen the extended cut by the time you’re reading this, drop what you saw in the comments — I’m dying to know if Async gets its due.
