Backrooms is currently riding high at the top of the box office, but 20-year-old director Kane “Pixels” Parsons is already talking about a sequel. According to a report by Deadline, the filmmaking prodigy is actively looking for a “screenwriting collaborator” to work with him on developing a follow-up movie.
Presumably, after an opening weekend in which his film grossed $118 million worldwide, Parsons is in a position to get whatever he wants, and if the rumors reported by Deadline are true, right now that’s a new writer to join him to create the follow-up project immediately. There’s no more meat on this bone just yet, but it does rather strongly suggest that the intention isn’t there to once again work with the first movie’s scribe, Will Soodik.
Soodik, who only has a handful of sporadic previous writing credits, certainly has the right names on his brief resume. He is credited as a writer on one episode each of Homeland, Borgia and Westworld, and ten episodes of the wonderful Ash vs Evil Dead, and that’s it. However, he’s already co-written Sputnik director Egor Abramenko’s forthcoming horror film Altar, and is attached to the director’s next film, God’s Country. Perhaps this engagement means he’s not available for a Backrooms sequel?
Soodik was a swap-in for writer/producer Roberto Patino, a frequent writer of Sons of Anarchy and Westworld, who was originally set to pen Backrooms and is currently writing the upcoming Assassin’s Creed movie. So that’s him out, too.
Backroomed into a corner
Honestly, I’m not sure going straight into another Backrooms is the right move for Parsons, although I completely understand why he’d want to. Given he came to attention for the extraordinarily good YouTube Backrooms shorts he made when he was a teenager, which opened the door to A24 and the offer to create a feature film version, going straight into yet more Backrooms seems like a surefire way to pigeonhole himself as “the Backrooms guy.”
Far too many break-out directors (especially horror directors) back themselves into this corner, failing to show enough range early on and finding themselves doomed to produce straight-to-streaming V/H/S sequels and the like. But Parsons’ passion is clearly set in the Backrooms mythos—he has a desire to create an anthology—and he’ll certainly not have any trouble getting funding right now. Hey, maybe the guy’s smart enough to secure an enormous fee to make the follow-up such that he never has to worry about money again.
