Kane Parsons, the twenty-year-old director of the horror film "The Backrooms" from A24 studio, expressed strong interest in creating a feature film based on Valve's Portal series. In an interview with The New York Times, Parsons called a Portal adaptation his dream.
Parsons grew up playing games like Half-Life and Portal, and long before creating the viral web series The Backrooms, he released a short film set in the Portal universe on his YouTube channel. Moreover, both franchises are conceptually similar: the liminal horror of the empty yellow rooms in "The Backrooms" largely echoes the sterile atmosphere of Aperture Science's test laboratories.
Attempts to adapt Portal have been made before. As early as 2013, director J.J. Abrams and his company Bad Robot planned to bring both Half-Life and Portal to the big screen. In 2021, Abrams confirmed to IGN that a cinematic version of Portal was still in development at Warner Bros., but no news about the project has emerged since then. It is unknown who currently holds the adaptation rights.
For now, Parsons intends to continue developing the Backrooms franchise, especially since the recent theatrical release of "The Backrooms" turned out to be a phenomenal box office success. With a modest budget of $10 million, the horror film earned a staggering $118 million worldwide in its opening weekend, setting an absolute record for A24 studio and making the twenty-year-old Parsons the youngest director in history whose film debuted at the top of the global box office. Second-weekend data will be available in the coming hours – as soon as the Western Hemisphere wakes up.
"The Backrooms" was released in Russian cinemas on June 4.
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