Kane Parsons

Kane Parsons (born 2005) is an American filmmaker and visual-effects artist who became an internet phenomenon while still in his teens. His found-footage horror series The Backrooms, posted to his YouTube channel, drew hundreds of millions of views and earned him a feature-film adaptation backed by major Hollywood producers — a remarkable trajectory built almost entirely on self-taught 3D, compositing, and editing skills.

The biggest opening in A24 history

The bet paid off spectacularly. Backrooms, which Parsons directed for A24, opened in U.S. theaters on May 29, 2026 to $81.4 million domestically and $118 million worldwide — the biggest opening weekend in A24’s history, more than tripling the record set by Civil War — and made Parsons, at 20, the youngest director ever to top the domestic box office. The film was made without generative AI tools, and Parsons spent the press tour saying exactly why.

Precisely because he is a digital-native craftsman, his rejection of generative AI carries weight. He frames it not as a labor or rights argument first, but as a creative one: the tools, he says, drain the satisfaction out of the work for him, and he experiences the broader flood of AI imagery as a kind of cultural decay.

It is a striking stance from someone whose entire career was enabled by cheap, accessible digital tools — and one of the clearest articulations of the purist position that the value of the work lies in the human effort of making it. Yet his rejection has a curious edge: Parsons is fascinated by AI as a subject, and has said the aesthetics of machine-generated imagery belong in art even if the machines do not.