The final week of May had several of the biggest conversations in the industry happening side-by-side. A 20-year-old from YouTube rewrote A24’s record books, Cannes handed its highest honour to a Romanian director, and the argument over artificial intelligence (AI) got noisier.
A24 and Kane Parsons Make Box Office History
The biggest story of the week, and arguably one of the more stunning box office stories of the decade, came when Kane Parsons’ Backrooms opened across 3,442 North American theaters on May 29. It pulled in $81.4 million domestically and $118 million globally in its opening weekend.
The film is adapted from Parsons’ viral YouTube series about a fictional research institute that discovers a portal to a dimension of liminal spaces. Backrooms reportedly opened somewhere between $15 million and $20 million but went on to make $38.4 million on its first day alone.
The opening weekend also became the biggest in A24’s 14-year history, clearing its previous record held by Alex Garland’s Civil War, which opened to $25.5 million in 2024.
At 20 years old, Parsons is now officially the youngest director in history to top the domestic box office, taking the record from Josh Trank, who was 27 when Chronicle opened to number one in 2011.
The cast includes Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve and Mark Duplass, with James Wan, Shawn Levy and Osgood Perkins among the producers, on a reported budget of under $10 million.
Cannes Ends and Europe Takes the Palme
The 79th Cannes Film Festival closed on Saturday with Romanian director Cristian Mungiu taking the Palme d’Or for Fjord. The drama stars Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as a mixed Romanian and Norwegian couple whose planned new life in a fjord village unravels in ways they did not anticipate.
The award marks Mungiu’s second Palme, with his first being the landmark 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days in 2007. This makes him only the tenth filmmaker in the festival’s history to claim the award twice.
Led by Park Chan-wook, the jury spread the remaining awards across a largely European slate. Andrey Zvyagintsev won the Grand Prix for Minotaur, while Best Director was shared by Pawel Pawlikowski for Fatherland and the duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi for La Bola Negra. Coward earned Best Actor for its co-leads, while Best Actress went jointly to Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto for All of a Sudden. Best Screenplay went to A Man of His Time, while The Dreamed Adventure took the Jury Prize.
Hollywood’s AI Argument Gets Louder
The industry’s AI debate moved in two directions at once this week. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences updated its rulebook to officially ban AI-generated work from eligibility in competitive Oscar categories. The move draws a clear line that human creation remains the baseline standard for the awards.
On the other side of that argument, Amazon MGM Studios, in collaboration with Amazon Web Services, used its GenAI summit to announce the creation of a GenAI Creators’ Fund. The fund is backed by a proprietary cloud platform called Project Nara, with three animated series greenlit for Prime Video, including Diana Music Hunters, Cupcake and Friends, and Punky Duck.
Following the announcement, Loryn Brantz, the original creator of the Good Advice Cupcake character, publicly stated she was “horrified and disgusted” to learn her character had been adapted into an AI production without her consent.
Amid the backlash, Gareth Edwards offered a more measured defence of the technology as a production and brainstorming tool. Edwards told The Hollywood Reporter that directing an AI model is like working with “a billionaire on acid. It’ll do anything you ask, not a problem. Sometimes it’ll go batshit crazy.”
Meanwhile, the Tribeca Festival this week confirmed it will host the premiere of Dreams of Violets, the first fully AI-generated feature-length film to screen at a major global festival, a decision that has drawn sharp responses from both ends of the debate.
The Takeaway
Backrooms proved again that the pipeline from online creator to theatrical record-breaker is now fully operational. On the other hand, Cannes rewarded the kind of European auteur cinema that the festival was built to celebrate.
Meanwhile, the Academy drew a boundary around human creative work as Amazon began testing how far its technology could go.
All of it, from the box office to the policy room to the beach, points to the question of who decides what counts, and who gets left out when the rules change.
