Mark Duplass Defends Kane Parsons With 100% On-Set Control Claim
Mark Duplass says kane parsons was “100% in control” on the set of Backrooms, pushing back after social media users questioned whether the 20-year-old directed the film. The defense landed just as the A24 horror feature moves toward theaters on Friday, giving the online debate a real-world release date.
Duplass Answers the X Post
Duplass replied to an X post that said, “we all know Kane Parsons absolutely didn’t direct this movie.” His response was blunt: “Hmmm, with all due respect I don’t remember seeing you on set.” He added, “When I was there, Kane was 100% in control.”
He went further: “More so than many directors 3x his age.” That line does more than defend Parsons personally. It also challenges the assumption that a young filmmaker attached to a studio release must have had a lesser role because older, better-known names sit in the producing lineup.
Parsons and the Backrooms Origin
Parsons began uploading the YouTube series that inspired Backrooms as a teen in early 2022, and the film now makes him the studio’s youngest feature director. At CCXP Mexico, he said the team built 30,000 square feet of actual backrooms and that the movie uses the existing series and online lore as a jumping-off point to examine its characters.
He also said the film “rarely has more than one or two characters on screen at a given time” and called it “a pretty lonely film.” That framing fits the project’s scale: Backrooms stars Duplass, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell, but Parsons’ own description suggests the movie is built around isolation rather than ensemble display.
Producer Credits and Online Doubt
James Wan, Shawn Levy and Osgood Perkins are among the film’s producing team, and that helped fuel theories that Parsons was not the primary director. The speculation sharpened because Backrooms comes from a 20-year-old making a feature-debut leap on a major horror release, a setup that invites suspicion from viewers used to seeing older names steer studio productions.
Markiplier’s self-distributed Iron Lung passed $43 million at the global box office earlier this year after studios and distributors passed on it, and that comparison hangs over Parsons’ moment too. The larger business question is not whether young online creators can attract attention; it is whether they can keep directorial control once a studio release enters the pipeline. Duplass says Parsons already has.
Backrooms hits theaters on Friday, and the release will be the first public test of whether that control shows up on screen for an audience that has already judged the movie’s authorship online.
