Backrooms director Kane Parsons wants to direct a Portal movie
Kane Parsons—better known online as Kane Pixels—has expressed interest in bringing Valve’s Portal to the big screen. In a recent New York Times interview, the 20-year-old filmmaker reportedly said he’d like to be involved with a Portal adaptation at some point.
Parsons has rapidly become one of the youngest working directors in modern cinema. His feature debut, Backrooms, has reportedly smashed internal records at A24 within its first week, cementing him as a rising voice with a flair for atmospheric, internet-rooted horror. That momentum, and his fondness for Portal, have fans curious about what his take on the iconic game might look like.
First released in 2007 as part of Valve’s Orange Box collection, Portal is a puzzle-platformer set in the crumbling Aperture Science Laboratories. A rogue AI named GLaDOS—short for Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System—oversees a series of increasingly perilous “tests,” while the player, controlling silent protagonist Chell, uses a handheld portal device to bend space, solve puzzles, and survive. It’s a concise, inventive experience that has become a cornerstone of modern gaming culture.
Parsons has cited Portal as one of the inspirations for Backrooms. The connection tracks: both works revel in sterile office corridors, humming fluorescents, and the uncanny “liminal” dread of spaces not meant for people to linger in. Portal’s hidden narrative breadcrumbs—like the graffiti of the elusive Aperture survivor known as the Ratman—also echo the Backrooms’ love of found spaces and environmental storytelling.
Turning that sensibility into a feature film, however, would mean navigating a long-stalled Hollywood journey. A Portal movie has ostensibly been “in the works” since 2013, when Gabe Newell and J.J. Abrams teased projects based on Portal and Half-Life at the DICE Summit. In true Valve fashion, updates have been sparse in the years since, and any concrete progress has remained elusive.
Even so, the idea of a Kane Parsons–helmed Portal is tantalizing. His knack for stretching tension across anonymous hallways and fluorescent-lit chambers feels tailor-made for Aperture’s test chambers, while GLaDOS’s pitch-black humor could dovetail with Parsons’s stripped-down, internet-native approach to horror and sci-fi. The puzzle-box structure of Portal also lends itself to inventive visual storytelling—something Parsons has already demonstrated across his Backrooms work and online shorts.
Whether a studio-backed Portal feature finally breaks free from development purgatory is anyone’s guess. But with Parsons openly voicing interest—and with his profile surging—there’s fresh energy around a concept fans have wanted for more than a decade. In the meantime, if you’ve somehow missed Portal, it remains a tight, brilliant classic well worth revisiting. And if Backrooms is your entry point to Parsons’s work, his nods to Portal’s sterile labyrinths and whispering corners are impossible to miss.
For now, it’s a compelling what-if: a filmmaker who thrives in liminal spaces, eyeing one of gaming’s most iconic labyrinths. If the stars align, Aperture Science might finally get the cinematic treatment it’s been promised—this time with a director whose sensibilities seem engineered for it.
