Curry Barker’s ‘Obsession’ Just Crossed $400 Million and It’s Rewriting Horror Box Office History
Horror has quietly become one of the most reliable draws at the multiplex again, and a new wave of filmmakers who cut their teeth online are leading the charge. Studios that once treated YouTube as a talent pipeline for cheap content are now handing its biggest names real budgets and real release dates, and audiences are showing up in droves. Few examples capture that shift better than ‘Obsession,’ the twisted romance horror film that keeps refusing to leave theaters.
The movie comes from Curry Barker, a YouTube sketch comedian who built an audience through his channel That’s a Bad Idea before turning to filmmaking with the found footage project ‘Milk & Serial.’ ‘Obsession’ follows Bear, a music store employee who buys a supernatural toy that grants his wish for his coworker Nikki to fall in love with him, with horrific consequences that follow. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2025, where Focus Features acquired it in a bidding war for around fifteen million dollars.
According to a post from Nexus Point News on X, ‘Obsession’ has now surpassed four hundred million dollars at the worldwide box office, making it the tenth highest grossing horror film of all time. The account also noted that Barker made the film for a budget of just seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, a figure that lines up with what multiple outlets have reported. Variety confirmed the milestone separately, reporting that the film has grossed a remarkable four hundred and three million dollars after two months in theaters, including two hundred and forty five million domestically and one hundred and fifty seven million overseas.
Most films would be winding down after eight weekends, but ‘Obsession’ remained a draw over the July 4th holiday, pulling in another five point three million domestically and twelve million internationally. Earlier in its run, the film set a record for the best fourth weekend hold ever for a horror movie, declining just seven percent and beating the previous mark held by ‘The Blair Witch Project.’ The film was shot in Los Angeles in October 2024 and stands as Barker’s first movie to receive a theatrical release.
Barker himself has admitted he never saw this coming. Speaking in a video interview with NBC News, he said, “When we made Obsession, we had no idea what was going to happen. As the leader of the ship, I had to tell the people, this is going to be huge, you guys have to give this a year, because it’s going to be something special. But that’s just because that’s my job, to champion the movie. Really, I had no idea. It was insane when we even just got into TIFF.”
Critics and audiences have largely been aligned on the film’s quality, with ‘Obsession’ holding a 94 percent fresh score from critics and a 94 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. The cast includes Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless, Haley Fitzgerald, Darin Toonder and Andy Richter. Producer Jason Blum, who backed the film through Blumhouse, has pointed to a broader shift among younger moviegoers driving this kind of success. He told Variety that there is a new generation of moviegoers declaring a very specific taste for horror movies that is quite left of center.
Barker is already moving on to his next project, the supernatural comedy ‘Anything but Ghosts,’ which is currently in post production. With ‘Obsession’ still climbing the all time charts, the question now is just how high it can go before it finally exits theaters for good.
Do you think Bear and Nikki’s twisted love story deserves its spot among horror’s biggest box office hits of all time?
