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Obsession got what it wished for and more: The 2025 horror film has broken the record for highest-grossing film with a $750,000 US budget, with its box office sales surpassing $400 million US.
The American movie, directed by 26-year-old Curry Barker, debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival last September and released theatrically on May 15. It’s been a mainstay on box office charts since, grossing more than $245 million US domestically and more than $158 million US internationally, totalling just over $403 million US, according to Box Office Mojo. That puts it ahead of 1973 Bruce Lee martial arts film Enter the Dragon, which cost $850,000 US to make and has made $400 million US over several re-releases. (Both figures are pre-inflation.)
Focus Features acquired the film after its festival debut for approximately $14 million US. It’s now the biggest hit in the company’s 24-year history, and ranks among the most profitable movies ever made.
The film’s theatrical success prompted Focus to postpone the video-on-demand release. It released on streaming platforms on June 30, and is set to come out on Blu-ray 4K and DVD on July 14.
Obsession tells the story of Bear (Michael Johnston), an awkward and romantically unsuccessful young man suffering through presumably unrequited love for his friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette). Things get crazy — and bloody — after Bear uses a “One Wish Willow” to make a poorly worded wish for Nikki to love him more than anyone in the world. He soon finds he should have been more careful what he’d wished for.
How Obsession is flipping the script
Obsession’s box office success comes at the same time as that of horror movie Backrooms (2026), directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons and based on a series of YouTube videos. The two films have fuelled an industry-wide conversation about the rise of Gen Z filmmakers and their potential to get younger audiences out to movie theatres.
Michael Stasko, a filmmaker and a professor at the University of Windsor, said part of the film’s success is due to its efficient, engaging script.
“There were a lot of films, especially horror films, that would kind of take time to dive into B-characters … or specifically have scenes that’s just world-building,” he said.
He said Obsession avoids that by having many things occur at once: World-building comes with some interesting dialogue, for example, or a couple scares accompany a scene of visual intrigue and some character development.
The film also wasn’t the overnight success it appeared to be, he noted, as Barker spent years honing his craft on his YouTube channel with his friend Cooper Tomlinson, who also stars in Obsession. The channel has approximately 1.5 million subscribers.
“That audience was built not by money being thrown at marketing or PR to get people to his channel — he was just doing genuinely good, interesting content,” Stasko said, adding that distributors are increasingly expecting filmmakers to have an audience before pitching a film.
Ernest Mathijs, a film studies professor at the University of British Columbia, said Barker’s and Parsons’s backgrounds in YouTube could mark a change in filmmaking.
“They know the media very well. They’ve made their mark by making short YouTube films, which obviously people watch and react and comment on, and on the basis of that, they’ve refined their craft … at a very young age,” he said.
“They’re going through their learning curve much faster than filmmakers used to in the past, and I think that makes a difference.”
Mathijs said the movie will likely make its way into the lecture hall.
“We’ve already made sure that we’re getting a copy of the film, and it’ll get mentioned in class. If it isn’t me, then it’ll probably be the students who bring it up.”
As for director Barker, he’s already shot another horror flick, Anything But Ghosts, which takes place in the same universe as Obsession and is set for release next year.
He’s also booked to write and direct a remake of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and has said he’s considering creating an anthology series about wishes gone awry.
