Audiences Obsess Over Obsession

One metric to show just how successful 26-year-old Curry Barker’s movie, Obsession, has become is that some people now think an older, more experienced person directed it, like how folks assumed Matt Damon and Ben Affleck couldn’t have written Good Will Hunting. Another metric is the money. The horror film’s box office actually went up by 39 percent in the second weekend of its wide release. Obsession made $17 million on its opening weekend domestically and $23.9 million over Memorial Day weekend. Including international box office, the movie has now made $75 million. The total amount is particularly shocking given the film’s comparatively minuscule $1 million budget. “Obsession is the ONLY wide-release horror film on record to grow in its second weekend at this scale — $22.4M, up 30% over opening,” producer Jason Blum, of Blumhouse, crowed on social media. This makes up for Blumhouse’s monumental loss on M3gan 2.0 around this time last year.

It’s also a towering success for Barker, who got his deal based on the success of a short horror film, titled The Chair, that he uploaded to YouTube. If the movie has any worry in the weeks ahead for its box office, it’s that it will now compete with another YouTube wunderkind-made horror movie. Kane Parsons’s Backrooms, based on his YouTube series of the same name and starring Oscar nominees Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, is headed for theaters this weekend. Parsons is even younger than Barker, just 20 years old. Can his movie produce the same results as Obsession? Only time and YouTube hits will tell.