Curry Barker has a release date for Anything but Ghosts, and the calendar is the least revealing part of the news. The more telling detail is a choice he made before the cameras rolled: told by the people around him to trim his script, the Obsession director kept every page, and paid for it on set.

The trade coverage has treated the dating as a victory lap, another Barker summer lined up behind the sleeper that rewrote what a festival pickup can earn. Listen to his own account of the shoot and a different portrait comes into focus: a filmmaker who, backed by a studio for the first time, chose the script over the safety net.

Speaking to Deadline at a DGA panel in Toronto, where he had returned for the anniversary of the Obsession premiere, Barker put it bluntly: “The hardest day on Obsession was the easiest day on Anything but Ghosts.” He had a 130-page script and 26 days to shoot it. He was directing, and he was also playing the lead, with more lines than anyone else in the film. A fellow director told him to cut 30 pages. So did his manager. “But I didn’t cut a single page because I wanted to shoot all of it,” he said.

Then came the cost. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and we were compromising shots left and right off the shot list. Gone. Just like coverage was going out the windows.”

Coverage is the word to hold on to. It is a director’s insurance: the extra angles and alternate takes that give an editor room to rescue a scene, reshape a performance, find a rhythm the day did not deliver. To give it up in order to keep pages is to decide that the film lives in what is written and performed rather than in what can be rebuilt in the cutting room. It is a wager on the screenplay as the unit of meaning, and it runs against the lesson most of the industry drew from Obsession, whose legend is one of economy, of doing a great deal with very little.

Whether the wager pays off cannot be judged from outside; nobody beyond the production has seen the film, and Barker himself describes the shoot as a string of compromises. But the choice fits the person. He came up making sketches and videos on YouTube with Cooper Tomlinson, and their production company still carries the name of that channel, That’s a Bad Idea, according to TheWrap. Tomlinson co-wrote this film and stars opposite him. IndieWire notes that Obsession has Hollywood chasing “the next Barker.” Barker, for his part, has gone back to his double act.

The premise explains the pull. Barker told CBR, in remarks reported by Bloody Disgusting, that the film is about “two con artist ghost hunters that just con old women and single dads, but they’re really good at it.” With their special equipment they can make the table shake and the lights flicker. “They put on a show,” he said, “until they run into a very real, very dangerous dark entity.” He has said the idea “lends itself better to comedy” than Obsession did, “Cooper and me doing our thing,” yet insists it is “still set in this super grounded world. It’s ghosts being real in a world where ghosts are not real.” Focus Features’ official logline speaks of a group of fame-seeking wannabe ghosthunters who find themselves in over their heads as things “spiral wildly and terrifyingly out of control.” Violet McGraw, Chris Reinacher, Bryce Dallas Howard and Aaron Paul complete the cast.

There is also an auteur’s instinct for continuity at work. Barker has confirmed that Anything but Ghosts shares a universe with Obsession, telling a post-screening audience, as Deadline reported, that a news anchor in the new film talks about “a triple homicide [by] a woman.” Inde Navarrette, the star of Obsession, told Gold Derby that the new film will show on screen what became of her character, Nikki. Barker is only a few features in, and he is already threading them together.

Focus Features and Blumhouse Atomic Monster will open Anything but Ghosts in theaters on May 7, 2027. The film is already completed. Focus holds worldwide rights, with Universal Pictures International handling international distribution. Several outlets have called the date exactly one year after Obsession; that film actually opened on May 15, 2026, so the new one lands a week short of the anniversary, in the same corner of the spring calendar. Obsession was made for $750,000, bought by Focus out of TIFF’s Midnight Madness section in 2025 for $15 million, and went on to gross $263.4 million domestically and nearly $520 million worldwide, the highest total in Focus’s history and the biggest ever for a festival acquisition, ahead of The Blair Witch Project.

The new film will not have the weekend to itself. Lionsgate’s The Resurrection of the Christ (Part One), directed by Mel Gibson, and 20th Century Studios’ Beach Read are dated for the same frame, a week after Sony opens The Legend of Zelda.

Barker kept his pages and gave up his angles. Next May, audiences find out which of the two a ghost comedy really needed.

Tags: Curry Barker, Focus Features, Anything but Ghosts, Cooper Tomlinson, horror comedies