Curry Barker shot his first theatrical feature in 26 days for at most $750,000. A year after its Toronto premiere, Obsession has taken about $520 million worldwide, Focus Features has the biggest film in its history, and the YouTube sketch comedian behind it has studio horror projects lined up into 2027.

Obsession, written, directed and edited by Curry Barker, starts from the smallest of stakes. Baron “Bear” Bailey (Michael Johnston) works at a struggling music store with his friends Nikki Freeman (Inde Navarrette), Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) and Sarah Harper (Megan Lawless), and has never found the nerve to tell Nikki how he feels about her. Looking for a gift, he walks out of a crystal shop not with the necklace he went in for but with a One Wish Willow, a novelty toy that is supposed to grant a single wish when it is broken. That night, after once again failing to say anything, he snaps it and wishes that Nikki loved him more than anyone in the world.

The wish works at once, and the film is about what it costs. Nikki turns up at his door, and within days the affection he wanted is watching him sleep, taping his front door shut and standing in place all day until he comes home. When Bear calls the toy’s customer service line hoping to change the terms, the representative, voiced by Barker himself, tells him that the wish cannot be modified and will only expire when he dies. From there the story moves towards violence, and this article stops short of the second half, which is where most of its surprises are kept.

From a YouTube sketch channel to a Toronto bidding war

Curry Barker was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1999, and left home at 18 to study acting at the New York Film Academy’s campus in Los Angeles. In his first week there he met Cooper Tomlinson, and the two began making videos together on YouTube as the sketch comedy duo “that’s a bad idea”, which they have described as their film school outside film school. Both dropped out, moved in together and kept publishing sketches and short films while Barker worked at Starbucks. By 2023 he was landing small acting jobs, including guest roles in Dave and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and the channel has since passed 1.6 million subscribers.

The turn towards horror came through shorts. In 2023 Barker uploaded The Chair, a horror short that drew more than ten million views and caught the attention of the producer James Harris of Tea Shop Productions, who suggested turning it into a feature. Barker pitched something else instead: a draft, a one-pager and a lookbook for Obsession. He received an offer to direct it on a budget of $1 million, and around the same time turned down a $2 million offer to rewrite the script so that Bear would become a hero. While he waited, he made Milk & Serial, a found-footage horror feature shot for roughly $800, and released it on YouTube in August 2024 after a year of failing to find a distributor. It went viral and helped him sign with a major talent agency.

Obsession began as an idea about a couple who are obsessed with each other. The wish arrived in July 2023, when Barker, gathered with friends to watch his own episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, caught a rerun of “Treehouse of Horror II”, the 1991 episode of The Simpsons in which Homer comes into possession of a monkey’s paw. The device is older than television, going back to W. W. Jacobs’s 1902 short story “The Monkey’s Paw”, and Barker has said that the screenplay is about obsession rather than the supernatural, with the wish as a way of looking at how fixation on another person turns destructive. He wrote it over eight months while working at a coffee shop, chose, after taking Aaron Sorkin‘s screenwriting MasterClass, not to expand Nikki’s backstory or the lore of the toy, and designed the One Wish Willow itself with his mother, a graphic designer.

Casting Nikki and Bear

Inde Navarrette in a tense scene from the horror film Obsession — Michael Johnston and Inde Navarrette in *Obsession* (2026). Focus Features / Blumhouse.

Barker considered playing Bear himself. An early screen test of the scene in which Bear first makes the wish was shot with Cooper Tomlinson, already cast as Ian, standing in as the lead. The film was financed by Capstone Studios after Harris passed the script to its founder, Christian Mercuri, and it was Mercuri who championed Inde Navarrette, who had appeared in three earlier Capstone projects, during a long search for an actress who could play both an ordinary young woman and a frightening presence. Barker wrote Nikki as a threat and a victim at the same time. Michael Johnston was cast as Bear after a chemistry read with Navarrette, and the supporting cast adds Megan Lawless as Sarah and the comedian Andy Richter as Carter, the owner of the music store and Sarah’s father.

For Navarrette, it was a second film after Wander Darkly (2020), following television work on 13 Reasons Why and Superman & Lois. Much of Nikki’s physical behaviour was worked out between her and Barker, and her screams, facial expressions and vocal changes were performed without computer-generated imagery or artificial intelligence, with practical makeup for the scenes in which Nikki lurks in the dark partly inspired by an uncanny-valley makeup trend that spread on TikTok in 2023. Barker had the cast watch Hereditary (2018), and Navarrette has named Betty Gabriel in Get Out, Toni Collette in Hereditary and Mia Goth in Pearl as the performances she drew on.

Twenty-six days around Los Angeles

With so little money, planning was the budget. Barker and the cinematographer Taylor Clemons scanned their locations in 3D and rebuilt them as digital models to plan shots in advance, keep coverage to a minimum and work out practical in-camera effects, with the stated aim of a centred composition and extra headroom meant to make the images feel uncomfortable. Principal photography began in late October 2024 and ran 26 days in total, an initial 20-day shoot plus reshoots, at a pace of five to six script pages a day. Bear’s home is a house in Burbank remodelled by the production designer Vivian Gray; the music store is Cassell’s Music in San Fernando, which closed a year after the shoot wrapped; and the conversations in cars were filmed on a soundstage with LED screens.

The reshoots added a new opening and a scene designed, in Barker’s words, to show why Bear does not want to fix things right away. A planned reshoot of the party sequence had to be abandoned because the house where it was filmed burned down in the January 2025 Southern California wildfires. The ending changed too: Barker first wrote and shot a conclusion inspired by Romeo and Juliet, then, on the advice of his father, of Tomlinson and of others, filmed a single take of an alternative, and that alternative is the one in the theatrical cut. By his own account, the whole production cost no more than $750,000.

Barker cut the film himself in Adobe Premiere, recording the One Wish Willow customer service lines on his phone in his bedroom and rewriting them to fit the edit. After the festival premiere, one of the killings was shortened by what he described as “six or seven smashes” to avoid an NC-17 rating. The score is the first feature work of Rock Burwell, who met Barker in 2024 through a comedy song for the YouTube channel and has cited Angelo Badalamenti’s music for Twin Peaks as a key influence; an 18-track album came out digitally on the day of the US release, with cassette, CD and vinyl editions due from Waxwork Records at the end of 2026.

A record sale and a box-office run nobody planned for

Obsession premiered in the Midnight Madness section of the Toronto International Film Festival on September 5, 2025, and finished as runner-up for that section’s People’s Choice Award. Two days later Focus Features entered talks to buy it for $14 million to $15 million, the highest price paid for a genre film in the festival’s history, with Universal Pictures International handling most territories outside the United States; A24, Neon and Netflix were also among the suitors. Jason Blum joined as an executive producer under his Blumhouse banner after the premiere, a fact revealed only in December 2025 with the first teaser. In October 2025 the film won the Special Jury Prize of the Sitges festival’s official fantastic competition, shared with The Furious, along with the SOFC audience award and the Carnet Jove youth prize.

The US release on May 15, 2026 began modestly, with $17.2 million and third place behind Michael and The Devil Wears Prada 2. Then the numbers went up instead of down. The second weekend brought $24 million, a 39% rise and the biggest second-weekend increase on record for a film in more than 2,500 theatres outside the Christmas season. The third brought $27.4 million, making Obsession the first wide release outside Christmas since E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) to grow for three consecutive weekends, and pushing it past Downton Abbey as Focus Features’ biggest domestic release. By its fourth weekend it was the studio’s highest-grossing film worldwide, and in its fifth it overtook The Blair Witch Project as the highest-grossing festival acquisition of all time.

The milestones kept coming through the summer. On July 6 it passed Enter the Dragon as the highest-grossing film ever made for under $1 million, unadjusted for inflation, and on August 23 it crossed $500 million, the first English-language original film of the 2020s to do so. It closed at roughly $263 million in the United States and Canada and about $520 million worldwide, with audiences aged 18 to 34 making up 75% of ticket buyers. Disney‘s The Mandalorian and Grogu, which opened the following weekend, ended up with a smaller lifetime gross, and together with Backrooms, the A24 feature by the YouTube creator Kane Parsons, Obsession set off a wider discussion about audience appetite for original stories, and about a line of YouTube-to-Hollywood directors that already included David F. Sandberg.

Awards, a lawsuit and the next wish

The awards have followed the money. At the Critics’ Choice Super Awards in August 2026, Obsession won Best Horror Movie and Navarrette won Best Actress in a Horror Movie, and on October 25 the Fangoria Chainsaw Awards gave it five prizes, including Best Wide Release, Best Director and Best Screenplay for Barker and Best Lead Performance for Navarrette. The film is also nominated for the Audience Award at the Gotham Independent Film Awards, to be presented on November 30. Its success has had a less comfortable side. In June 2026 the art director Sally Choi said publicly that she had been paid $300 a day on the non-union production while also working as a production assistant, set dresser, graphic designer and background actor, and that some crew members were volunteers paid in gas money and mileage. In September the executive producer Leonora Ann Darby sued James Harris and Mark Lane of Tea Shop Productions, claiming she had not received the profits she was promised.

Nikki has meanwhile become a seasonal attraction, appearing this autumn at Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights and in the Halloween event of Fortnite, which some viewers and journalists felt made light of what the character goes through in the film. Barker’s own calendar is full. His next feature, Anything but Ghosts, produced through Blumhouse-Atomic Monster and Spooky Pictures among others, is due from Focus Features on May 7, 2027 and nods to the events of Obsession through a news report. He has also been announced as the writer and director of a new The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for A24 and of an original horror film for Universal, was named to the TIME100 Next list in September, and has said he is weighing either a sequel or an anthology series in which each episode follows a different person making a wish.

What the documented record shows is a familiar engine, the monkey’s paw that Jacobs put on paper more than a century ago, rebuilt by a first-time theatrical director with no money, a mostly young cast and a friend from film school, and arriving in a stretch of original studio horror shaped by Zach Cregger‘s Barbarian and Weapons. Whether Obsession will be remembered for its wish or for its numbers is a question for later. For now it is the clearest evidence yet that a YouTube channel can be a film school, and that a $750,000 idea, sold at the right festival, can still outrun a franchise.