Curry Barker made Obsession in 20 days on a $750,000 budget, and the romance-horror film is now on track to earn $79.7 million at the global box office. Inde Navarrette stars alongside Michael Johnston in the movie, which has become one of the clearest signs yet that a creator who built an audience on YouTube can turn that following into a theatrical hit.
The film has pulled in $58.5 million from North American theaters alone, after Focus Features acquired it for $15 million following its festival debut. Barker, 26, said the scale of the response caught him off guard. “When we made ‘Obsession,’ we had no idea what was going to happen,” he said. “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.’”
That confidence now looks justified. Jason Blum wrote that “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.” Barker said the moment the film reached the Toronto International Film Festival in September was the real turning point. “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,” he said.
Before the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, Barker was mainly known for his work on YouTube, where he built an audience with projects like Milk and Serial, a thriller about a duo of YouTube pranksters. He said the internet-first path he took once ran against the grain of film-school thinking. “We’re finally getting to the point where people are like, OK, fine, I’ll put my film on YouTube,” Barker said. “Versus when I was in film school, that was kind of like a last resort. People didn’t want to put their stuff on YouTube. They wanted to go the festival route. I was like, screw it. You know, just put it on YouTube and see what happens.”
That reversal matters because it is no longer just a novelty story about an online creator crossing over. Obsession, distributed by Focus Features, a unit of Comcast, has a 95% fresh Tomatometer score from critics and a 94% hot Popcornmeter score from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, and Barker already has another film, Anything But Ghosts, in the works. A24 has also tapped him to helm a reimagining of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. For Navarrette, the movie is part of a breakout, and for Barker it is proof that the route from YouTube to theaters can now end in a franchise-level opportunity.
