Obsession Cost $750,000 and Became the Decade’s Most Profitable Horror Hit

Obsession has a simple hook. A guy who works at a music store breaks a cheap novelty toy and wishes for the girl he likes to love him more than anyone. He gets exactly what he asked for. The movie was made for $750,000 at most, and as of September 21, 2026, it had grossed $519 million worldwide.

Writer-director Curry Barker was 25 when he shot it. He came up through YouTube sketch comedy, and his previous feature, Milk & Serial, went straight to the platform in August 2024 with an $800 budget.

The story

Bear has been quietly in love with his co-worker Nikki for a long time and has never told her. At a crystal shop he picks up a One Wish Willow, a stick you snap to make a single wish. He wishes that Nikki would love him more than anyone.

The next morning she does, and she is no longer the Nikki he knew. She never leaves his side, never sleeps, resents his friends and gets scarier by the day. There is no taking the wish back, and the real Nikki seems to be in there somewhere, aware and powerless.

Barker has said the movie is about obsession, not the supernatural. The wish is a device for looking at how fixating on another person wrecks both people.

The cast

• Michael Johnston as Bear
• Inde Navarrette as Nikki
• Cooper Tomlinson as Ian, Bear’s friend and co-worker
• Megan Lawless as Sarah
• Andy Richter as Carter, who owns the store

The One Wish Willow customer service rep is voiced by the director, who recorded the lines on his phone while cutting the movie in his bedroom.

Navarrette came to the role from TV, including 13 Reasons Why and Superman & Lois. The screams, the faces and the shifts in Nikki’s voice are all hers, with no CGI. Variety’s Guy Lodge praised her for “acing one of the more physically and emotionally taxing horror leads to come down the pike in a while,” and Katie Rife at RogerEbert.com wrote that her emotional scenes are a reminder of “the human being trapped inside.”

Making it

The wish idea arrived in July 2023, when the director was watching the monkey’s paw segment of The Simpsons. He wrote the screenplay over eight months while holding down a coffee shop job.

He says he turned down a $2 million offer to rewrite the script so that Bear would be the hero.

Cameras rolled in the Los Angeles area in late October 2024. The shoot ran 20 days, with six more for reshoots, covering five to six pages a day. To keep coverage to a minimum, the director and cinematographer Taylor Clemons 3D-scanned the locations and previsualized the shots on digital models. Actors were framed dead center with extra headroom to make the images feel off.

The director also cut the movie himself. Composer Rock Burwell, scoring his first feature, pointed to Angelo Badalamenti’s music for Twin Peaks as a key influence.

The sale and the run

Obsession premiered in Midnight Madness at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 5, 2025. A24, Neon and Netflix were in the hunt, and Focus Features won with a $14–15 million deal, the biggest ever for a genre title at TIFF. Jason Blum came aboard as an executive producer after the premiere.

The movie opened in U.S. theaters on May 15, 2026, in third place with $17.2 million. Its second weekend was up 39 percent, and the third was up again. No wide release outside the Christmas corridor had grown three weekends straight since E.T.

Moviegoers aged 18 to 34 made up 75 percent of the audience. By late August the film had crossed $500 million, making it the top earner in Focus Features history and the fifth-biggest horror movie ever, unadjusted for inflation.

Reviews

The film sits at 93 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from 329 reviews and at 77 on Metacritic. CinemaScore audiences gave it an A−, which horror movies rarely get.

Empire’s Lou Thomas called it “so fresh and exhilarating, one can forgive its familiar origins,” and The Guardian’s Benjamin Lee praised the “disturbing sound design.”

There are dissenters. Odie Henderson of The Boston Globe wrote that the story “tries to say something about female autonomy and male selfishness” but plays like a riff on the stand-up staple “girlfriends be crazy.” Other critics noted how little of the movie is told from Nikki’s point of view.

Obsession took three prizes at Sitges and won best horror movie at the Critics’ Choice Super Awards, where Navarrette won best actress in a horror movie.

What’s next

The director has floated both a sequel and an anthology series in which a different character makes a wish in every episode. His next film is titled Anything but Ghosts.