A horror movie that probably cost less to make than the catering bill on most studio blockbusters has just pulled off one of the biggest box office surprises in years.
‘Obsession‘, the 2026 horror film about a young man named Bear whose wish for his crush’s devotion spirals into something dark, has now passed ‘Sinners‘ as the highest-grossing live-action English-language original movie of the 2020s. By the end of its seventh weekend in theaters on June 28, the film had reached a worldwide total of $371.1 million, edging past the $370.3 million that Ryan Coogler‘s vampire epic had been holding onto.
‘Obsession’ Movie Budget and Profit Compared to ‘Sinners‘
What makes this so impressive isn’t just the number itself, but how the movie got there. Directed by 26-year-old Curry Barker, a former YouTube sketch comedian making his first feature, ‘Obsession‘ opened to a fairly modest $17.2 million domestic weekend before quietly turning into a sleeper hit. It became the first movie since 1982 to earn more in each of its first three weekends than the one before it.
Related: ‘Obsession’ May Have Launched Horror’s Next Shared Universe
The money side of the story is even wilder. ‘Sinners‘ had a hefty $90 million production budget, but ‘Obsession‘ reportedly cost just $750,000 to make, a number that wouldn’t even cover a single day of shooting on most major studio films. Focus Features picked up distribution rights for $15 million, and that deal has paid off in a big way.
‘Sinners‘, for everything it accomplished, multiplied its budget about fourfold. ‘Obsession‘ has now earned back more than 494 times what it cost to make, turning a tiny horror project into one of the most profitable films ever made when you look at return on budget.
‘Obsession’ Rotten Tomatoes Score and Weekend by Weekend Earnings
Word of mouth seems to have driven a lot of this. The film holds a 94% score on Rotten Tomatoes from both critics and audiences, with people praising its mix of horror and comedy along with Inde Navarrette’s performance. It also picked up a rare A- CinemaScore, the kind of grade usually saved for horror standouts like ‘The Conjuring‘ and ‘Get Out‘.
In case you missed it: One Disturbing Detail Links ‘Obsession’ To A Modern Horror Classic
The climb wasn’t a sudden spike either. It built up steadily. After that modest opening weekend, it brought in $23.9 million, then $27.3 million, and even its fourth and fifth weekends beat the opening, pulling in $25.3 million and $19 million. By its seventh weekend it still made $9.8 million domestically, the strongest seventh-weekend total any horror movie has ever posted.
Along the way, ‘Obsession‘ has picked up a strange list of records. It became only the second original film since Pixar’s ‘Coco‘ in 2017, after ‘Sinners‘, to cross $200 million domestically, and it has now passed films like ‘A Quiet Place‘, ‘Alien: Romulus‘, ‘Hannibal‘, and ‘The Nun‘ to rank among the highest-grossing horror movies of all time worldwide.
‘Obsession’ Streaming Release Date and Curry Barker’s Next Projects
For Barker, this has already opened a lot of doors. He’s working on a new ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre‘ movie, plus another project sold to Blumhouse and Universal, and people in the industry seem to think a sequel and eventually a franchise are basically a given at this point.
‘Obsession‘ starts streaming on Prime Video and Apple TV on June 30, putting it in front of a much bigger audience right as its theatrical run is wrapping up. Some analysts think it could still cross $400 million worldwide before its original run ends, which would put even more distance between it and ‘Sinners‘, at least until the next surprise original comes along and finds its audience.
You might also want to read: ‘Obsession 2’ Gets Major Update as Director Curry Barker Reveals Surprise Sequel Strategy
