Curry Barker, a 26-year-old YouTuber turned filmmaker, made his horror film “Obsession” in just 20 days on a budget of just $750,000.
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Now, after its second weekend in theaters, the Focus Features-distributed film is on pace to earn more than 100 times that amount, with an expected $79.7 million at the global box office, according to Box Office Mojo, which tracks global theatrical totals. Of that projected total, $58.5 million came from North American theaters. (Focus Features is a unit of NBC News parent corporation Comcast.)
It’s a feat that even horror movie genre heavyweight Jason Blum, who executive produced the film, said is rare. “Obsession is the ONLY wide-opening horror film on record to grow in its second weekend on this scale: $22.4 million, up 30% from its debut,” Blum wrote Sunday in X. “This doesn’t happen in horror movies.”
The film is the latest project from a YouTuber that exceeds industry expectations. “Iron Lung,” a self-financed indie video game adaptation by Mark Fischbach, better known online as Markiplier, became a huge box office hit upon its release in February, helping to renew online creators’ interest in indie projects. “Backrooms,” an A24 film by 20-year-old YouTuber Kane Parsons, is also expecting a big opening weekend.
For Barker, the huge theatrical turnout for “Obsession” marks another chapter in her wild, fairy-tale-style Hollywood story.
Ahead of the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in September, Barker was primarily known on YouTube, where he built an audience with projects like “Milk and Serial,” a thriller following a duo of YouTube pranksters.
After “Obsession” made its festival debut, studios were so impressed with it that they entered into a bidding war for the project, with Focus eventually acquiring it for $15 million.
“When we made ‘Obsession,’ we had no idea what was going to happen,” Barker said in a video interview last week. “As the leader of the ship, I had to tell people, ‘This is going to be huge. You have to spend a year on this, because it’s going to be something special.’ But that’s just because that’s my job, to champion the movie. I really had no idea. … It was crazy when we just got into TIFF.”
The film, starring Michael Johnston and Inde Navarrette, is a romance-horror that plays with the idea that people should be careful what (or who, in this case) they wish for. On review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, the film has amassed a 95% fresh score on critics’ Tomatometer and a 94% hot score on audiences’ Popcornmeter.
When asked why he thinks YouTubers are getting more recognition in Hollywood, Barker said he thinks filmmakers and producers are “getting wise” to sharing and discovering content on the Google-owned video platform.
“We’re finally getting to the point where people are saying, okay, I’ll put my movie on YouTube,” he said. “Unlike when I was in film school, that was 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 all. You know, just put it on YouTube and see what happens.”
It’s a gamble that clearly paid off, as Hollywood already relies heavily on Barker for its future projects. He has another film in the works, titled “Anything But Ghosts,” and A24 recently hired him to direct a reimagining of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”
“The opportunities I have now are pretty crazy,” he said. “But I’m just trying to keep my head down and focus on what’s important to me, you know?”