Obsession probably needed to make about $30 million to make a profit. The indie horror film was budgeted at around $750,000 and, after premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, Focus Features paid $14 million for the rights to distribute it. Then, you estimate that about double the cost of the film is used to market it. So, very roughly, once Obsession hit $30 million or so, it was something of a success.
That happened on day four.
Since then, Curry Barker’s devilish horror film Obsession has gone on a box office run for the ages. While most films usually make most of their money on opening weekend, Obsession saw its grosses actually increase over multiple weekends, something that hadn’t happened for a wide release in decades. And, in the weeks since then, it’s held up incredibly well against not just other independent horror films, like Backrooms, but massive Hollywood productions such as Toy Story 5, Supergirl, and Disclosure Day.
This weekend, that success continued as the film crossed another milestone. Over a very competitive July 4 holiday weekend in the U.S., Obsession came in 6th place, grossing $5.3 million. And that number was enough for the film to cross $400 million worldwide, with $245 million coming in domestically and $157 million coming in internationally.
When you get into the hundreds of millions of dollars like this, the success of a movie, especially a horror movie, goes from eye-opening to flat-out historic. Because while Hollywood often makes movies that are so expensive they feel like a failure at $400 million, a horror movie earning that is something else. Especially once that costs less than a million dollars to make.
To put it in a larger context, depending on how you classify what is or isn’t a horror movie, Obsession is now either in the top 15 highest-grossing horror films of all time (if you go by this Wikipedia list) or in the top 10, if you are a little more selective (Is Beetlejuice 2 really a horror movie? Come on.) And, no matter where it specifically ranks, most of the undeniably hits above it—It, The Sixth Sense, World War Z, etc.—all cost significantly more to make and market. That means Obsession could very well be the most profitable horror movie of all time, not adjusted for inflation, of course. (Inflation changes things because something like Jaws, for example, cost around $10 million and made around $500 million 50 years ago. That’s well over a billion today.)
Can Obsession cross that next milestone, though? Can it get to half a billion dollars? With the film recently coming to VOD and set for physical release on July 14, it’s highly unlikely. But again, it only needed to make about $30 million to be a success, and it blew by that months ago. The world is obsessed, and rightfully so.
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