Obsession cost $750,000 and out-grossed every Disney film but one

Obsession cost $750,000 to make. It has taken $513,840,715 worldwide. That is a return of roughly 685 times the production budget, and nothing else released in 2026 is within reach of it.

The film sits seventh on the year's domestic chart with $263,451,715, according to Box Office Mojo. Set that beside the Walt Disney Company's year and the figure starts to look peculiar. Obsession has out-grossed every Disney release of 2026 except Toy Story 5. It is ahead of The Devil Wears Prada 2 by $42.9m, ahead of Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu by $85.7m, and ahead of Hoppers by $97.4m.

A horror film by a first-time feature director is beating three of Disney's four wide releases. Not narrowly, either.

What it actually is

Obsession is a horror romance written, directed and edited by Curry Barker, who built an audience on the YouTube channel That's a Bad Idea before making it. The screenplay is original, which in this bracket is rarer than the box office.

It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 5 September 2025. Focus Features bought it there for a reported $14m to $15m, the highest price a genre film has commanded at Toronto. At the time that looked like an aggressive number for an unknown director working in a crowded category.

It went wide in the United States on 15 May 2026 across 3,068 cinemas and opened to $17,196,855. The opening weekend alone returned almost 23 times what the film cost to shoot. By June it had become Focus Features' highest-grossing release ever, Deadline reported, at a point when it had taken $224m domestically. It finished its domestic run on 14 August on $263.5m.

Focus paid roughly 19 times the production budget simply to acquire the film. It has made that back thirty-five times over. The gamble paid.

What the arithmetic does to the studio table

The interesting part is not that a cheap film did well. It is where that leaves the companies that spent properly.

Disney has four films in the year's domestic top twelve: Toy Story 5 on $480,196,107, The Devil Wears Prada 2 on $220,556,651, Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu on $177,730,060 and Hoppers on $166,010,783. Together they have taken $1,044,493,601.

Sony has one. Spider-Man: Brand New Day stands at $935,858,050, the biggest domestic gross ever recorded. Four Disney films beat one Sony film by $108,635,551.

Universal has three in the top twelve, and they total $1,214,717,430, which is $170,223,829 more than Disney's four.

A studio that needs four of the twelve biggest films of the year to edge past a rival's single release does not have a volume advantage. It has a peak problem. Disney's best performer this year would sit fourth on its own 2019 slate, and The Devil Wears Prada 2 only reached $220m by finding an audience the majors had stopped courting.

Where Obsession sits inside Universal

Focus is Universal's specialty label, so Obsession counts towards the group total. Universal announced on 3 August that it had become the first studio to reach $4bn at the global box office in 2026, split $1.53bn domestic and $2.48bn international.

One line in that announcement is worth reading carefully. It counts Michael among the Universal releases to have passed $1bn worldwide. Lionsgate distributes Michael in the United States; Universal handles every other territory except Japan, a split Deadline reported when the deal closed in 2023. The milestone is real. The $372,303,388 that Michael has taken in America is not part of it, and Universal does not say so.

Universal's own tentpole year has been strong on its own terms. The Odyssey has passed $1.1bn globally, though it is only Christopher Nolan's biggest film if you ignore inflation.

Obsession is not the only one

Two other films in the domestic top twelve are neither sequels nor franchise entries. Project Hail Mary, from Amazon MGM Studios, has taken $344,050,007. Backrooms, from A24, has taken $197,523,513.

Add Obsession and the three total $805,025,235. That is more than The Odyssey and Minions & Monsters have made in America combined, which comes to $784,902,820. Three films with no existing franchise between them out-earned the two biggest releases from the studio having a record year, by $20.1m.

This is the second year running that the supply argument has been the interesting one. Summer takings reached $4.76bn on the back of more wide releases, not bigger ones. What 2026 adds is that the extra films are not all coming from the majors, and the cheapest of them is the most profitable object in the market by a distance no marketing budget can close.

The lesson studios will take from this is probably the wrong one. The temptation after a $750,000 film makes half a billion dollars is to commission thirty more $750,000 films. What Focus actually did was pay a serious price for a finished film by someone nobody had heard of, and then release it on 3,068 screens as though it were a tentpole. The distribution was the expensive part, and it was the part that worked.

What happens next

Focus already has Barker's second feature. Anything But Ghosts is shot, with Barker writing, directing and starring, and he has said it shares a universe with Obsession, according to Deadline.

His third has gone elsewhere. Universal and Blumhouse Atomic Monster bought an original horror idea from him off a pitch, in what Variety described as an eight-figure deal, with the premise kept secret. He also has a Texas Chain Saw Massacre reboot in development at A24.

So the price of a Curry Barker film has gone from $14m to $15m for a completed picture at a festival to eight figures for a sentence in a room. That second number is the one to watch, because it is the point at which this stops being cheap.