A horror film made for less than a studio tentpole spends on catering has overtaken Sinners to become the highest-grossing original, (non-IP) live-action film of the 2020s.
Curry Barker’s debut theatrical feature, Obsession, made for a reported $750,000, has just crossed $370 million worldwide. The last figure released to the public read $370.1 million. Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s vampire epic, closed on $370.2 million and held the record until this week, but has surely now been passed. Obsession is now the highest-grossing original, non-IP, live-action film of the decade. Live-action original smashes were not supposed to be possible in 2026. The decade has belonged to sequels, reboots and shared universes, and “unbranded” live-action ideas were meant to be commercial suicide.
Getting there meant breaking one record after another, each less likely than the last. It opened to a fairly ordinary $17.2 million, third on its weekend. Then it did the one thing horror films are not supposed to do: it rose. The second weekend climbed almost forty per cent, the biggest second-weekend increase for any wide release outside the Christmas season on record, and then the third weekend climbed higher again. It led the weekday box office when it had no right to. Exhibitors added screens instead of pulling them. Somewhere in that run it overtook Downton Abbey to become the biggest film Focus Features has ever distributed, passed The Blair Witch Project as the most successful festival pick-up in history, and pushed into the all-time top eleven for horror worldwide, ahead of A Quiet Place and The Nun.
It then passed the total take for Tenet, which cost Christopher Nolan and Warner Bros $205 million, struggled to $365.3 million in a half-shuttered pandemic market, and lost money in the process. Obsession was made for about a third of one per cent of that and has outgrossed it. The industry’s faith in the nine-figure budget has rarely looked more misplaced.
The record for the highest-grossing original horror film, which Sinners had held for barely a year, has now fallen.
Some of China’s recent giants out-earn it, and none of them qualify as original. The Battle at Lake Changjin ($913 million) and Hi, Mom ($822 million) are the biggest, but one is built on real history and the other on autobiography; The Wandering Earth ($700 million), Moon Man ($460 million), Pegasus 2 ($464 million) and YOLO ($480 million) are variously adaptations, a sequel and a remake. Even Zhang Yimou’s Full River Red ($650 million), the cleverest of them, takes its name and its climax from the twelfth-century poem ascribed to Yue Fei. Strip out the borrowed material and Obsession stands alone.
The next record in Obsession’s sights has to be that of the biggest original English-language animation of the decade: Pixar’s Elemental at $496.4 million worldwide. That would truly require a one-wish-willow, but with multiple screenings a day still taking in money, and a potential awards run for co-star Inde Navarrette on the cards, anything feels possible.
In the meantime, a debut made for three quarters of a million dollars has outgrossed the decade’s biggest brands, and shown that an original idea, given a proper run, can still rule the cinema.