Obsession has crossed $500 million worldwide.
Box Office Mojo now has Curry Barker’s horror hit at $263,451,715 domestic and $238,212,000 international for a global total of $501,663,715.
The movie reportedly cost between $750,000 and $1 million to make, which puts the return somewhere between 500 and 670 times its budget.
It also makes Obsession the second-highest-grossing horror movie in history, unadjusted for inflation. Only 2017’s It ($701 million) is ahead of it.
Obsession Beat The Conjuring: Last Rites On 2% Of The Budget
The movie it just passed says everything.
The Conjuring: Last Rites closed out its run at $499.2 million worldwide, a record-setter built on nine films of franchise equity, Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, a $55 million budget, and the full weight of Warner Bros.’ global marketing machine. It carried a 59% Rotten Tomatoes score the whole way.
Obsession has no franchise, no stars, no IP, and a budget that wouldn’t cover catering on a Conjuring shoot. It has a 95% Rotten Tomatoes score, an A- CinemaScore that horror movies almost never see, and $2.5 million more in the bank.
The last stretch came from overseas. On July 9, Obsession sat at $249.5 million domestic against $158.2 million foreign, with international under 39% of the gross.
International is now 47.5%. Since early July the film has added roughly $14 million domestically and $80 million abroad, the profile of a movie that keeps opening in new markets and keeps holding once it gets there.
That’s word of mouth doing what a nine-figure marketing spend usually has to fake. This is the same film that rose two weekends in a row, the first horror movie to do it since E.T.
Audiences didn’t quit theaters and they didn’t quit a genre. They quit being sold things. Hand them one original movie worth texting a friend about and they’ll carry it to half a billion dollars against a $750,000 budget.
The full run is tracked in our Obsession box office breakdown, and Barker got here from an $800 YouTube movie.
Inde Navarrette Goes From Obsession To Marvel’s Rogue
Inde Navarrette plays Nikki, the crush at the center of Barker’s wish-gone-wrong premise, and her performance is the reason the thing works at all.
Marvel noticed.
Navarrette was revealed as Rogue at the D23 panel, joining Jake Schreier’s X-Men alongside Sadie Sink, Kit Connor, Samara Weaving, Christopher Abbott, Maya Boyd, and Adam Driver. It opens May 5, 2028, the first movie of whatever the MCU becomes after Avengers: Secret Wars.
She spent the Obsession press tour campaigning to play Mystique. Marvel handed her Mystique’s adoptive daughter instead, which is the better version of that story.
Her co-star Michael Johnston voices young Cable in X-Men ’97 season 2, so both leads of a $750,000 horror movie ended up mutants.
A year ago Navarrette was the sixth lead on a canceled CW show. She now has the second-biggest horror movie ever made on her resume and an X-Men film in front of her. Cameras are said to roll at the end of summer.
