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What Made ‘Obsession’ Such a Hit?
Curry Barker’s ‘little film that could’ has defied the box office odds in historical fashion, but why?
By now, you’ve heard of Obsession. Everybody has — it has been the one film aside from The Odyssey and Spider-Man Brand New Day to really make a mainstream cultural splash (if we go exclusively from how much coverage these films have had online, I would honestly say that Obsession has enjoyed even more discussion than both of those two box office behemoths!) despite the fact that — as so many articles and videos and so on are chomping at the bit to tell you — the film was made by a young YouTuber turned filmmaker on a very low budget of around $750,000.
The fact that Obsession has been able to make a staggering $500+ million on that budget makes it one of the most profitable films of all time in terms of percentages, rivalling the likes of The Blair Witch Project from 1999 alongside a handful of mostly other horror movies produced cheaply and engaged with on a humongous scale, and this is of course a seriously impressive feat… but what exactly is it about this particular film that has allowed it to catch so much attention? A film with a mostly unknown director, a cast consisting almost entirely of young up-and-coming stars who are also mostly unknown (though not for long, in both cases!)……
