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For those who have followed Gen Z filmmaker Curry Barker‘s career since he started blowing up YouTube, it’s no surprise that his debut feature film Obsession is doing the same in theaters. The horror pic has been in theaters for less than two weeks and has already earned north of $68 million in North America alone against a minuscule budget of $750,000.
For everyone else, it’s a revelation of epic proportions.
Over the long Memorial Day weekend, the film soared to $23.9 million for the three-day number, a record-smashing increase of 39.4 percent over its opening weekend haul of $17.2 million from 2,615 theaters at the domestic box office. That’s the biggest spike in modern times for a movie playing in more than 2,500 theaters outside of the Christmas holidays, and even then, the increase is bigger than a number of popular year-end titles.
Comscore chief box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian is among those left stunned, saying there are virtually no comps. “I’ve been tracking and analyzing box office for 33 years now, and I thought I’d seen it all until this past weekend with the incredible performance of Obsession that required no caveats. A second weekend jump nearing 40 percent is virtually unprecedented in the annals of modern box office tracking, and there really is no direct apples-to-apples comparison available.“
