In a story likely to have been excitedly retold and forwarded many thousands of times among budding filmmakers over the last few weeks, before he made “Obsession,” Curry Barker was doing his thing on YouTube, where in 2023 his 22-minute horror short “The Chair” was spotted by LA-based Brit producer James Harris.
Impressed by what he saw, Harris showed “The Chair” to his fellow Brits running Tea Shop Productions, co-founder Mark Lane (based in the U.K) and Leonara Darby, another expat in LA who first joined the company as an assistant but was soon elevated to producer.
“It’s such an incredible short in terms of its cinematic appeal,” says Harris, noting that Barker was able to make something for a small amount of money that, unlike many other YouTube filmmakers, didn’t “feel like it was shot on an iPhone in someone’s house” and had a distinct Hollywood aesthetic. “And it just felt to us, that, okay, here is a person who, if you can translate whatever he did for a few $1,000 and give him more money, which isn’t a lot of money for a film but is a lot of money for him, you can scale him up.”
That scale-up has now become the stuff of almost Hollywood legend.
From a budget of $750,000, Barker made his debut horror feature “Obsession,” one of the biggest phenomenons of 2026 that continues to smash records. After three weeks of successive box office hikes (the first non-festive wide release since “E.T.” to do so and beating “Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu” in the process), and a mere 7% drop in the fourth, the film now sits at an astonishing $224 million worldwide, making it the most successful release of all time for Focus Features, who bought the film for $15 million following major buzz in Toronto last year. Coupled with “Backrooms,” “Obsession” has helped turn the industry on its head in less than a month.
Despite having lived in LA for over a decade, Lane offers a distinctly British reaction to his company being behind one in one of the surprise breakaway hits of the year.
“I would love to pretend there was some sort of amazing secret to it,” he says. “And look, we all saw potential in the project. But I’d be lying if anyone could foreshadow the phenomena of people seeing the movie six times, or people making memes about it, or people reading into stuff in the movie that honestly I don’t think anybody should be reading into.”
Harris went to see “Backrooms” last week and “really enjoyed it,” but says the most eye-opening thing was that the cinema “was like an event full of sub-30-year-olds who were almost rediscovering what it’s like to go to the cinema,” he says. “It was wild.”
For Tea Shop — first launched in 2010 — “Obsession” has become by far its biggest title to date from the more than 40 it has produced. The film has long surpassed 2017’s “47 Meters Down,” its Mandy Moore-led shark thriller from director Johannes Roberts, which marked a turning point for the company after it was saved from a straight-to-DVD release at the 11th hour to make a surprise $62.5 million at the box office, spawning a franchise. There’s another franchise in Scott Mann’s vertigo-inducing survival thriller “Fall,” which became a pandemic hit for Lionsgate and now has two sequels in the works (the first gearing up for release in September and the second now in post).
But “Obsession” isn’t going to dramatically shift how Tea Shop works, outside the studio system with a focus on smart genre storytelling from bold up-and-coming filmmakers, many of whom they’ve helped elevate in the process. Harris is keen to highlight directors such as Ruth Paxton, who made her debut with the horror “A Banquet,” Emmanuelle Picket, who shot a pre-“Anora” Mikey Madison in “All Souls,” and Jordan Downey, who did his second film, the horror/thriller “The Cycle,” with them. Among its upcoming features is “The Grow Up,” the debut feature from Plum Stupple-Harris, who they first crossed paths with when he was working as a director’s assistant on last year’s rom-com “Jingle Bell Heist.”
“Obsession” does, however, help grease the wheels going forward.
“We’re pretty happy with our operation and the projects we do, and we’re been pretty true to the type of material we like,” says Harris. “But ultimately, it’s just going to open more doors and make certain conversations easier. Success breeds success, so if agents start sending you projects with bigger talent attached, those projects become easier to make. Also, scripts are subjective, so having a successful movie means that people are now like; ‘maybe I should say yes to this.’”
Much of widespread chatter over “Obsession” and “Backrooms” is over their impact on the industry, and Lane says that some of the best response they’ve received have been how it’s “good for everyone, because it means it could happen to us as well.” Because, for all the educated insight of a team of experienced producers who believe they know what audiences want to watch, there is a “huge element of luck,” he acknowledges. “Which is why everyone is looking at us, going that could be me — that could be the next small film that we get off the ground.”
As Harris notes, thanks to these two films, it’s no doubt a “wonderful time to be a YouTube creator,” and says he’s sure “every studio has just suddenly hired a 23-year-old to be an Instagram researcher.”
But he does offers an air of caution to those who might get caught up in a potential gold rush and the allure of studio budgets.
“I’m sure a lot of YouTube filmmakers are going to now skip the ‘Obsession’ step and move on to $20 million studio movies,” he says. “And I think there’s a lot of merit in doing that step first and making something that says something about you, versus doing a franchise film that maybe you don’t nail, and and then you go back to the beginning again.”
Having nailed it, and then some, with “Obsession,” Barker has already shot his second feature, the supernatural horror “Anything But Ghosts” — starring Aaron Paul and Bryce Dallas Howard — for Blumhouse and is now plotting his third, which thanks to the last few weeks, Harris say “I’m sure he’ll get a trillion dollars for.” And then there’s the potential of reteaming with Tea Shop on a sequel to the smash hit that made his name.
“I’m sure there’ll be an ‘Obsession 2’ conversation sooner rather than later,” says Harris. “But let’s see when Curry is even available to make it, because I’m sure he’s having more meetings that he knows what to do with at this stage.”
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