In a story that has probably been excitedly retold and forwarded a thousand times among budding filmmakers in recent weeks, Curry Barker had been doing his own thing on YouTube before making Obsession, and in 2023 his 22-minute horror short The Chair caught the attention of LA-based British producer James Harris.
Impressed by what he saw, Harris showed The Chair to fellow Brits who run Tea Shop Productions, co-founder Mark Lane (who lives in the UK), and fellow LA expat Leonara Darby, who started out as an assistant but was quickly promoted to producer.
“In terms of cinematic appeal, this short is really incredible,” Harris said, noting that unlike many other YouTube filmmakers, Barker was able to make a film with a distinct Hollywood aesthetic that didn’t “feel like it was shot in someone’s home on an iPhone” and on a shoestring. “And we felt that if this guy could translate whatever he did for a few thousand dollars and give him more money, which isn’t a lot of money for a movie, but it was a lot of money for him, we could scale him up.”
That scale-up is now the stuff of Hollywood legend.
From a budget of $750,000, director Barker made his horror feature debut Obsession, which continues to set records as one of the biggest phenomena of 2026. After three consecutive weeks of box office gains (the first non-festival wide release since “ET” and surpassing “Star Wars: The Mandalorian & Grogu” in the process) and a mere 7% drop in its fourth week, the film now has a worldwide gross of 2.2 billion. It grossed an astonishing $4 million, making it the most successful release ever for Focus Features, which bought the film for $15 million after it made waves in Toronto last year. Coupled with “Backrooms,” “Obsession” helped turn the industry upside down in less than a month.
Despite living in LA for more than a decade, Lane had a decidedly British reaction to his company falling behind in one of the year’s surprising hits.
“I like to think there’s some amazing secret,” he says. “And look, we all saw potential in this project. But we’d be lying if anyone could have predicted the phenomenon of people seeing the movie six times, making memes about it, reading too much into a movie that honestly no one should read too much into.”
Harris went to see “Backrooms” last week and “had a lot of fun,” but he said the most eye-opening thing was that the theater “seemed like an event full of young people under 30 who were trying to rediscover what it was like to go to the movies.” “It was wild.”
First launched in 2010, ‘Obsession’ has become by far Tea Shop’s biggest title out of over 40 they have produced to date. The film far surpasses 47 Meters Down, the 2017 shark thriller starring Mandy Moore and directed by Johannes Roberts, which was a turning point for the company as it escaped direct-to-DVD release at the 11th hour, grossed an astonishing $62.5 million and spawned a franchise. Scott Mann’s dizzying survival thriller The Fall has another franchise, a pandemic hit for Lionsgate with two sequels currently in the works (the first in preparation for a September release and the second in theaters now).
But “Obsession” doesn’t dramatically change the way tea shops work outside of the studio system, which focuses on smart genre storytelling by bold up-and-coming filmmakers, many of whom have helped improve in the process. Harris wants to look to directors such as Ruth Paxton, who made her debut with the horror “The Banquet,” Emmanuel Pickett, who shot Mikey Madison before “Anora” in “All Souls,” and Jordan Downey, who co-produced his second horror/thriller “The Cycle.” Upcoming films include “The Grow Up,” the debut film from director Plum Staple-Harris, whom she first met while working as a director’s assistant on last year’s romantic comedy “The Jingle Bell Heist.”
But “obsession” will help moisturize the wheels of the future.
“We were pretty happy with our operation and the project, and we stayed pretty true to the types of materials we liked,” Harris says. “But ultimately it just opens more doors and makes certain conversations easier. Success begets success, so when agents start sending projects with better talent, those projects become easier to make. And because scripts are subjective, a successful movie means people start thinking, ‘Maybe I should say yes to this.'”
Much of the widespread conversation surrounding “Obsession” and “Backrooms” has been about the impact on the industry, and Lane says some of the best responses they’ve received are that it’s “good for everyone, because it means it can happen to us too.” Because despite the educated insights of a team of experienced producers who believe they know what viewers want to see, he admits there’s “a big element of luck” involved. “That’s why everyone’s looking at us. We’re thinking it might be me. That might be the next little movie we start.”
These two films definitely make this a “great time to be a YouTube creator,” as Harris notes, and believes that “suddenly every studio is hiring a 23-year-old to be an Instagram researcher.”
But he exudes an air of caution about those who might get caught up in the lure of a potential gold rush and studio budget.
“I’m sure a lot of YouTube filmmakers will skip the ‘obsession’ step and move on to $20 million studio films,” he says. “And I think there’s a lot more benefit to taking that step first and making something that says something about you than making a franchise movie that probably won’t work and then going back to square one again.”
Barker, who had some success with “Obsession,” has already shot his second feature film, the paranormal horror “Anything But Ghosts,” starring Aaron Paul and Bryce Dallas Howard, at Blumhouse, and is currently developing a third, with Harris saying in recent weeks that “he’s going to get paid a trillion dollars.” And there is a possibility that he will team up with Tea Shop again for a sequel to the blockbuster that made him famous.
“I’m confident that sooner or later there will be conversations about Obsession 2,” Harris said. “But let’s see when Curry is available because I’m sure he has more meetings that he knows what to do at this stage.”
