‘Obsession’ Just Beat ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ And ‘Project Hail Mary’ In Its First Day Of Streaming

Horror has quietly become one of the most reliable success stories in movies this year, with low-budget genre films consistently outperforming projects backed by massive studio machines. Audiences have shown up in a big way for original scary movies, and the numbers behind some of these releases have been genuinely staggering.

One title sitting at the center of that conversation is Curry Barker’s Obsession, a supernatural horror film that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival before opening in theaters on May 15. The film follows a music store employee named Bear who wishes for his childhood crush to fall in love with him after finding a mysterious object, only to watch that wish spiral into something far darker.

Made for a reported budget of under 750,000 dollars, Obsession has spent the past several weeks turning into one of the biggest financial stories in recent movie history. Now that momentum has followed the film straight onto streaming, with Obsession climbing to the number one spot on the Apple TV Store within just 24 hours of its June 30 digital release.

That is a genuinely impressive feat considering the competition it beat to get there. Obsession’s digital debut outperformed titles like ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2‘ and ‘Project Hail Mary’ on the charts, two significantly higher profile studio releases that would typically be expected to dominate a fresh digital release window.

The streaming success is really just the latest chapter in what has already become one of 2026’s defining box office fairy tales. Obsession’s theatrical run has pushed its worldwide total past 372 million dollars, allowing it to surpass 2025’s ‘Sinners’ and claim the crown among recent horror breakouts at the box office.

Reaching those numbers off a budget that small means the film has grossed close to 500 times what it cost to make, a ratio that puts it among the most profitable movies ever produced. Critics and audiences have been equally enthusiastic, with Obsession holding matching scores of 94 percent on both the Tomatometer and the Popcornmeter over on Rotten Tomatoes.

That kind of across-the-board acclaim has made Obsession impossible for the industry to ignore, drawing praise from some unexpected corners of Hollywood along the way. Steven Spielberg spoke about the film during a red carpet appearance for his own movie Disclosure Day, saying he was impressed that a film made for so little money had performed so well.

“I’m so happy for them. I think it’s so fantastic,” Spielberg said in the interview, later adding that he had already seen Obsession and loved it. Coming from a filmmaker of Spielberg’s stature, that kind of endorsement only adds more weight to a film that was already generating plenty of its own buzz.

Obsession’s streaming rollout is expected to keep expanding in the coming weeks, with other digital platforms likely to post similar chart-topping numbers once their own data comes in. A physical media release is also on the way, with 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and DVD versions set to arrive shortly after the digital debut.

For director Curry Barker, Obsession’s success has already opened the door to his next project, a horror film called Anything But Ghosts that is described as existing in the same world without functioning as a direct sequel. Given how this film’s journey has gone so far, from a film festival premiere to dominating both theaters and streaming charts, expectations for whatever Barker does next are already climbing fast.

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