The low-budget horror film has turned a brutal love-curse premise into one of the year's longest-running streaming success stories on Peacock.
A movie that cost less than a million dollars to make is still refusing to leave the American streaming charts. Curry Barker's Obsession has now logged 129 days inside JustWatch's US Top 10, according to Collider, a run long enough that it has already touched No. 1 more than once during its stretch on Peacock.
That's the kind of longevity most horror films, even the ones that clear the theatrical bar, rarely get near once they move to streaming.
The premise does a lot of the heavy lifting. Bear Bailey, played by Michael Johnston, has been in love with his childhood friend Nikki Freeman, played by Inde Navarrette, for years. When he thinks he's blown it with her, he makes a wish on something called the One Wish Willow, asking for Nikki to love him more than anyone else on earth. It works. Except the version of Nikki that comes back is fixated on him in a way that turns violent, with the real Nikki occasionally clawing her way back into her own body.
Andy Richter, of Conan fame, rounds out a cast that also includes Cooper Tomlinson and Megan Lawless. Barker both wrote and directed, with James Harris, Christian Mercuri, Haley Nicole Johnson and Roman Viaris producing.
The numbers do the talking
Per Peacock, the film's production budget sat under $1 million, and by July it had pulled in more than $427 million worldwide, over $250 million of that from domestic theatres alone. That's a return most studios would kill for, and it explains why the film jumped to Peacock on July 17 instead of quietly fading out after its theatrical window.
Critics have mostly come around too. Obsession sits at 93 percent on Rotten Tomatoes across 327 reviews, with the site's audience score running even higher at 94 percent. The consensus, as Collider notes, credits the film for leaning into how uncomfortable its own concept is rather than smoothing it into a conventional romantic horror.
That's the trick with a premise this blunt. Being wanted by someone who won't stop wanting you is supposed to sound sweet until you sit with what "won't stop" actually means. Barker's film seems to have found an audience willing to sit with exactly that discomfort for a lot longer than 129 days.
Whether Obsession can keep its streaming legs into the last quarter of the year, or whether a new horror title knocks it off the charts before Halloween, is the only real question left. For now, it's still sitting in Peacock's Top 10, refusing to let go.
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