Today, in “Boy, you kind of dodged a bullet there” news: Curry Barker has revealed that his breakout horror hit Obsession could have been the latest movie to get briefly tossed on the very tippy-top of Netflix’s endlessly churning vat of entertainment quicksand, before ultimately sinking into the mire. Instead of, you know, becoming the tenth-highest grossing film of 2026 to date, and a record-setter for the jump from a film’s budget to its ultimate box office take. Sliding Doors, huh?
This is per The Playlist, reporting on an interview Barker gave to the CBC this week in which he reflected on the reception his romantic horror film got after debuting at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2025. Barker says he woke up the morning after the premiere to multiple missed calls from his manager, agent, and the film’s financier, letting him know he now had the happy problem of being in the middle of a bidding war. “You name it,” Barker recalls them telling him. “You know, every company. Neon, Focus, A24, all of these companies are wanting to do your movie.” That included Netflix, which “was in the conversation at one point. They put in an offer to just put it straight on Netflix.”
Which is a genuinely interesting counterfactual to consider! It’s easy to imagine, after all, a universe where Barker took that offer, accepted a decent-sized pile of cash upfront, and let Netflix make a meal of his movie for the week or so it would take for the algorithm to churn and digest it. (It was, after all, not actually the first film he’d been invited to develop, as he was beginning his rise from his self-funded YouTube movie maker ranks; he’d actually been approached first, he notes in the interview, for a feature-length expansion of his online horror short The Chair.) (Which might still happen, by the way.) And it’s totally possible the film still would have caught on big—it succeeded in theaters because it grabbed people, hard, and it’s not like Netflix success stories like Kpop Demon Hunters don’t exist. But it still makes you wonder things like, “Would Disney have just announced it was going all-in on star Inde Navarrette as the X-Men’s new Rogue if she was the star of a well-received Netflix movie, instead of one of the defining elements of the biggest unlikely movie success of the year?” We’ll never know, of course, since Barker turned down the offer; he, and Focus Features, wound up reaping huge benefits from his decision to bet on theaters, instead.
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