Curry Barker arrived back at TIFF with a very different Obsession story than the one he brought to the festival a year earlier.
During a TIFF sit-down with Obsession star Inde Navarrette, moderated by Midnight Madness programmer Peter Kuplowsky, Barker revisited the unexpectedly massive run of his horror romance — including the box office milestone that almost left him and his representatives with matching tattoos.
Before the film opened, Barker said the message from his reps and people around him was cautious: “All we can hope for is that it sustains.” Expectations were not sky-high. But Obsession, which had world premiered at TIFF and was acquired there by Focus Features for $15 million, went on to gross $512.6 million worldwide. That put it ahead of Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, which made $345.5 million globally.
The filmmaker said there had been a plan tied to the movie’s opening weekend: if Obsession debuted to $20 million, he and his reps would get tattoos. It did not quite hit that mark at first.
“It didn’t,” Barker said. “It made $17M. So we’re like ‘Ok, I guess we’re not getting the tattoos…still really cool.’”
Then came the second weekend.
“And then the next weekend it made $27M,” he said. “It was like ‘Holy shit!’ That’s unheard of for it to go up!”
The TIFF conversation also underlined just how far the project traveled from its indie origins. Obsession was financed by Capstone for $750,000 before its festival launch and eventual Focus Features deal. Barker and Navarrette noted that one of the first signs their circumstances had shifted was practical: this year, their flight and hotel were upgraded compared with their experience arriving the previous year with a purely independent film.
The version audiences pushed back on
Barker also shared a key piece of the film’s development history: Obsession had been tested before release, and viewers were not shy about one element that frustrated them.
The film centers in part on Bear, played by Michael Johnston, and Nikki, played by Navarrette. Barker described audience dissatisfaction with Bear’s handling of Nikki after he puts a love-binding toxic spell on her.
“People were saying that they were frustrated with Bear and they didn’t understand why he doesn’t just try to do more to fix it,” Barker said.
According to the filmmaker, test audiences wanted Bear to take more obvious steps to undo what had happened.
“They were like ‘Why isn’t he going back to the crystal shop? Why isn’t he doing more research and trying to fix it?’ We got an overwhelming amount of people wanting us to do that,” he said.
But Barker said that reaction helped clarify what he did not want the movie to become. Rather than turning Bear into someone urgently trying to reverse the spell, Barker leaned further into the character’s unwillingness to act in the way audiences expected.
“Then I was like ‘Oh, wait, that’s not what I want to do. I don’t want to try and fix it. It’s way more interesting that there’s a passivity in his character. He’s what I would call a passive antagonist,’” Barker explained.
That realization reshaped his approach to the movie. He said the answer was not to make Bear move faster toward fixing the damage, but to make his motivation clearer.
“So, it became clear to me that the way to fix the movie was not to make Bear try and fix it sooner, but to actually make it even more clear to the audience that he wants to make it work,” Barker said. “That’s the thing that he becomes active on trying to make this work.”
Barker said reshoots followed, and he praised the film’s financier for supporting those additional resources. For him, that backing showed the financiers had faith in his vision.
What changed after Obsession
The post-Obsession shift has extended beyond travel accommodations and box office headlines. Barker said the movie’s success has changed the way pitch meetings feel.
Before Obsession, he said, his new ideas were frequently rejected. Now, he described the response as: “‘Curry, what is it you want to do?’”
That freedom comes with its own pressure. “It’s a little more challenging,” Barker said, adding, “I can pitch anything.”
Navarrette, too, described a major professional shift since the film’s TIFF breakthrough. She recently appeared at D23, where it was announced that she is playing Rogue in Marvel Studio’s revival of X-Men.
“Everything has changed for me, I’m now in rooms I could never even imagine,” Navarrette said of her life after TIFF 2025.
She also indicated that she is looking to expand her work behind the camera, saying she is pitching her own projects and is hoping she can produce and direct her own work.
For Barker and Navarrette, the TIFF return framed Obsession not just as a film that outperformed early expectations, but as the project that altered what is now possible for both of them.